Job Wanted: House Speaker
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz In a once in a century vote yesterday, Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position as Speaker of the House. Led by representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, the resolution to vacate the House speaker was voted by every democrat and 8 republican members, resulting in a 216-210 vote in […]
ESG Has Failed Investors
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz Preface – In a recent pitch to an endowment, our team was grilled about ESG screening criteria, and how we would apply this to the endowment’s “ESG” driven portfolio. As a rational and prudent capital allocator, I conveyed to the endowment committee that we needed to carefully draft policy guidelines […]
Swiss Banks, No Longer Secret
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz Swiss banks have historically been portrayed as a haven for offshore money given their nature of secrecy and security. Swiss banking law in 1934 made it illegal to disclose account holder names, and banks could even deny the existence of accounts. Of course, the following decades of cash inflow from […]
Bill Ackman is Short, We’re Long
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz If you don’t know, Bill Ackman is a billionaire hedge fund manager and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman’s famous for his activist investment philosophy, which involves betting on and against controversial positions and then tweeting about it. His most recent call? To short the 30-year treasury. Here’s his […]
The Fed, One and Done
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz We expect the Fed to hike rates by another 25-basis points at today’s July meeting. Just a reminder, we (rates) are already in restrictive territory, and today’s decision will bring the FOMC target range up to 5.50%. Since the beginning of this tightening cycle, the Fed has raised rates 550 […]
Opinion – RIVN: all the risk, none of the reward.
By Sambhav Bansal, Alonso Munoz Rivian has been on an absolute tear this year! If you’re even remotely interested in EV’s, you’re bound to have heard about Rivian Automotive Inc. The company is backed by Amazon and auto giants such as Ford. In recent years, it had one of the most valuable IPOs of 2021 […]
Value in Artificial Intelligence: TSMC
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz In similar fashion to the blockchain craze, investors are piling into any company that simply mentions the golden words “artificial intelligence”. It’s not a bad idea. We think AI is still the greatest tailwind in this economic cycle, but it’s important to look for quality companies, not unproven ones with […]
NVDA: Fueling the Future
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz If you had the opportunity to go back and purchase Google stock in 2004 during the genesis of the internet, or Apple in 2007 when the smartphone was released, would you? Of course. These companies were poised to benefit immensely from great technological advancements (and if you said no, then […]
First Republic, Another One Bites the Dust
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz Congratulations to First Republic for being the third major U.S. Bank to fail this year, and the second largest to fail in U.S. history! Another victim of tight monetary policy and failed management, FRC was unable to survive one of the most hostile rate environments in decades. It’s a similar […]
Rating Agencies Fail Again
By Kelvin Lee, Alonso Munoz As congress grilled regulators last week on the recent string of bank failures, we want to focus on the role of the rating agencies instead. Moody’s, along with Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings, are all responsible for assessing the creditworthiness of banks and other financial institutions. They provide an […]
