Commentary

Mask mandates are back in vogue, and it’s investors who should be the first to welcome them: They’ll protect us from January’s blast of “thermal pollution,” when Wall Street prognosticators expel large volumes of hot air with prophesies for the new year. We have no problem with the exercise—so long as full-year forecasts (including one’s own) aren’t taken too seriously. “Forecasts are for show,” Steve Leuthold would always say.

• Read more

We’re almost at a loss for words! But we want to thank our parents, siblings, extended family, an eighth grade English teacher who doubted us for an entire year, and our golden retriever, Miley.

• Read more

To summarize (and oversimplify), here are some of the frequent client responses to our prevailing “cautiously bearish” stance:

• Read more

Early this year we chatted with the retired founder of a Midwest investment management and research firm. After living and breathing markets for six decades, this bearded and iconoclastic character had avoided financial publications, Bloomberg, CNBC, and the like for more than a year.

• Read more

We are pleased to announce that James Paulsen, PhD, a leading investment strategist whose commentary is widely followed on Wall Street and across the country, has joined The Leuthold Group as our Chief Investment Strategist.

• Read more

It was thirty-three years ago today that I began my investment career as an equity analyst at The Bankers Life of Iowa (now known as Principal Financial Group). This month, my first as a gainfully employed member of The Leuthold Group’s research team, it seems natural to reflect back as a preface to my new adventure.

• Read more

It’s often said the best bull markets surprise even the bulls, and the current one has certainly done that.

• Read more

And now our final new analyst introduction (for the time being) of Chun Wang.

• Read more

Continuing our series of introductions of new members of the Leuthold team, this month we present our token New Yorker and bottom up Clean Tech stock picker David Kurzman.

• Read more

Our first introduction is of Jun Zhu, who broke the mold by not being another white Midwestern guy.

• Read more

Former Morgan Stanley strategist Byron Wein—now at Pequot Capital—publishes an annual list of potential market and economic “surprises” that has become a must read for institutional investors. Along the same lines, Wired magazine listed ten potential threats to what it calls the “Long Boom”. (Warning: This list might make The Leuthold Group look cheerful).

• Read more

“Managing Your Mother Lode”—Ten Commandments: outline of Steve’s speech for the Jim Fraser’s Contrary Opinion Forum.

• Read more

Will Wall Street See More “Sells”? Expect some changes, but most important development may be a rise in gutsy, independent institutional research. Also, decimalization: an unanticipated bonanza for NYSE specialists.

• Read more

“Restrictive Guidelines And Pressure To Outperform”, an excellent article by Walter Cabot appearing in the July/August 1998 Financial Analysts Journal.

• Read more

In one of our California meetings, the trading frenzy in the Internet stocks came up.

• Read more

If you’ve been in this business 30 years you’ll remember Adam Smith’s “The Money Game”. Read it again. Those who never read it, find a copy. Also, the results of our 1998 reader survey and a parody worthy of the “Bawl Street Journal” provides the first totally honest daily stock market report.

• Read more

Equity managers increasingly fear the career danger of holding cash. Sagging stock prices have led a growing number high tech firms to reprice employee stock options. The importance of humor and laughter in life and in business.

• Read more

New Era investment professionals, crowding onto the money train and a different way to look at the economic impact of bear markets.

• Read more

Reasonable valuations(?), risk reductions and the wealth effect.

• Read more

85% of mutal fund holders expect the next ten years of stock market performance to match or exceed the last ten years.

• Read more