Joshua M Brown

Artwork from the 1918 Pandemic

Taking a look back at the art, advertisements and political cartoons of the winter of 1918-1919 while the world was in the grip of the Spanish Flu, which ended up infecting as many as 500 million people, or one third of the world’s population. We didn’t have sophisticated equipment and laboratories to study the germ…

tHe sToCk MarKeT is iGnorInG tHe rEaL EcONomY

Or…and hear me out…the stock market is doing its best to reflect the “real” economy. The real economy, however, has moved online. Companies that dominate online business also dominate the stock market’s capitalization. This is what the real economy currently looks like now, via Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s credit and debit card spending data:…

Value Investing is Immortal

We’re having the “Value Investing is Dead” conversation again. It comes back for an eight-week run each year, like Game of Thrones used to. They bring back our old favorite characters – at least, the ones who haven’t been killed off by redemptions yet – and then introduce some new ones. But the plot cycle…

You don’t even know what risk is.

I spend my waking hours thinking about risk. Risk in exchange for reward. Risk adjusted returns. Risk management. Business risk. Concentrated position risk. Counter-party risk. Liquidity risk. Sequence of returns risk. Longevity risk. Career risk. And then after thinking about it, I read some more about it. Then I write about it. Then I talk…