Joshua M Brown

Cake Bubbles, Art Bubbles, etc.

My favorite anecdotal indicators for economic trends never come from the business pages, always from pop culture and the mainstream. Check out this piece in the New York Times Weddings / Celebration section this weekend: True, the recession forced many couples to downsize their weddings, and economize on glammy cakes. And afterward, some affluent couples…

The New Morgan Stanley

“We have the ballast that comes with wealth and asset management, and the speed that comes with the banking, securities, and M&A business…I like that balance. When the economy is recovering, the speed kicks in more. When the economy is suffering, the ballast kicks in more.” – James Gorman, CEO Morgan Stanley The most important…

This Week on TRB

Debating my pal Mike Murphy over Wal-Mart on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Friday Here were the most read posts on TRB this week, in case you missed them: Incentives Matter My Favorite Investing Books Anatomy of an Advisor Scam The Relentless Bid’s impact on volume and volatility My Interview with Morgan Housel…

Sensory Deprivation at All-Time Highs

God has a great sense of humor. An 80-month bull market for stocks, the second longest in history, and Wall Street sits it out because no one is trading. LOL, it’s almost too perfect. If Goldman Sachs were the old Goldman Sachs, its stock would be at $400 a share. Instead, it’s barely benefitting. Neither…

Draghi’s LTRO, Explained

The ECB unveiled plans for a targeted LTRO (Long Term Refinancing Operation) today but nothing has been carried out quite yet. The basic idea is that the ECB would buy up asset-backed securities (ABS) from its banks to improve their balance sheets and get more liquidity into the system. This would theoretically incentivize the banks…

The Relentless Bid’s impact on volume and volatility

Earlier this year, I explained why the market has been behaving as it has in my Relentless Bid post. The gist of it was that Wall Street firms are more fee-driven than transactional commission-driven than ever, and this change in incentives is altering the behavior of market participants which is manifesting itself in the market’s…

The Annual Letdown

Every year we are told that this is the year economic growth will finally pick up. This will be the year we hit escape velocity and break away from the sub-2% GDP trap the rest of the developed world has been mired in for seven years. This year was no different. Economic data had gotten…