Guild’s Basic Needs Index
India: Manufacturing Destination
Last week we reported about two large stakes taken in Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio by U.S. investors. Their interest focused particularly on the Indian consumer, one of the world’s great untapped consumer markets. Jio’s aggressive rollout of cheap internet service and mobile devices to currently unconnected Indians attracted a
Market Summary — 14 May 2020
With markets apparently becoming tired in their post-COVID-crash reality, confusion reigns in many investors’ minds. The market has, according to many observers, become detached from underlying economic realities. Many companies have withdrawn their guidance for the second quarter and often for the rest of 2020. That absence of visibility, coupled
Market Summary — 7 May 2020
In a recent conference call, Canaccord’s Tony Dwyer ably summarized the current market situation in a single graph: According to Dwyer, the market remains in a no-man’s-land between unprecedented economic events and unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus. In this “frustration” phase, we remain focused on our task at hand. Put
U.S. Firms See Opportunity in India
India continues to attract investment from U.S. tech and e-commerce firms. In 2018, Walmart [NYSE: WMT] acquired India’s biggest domestic e-commerce firm, Flipkart. Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN] has said that it is investing $5 billion in India. Now two U.S. entities — Facebook [NASDAQ: FB] and Silver Lake, a private equity
Will COVID Mean That Big Wins Over Small? Not Necessarily
Part of the emerging narrative about the long-term economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the business closures ordered in response to it suggests that it will lead to the ascendancy of the Big. The reasoning goes that big companies will be able to survive the downturn and will eat
Healthcare: Haven In the Storm?
The COVID crisis is first and foremost a healthcare crisis, although it is having deep economic effects. Predictably, in the market volatility caused by the pandemic, the healthcare sector has broadly outperformed; and within healthcare, biotechnology has performed even more strongly. Of course healthcare is a broad sector, comprising many
An Eye Towards the Post-COVID World
Parts of the United States and the rest of the world are tentatively moving towards re-opening their economies. Many unknowns remain about the path forward, including the timeline for developing treatments and producing vaccines, as well as many other issues. Those unknowns collectively are making it impossible for many companies
COVID: The Global Response
We’ve been concentrating on the fiscal and monetary response to the coronavirus pandemic. The responses are similar to the playbook developed in the wake of the Great Recession, but in scope and size, they are unprecedented. Our coverage has been primarily of the response of U.S. authorities so far. This
What Comes Next
Over the past several weeks, we have kept you informed about the monetary and fiscal stimulus being enacted in the United States in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dislocation associated with it. The nature and extent of the economic slowdown caused by measures to combat the virus
Watchful Eyes On the Near-Term… And the Horizon
If you’re in lockdown, working from home, or otherwise practicing social distancing, we hope this letter at least offers the chance to think with us about the implications of current events for the economic, financial, and investing landscape. Perhaps it will even be able to briefly take your mind away
Kitchen Sinks and Alphabet Soup
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold, investors’ attention is focused in two directions. First, the progression of the pandemic itself as a public health phenomenon. We believe that before a sustainable stock-market recovery can take hold, global investors will need to see improving news on this front. There are
Patience: This Too Shall Pass
Note: Current events are very fast-moving. The following note was composed last week and sent to our clients and paid subscribers last Thursday. Our first thoughts for our clients, friends, and readers are for your health and resilience, both physical and psychological, as the current crisis unfolds. We trust and
Shock and Awe
Coronavirus panic and a huge shock to oil markets converged on Monday to hand U.S. investors their worst day since the Great Financial Crisis. There were a lot of market-related movements that registered in the stratosphere of the unexpected: the size of the market’s decline; the rapidity of moves in
Market Summary—12 March 2020
For several weeks at the beginning of the year, we were expecting that the strong markets would experience a pullback; but what happened was that world stock and bond markets suddenly became unstable over the last 12 trading days. We began to prepare for a pullback in January, increasing cash
Market Volatility, Recessions, and the Uptick Rule
Global stock markets reacted to the ongoing COVID-19 scare with unusual volatility last week, with U.S. stocks shedding about $4 trillion in value over six bruising sessions. The decline marked the fastest 10% correction from the peak in S&P 500 history (during 1987, the peak was in August, months before
Market Summary—5 March 2020
U.S. and Global Stocks We don’t believe that last week’s declines represented a rational response to neutral analysis of the risks posed by COVID-19. The data we have so far lead us to believe that those risks are relatively modest — that COVID-19 will not be a global black swan,
