Greg Taunt, Author at IASG

Rising interest rates claimed their first big victim last week. The stunning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which was the 16th largest bank in the United States, as recently as last Wednesday took two days of relentless outflows before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stepped in to shut them down. The lender, known […]

“A politician’s first goal of governing is to get re-elected. It is also the second goal. Everything else comes after that.” While seemingly trite, this phrase was repeated by my professor throughout my business school class on strategy in non-market environments. I often think about this concept as our leaders consistently make decisions contrary to […]

Empires rise and fall. This often happens slowly and then quickly. In hindsight, we can identify critical events that should have raised alarm bells but did not. So, like asset bubbles that can crash an economy, identifying the next catalyst can be difficult. But perhaps the mounting debt of countries like the United States, most […]

Investors flock to high Sharpe ratio managers on sites like IASG.com for a good reason. They display an uncanny ability to put up positive numbers almost every month. Option sellers seem to do this better than anyone, and they stand out when looking through hundreds of managers. If this one marker told the whole story, […]

All economies go through fairly predictable patterns as they go through a business cycle. In simple terms, we go from expansion to peak, contraction, and trough. The depths of this drop vary based on both predictable and unpredictable factors. Let us look at some quantifiable factors as well as some wild cards that can impact […]

The English expression “May you live in interesting times” is claimed to be based on an ironic Chinese curse as most of us would prefer to live fairly peacefully. While some variety is nice, this year, it felt a bit more like the perfect storm of calamity. We covered many events throughout the year, but […]

Years of investment marketing tell us that a fund’s expense ratio is the most important characteristic we should look for in our asset selection. So, it is unsurprising that the first question I often get is, “How do you get paid if I open an account with you?” The question I get less often is, […]

Inflation fell according to the last CPI (Consumer Price Index) report in the United States, setting off a furious 5% rally in equities as Fed policy finally takes hold. However, according to Forbes, prices increased 0.4% month over month, bringing the rate down to 7.7% on an annualized basis, which they believe is reason to […]

Want access to some of the largest programs in the world at a lower entry point? Typically, investment options come through either a separately managed account with high minimums or a fund product with limited liquidity and less flexibility than a standard futures account. A managed account platform bridges this gap by offering increased liquidity, […]

Investors generally do an excellent job of looking at their equity allocations at the portfolio level. A single stock that drops 30% in an otherwise steady(ish) overall plan rarely gets much focus. On the other hand, a futures program that dropped 30% would often net a lot of attention. Some of this might be attributable […]

Is the equity market giving you heartburn? Bond market, too? Perhaps traditional asset classes lulled us into a false sense of confidence. After all, since 2008, outside of a few hiccups, returns provided ample reason to believe that our portfolios were destined to keep growing. But, as a trader once said to me, “Sometimes trading […]

The Efficient Market Hypothesis, introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot and popularized by Eugene Fama, infers that investing markets reflect all information to determine prices. Therefore, if the Fed is expected to raise rates by 75 basis points, the current market levels should reflect that consideration. This also means that nobody should be able to “beat the […]

We addressed the looming energy crisis in Europe in several articles, including the “War on Low Energy Prices,” It appears the day of reckoning is quickly approaching. However, they are choosing paths that I did not anticipate. In reaction to Russia closing the pipeline, the Europeans proposed two solutions; capping the amount that Russia would […]