Thursday, March 21, 2024, Delray Beach, Florida


Just One Thing

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The Connection Between Music and Numbers 

The company I have worked with for nearly 30 years employs dozens of very good financial analysts. Some of them are technical. Some are fundamental. Some follow trends. Some follow momentum. And some follow large, macro-economic events.

One thing that has struck me is that many of them are keenly interested in music. It’s generally known that there is a relationship between music and numbers, and maybe that explains this. If it does, one would think that there is a common denominator in the music they like. But there is none. The range is wide and the preferences diverse.

When they talk about their preferences, I am always interested in the music they love that I don’t even know.

Here, Garrett Baldwin, one of my new favorite analysts, writes about some of his favorites.

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Were It Not for Hypocrisy…

For ten years, from 2000 to 2010, I wrote a blog called Early to Rise. It was, in general, about self-improvement – building wealth, optimizing health and fitness, and living a rich and satisfying life.

I chose the title because I had recently discovered that instead of going to sleep at one or two a.m. and waking up seven hours later, which had become my habit, I could get much more accomplished by going to bed at ten or eleven p.m. and waking at five or six.

For ten years, I reported on my experiences with building wealth… diet and exercise… and the many philosophical approaches to life that I tried out.

The year 2000 was really the dawn of email-based blogs, and mine attracted a growing audience of young and middle-aged readers. At its peak, Early to Rise had more than 900,000 subscribers.

In 2010, I was invited to head up a business dedicated to just one of the topics I had been covering in the blog: creating personal wealth. So, I sold most of my equity in Early to Rise to a young man that I thought could continue its mission, and I devoted my next ten years to writing about entrepreneurship, business, and investing.

By 2020, I had written more than 10,000 essays on various aspects of wealth building and published 24 books. I had also established two non-profit organizations, made three movies, and started about a dozen small businesses.

No doubt about it. The early-to-bed/ early-to-rise idea had really been working for me!

I was on the verge of what would have been my third attempt at retirement and had to make some decisions about what I would be doing with my time once I stepped away from actively participating in business.

Since I’d stopped writing Early to Rise, I had developed an interest reading and writing and traveling and all sorts of other things that, if you’ve been reading this blog, you are well aware of. But something had happened between then and now that was not good. I had gradually developed a habit of going to bed later and waking up later until I was back to my old routine of staying up till one or two in the morning and waking at eight or nine.

I had also abandoned my number-one rule for being productive, which was to devote the first hour or two of every day to a goal that was “important but not urgent.”

I was getting by in terms of getting done what I had to get done every day. But I had stopped making progress on my important-but-not-urgent objectives, which included finishing 14 half-written books and building a museum of Central American art.

Somehow, just two weeks ago, I decided to return to my early-to-rise strategy and began to set my alarm for 6 a.m. and rearrange my daily schedule accordingly.

I’m happy to report that (so far, at least) it seems to be working out as well as it did 24 years ago. I’m back to exercising at seven a.m., and then spending the next hour or two on something I really want to get done before I shed the old mortal coil. And I’m feeling better than I have in years.

I’m telling you all this because I remember that when I did my first stretch of the early-to-rise lifestyle, I received many letters from readers that doubted the premise. And although I couldn’t guarantee that they would do better by getting up earlier, I advised them to give it a try. Many, I’m sure, did not. But over the ten years that I was writing Early to Rise, several hundred of my readers wrote to say that they were getting up earlier and it was working for them.

So, even if you are a confirmed “night person” and you feel that you are doing fine that way, I can only urge you to give the early-to-rise lifestyle a 30-day trial to see if your life doesn’t get noticeably better.

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Worth Considering

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CEOs Should Never Be on Vacation 

I’m sure that many people who read the next paragraph will think I’m kidding. And I’m sure that those that realize I’m not kidding will think I’m both irrational and also inhumane. Nevertheless, I have to say it:

Running a company is and should be a full-time job. And by full-time, I mean 24/7, every day of the year.

You got that right. I believe that the time it takes to responsibly run a company, and especially a growing company, is limitless.

That commitment is, in my admittedly insensitive opinion, the first and most important truth one must accept when taking on the role of CEO.

This is a demand I would require only of CEOs. Employees – even executive employees – are entitled to days off and vacations. They are also entitled to leave those obnoxious auto-responder notes saying, “Hi! I’ll be away from the office and unavailable for the next two weeks! If you have an urgent concern, please contact Gini, my 23-year-old assistant, who knows nothing about the business and has been told to never, ever interrupt me when I’m ‘away from the office.’”

There is a big difference between the role of CEO and every other role in a business. All employees are expected to do their jobs earnestly, energetically, and well. But every employee’s job is to some extent limited in scope. If you’re the IT guy, you need to be responsible for competently helping employees with all things IT. If you’re the CTO, you are responsible not only for making sure all things IT are functioning well and correctly, but also for anticipating and developing IT solutions for the future.

Except for the CEO, each job in the business has finite definitions and identifiable expectations. Because of those two simple limitations, employees, even senior employees, can get away from the grid completely, so long as they have a suitable backup.

But when one takes on the job of “running” the business, one must accept responsibility for everything that happens within the business.

There is no way to deny that. If you are a CEO and don’t understand it, you are not the right person for the job.

Put differently, the CEO – and only the CEO – has the ultimate and final responsibility for the company’s life and longevity. That means assuming responsibility for creating the revenue needed to meet or exceed customer expectations and accepting the responsibility for making sure that the business is always profitable enough to pay fair compensation to all its employees.

I’m not saying that CEOs must sleep in their offices, like Elon Musk does during start-up and expansion periods. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a CEO to be away from the office on weekends and take a family vacation now and then. But I don’t believe they ever have the right to go “radio silent” (as they say) with their top executives and shareholders.

Most of the time, in my experience, a business can function perfectly well without the direct and constant attention of the CEO. But every so often, every business faces some sort of unexpected crisis or opportunity that cannot be dealt with “when the boss returns.” An immediate answer needs to be given. And that answer can come only from the CEO.

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News & Views

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Health Watch 

A Persuasive Argument for Vitamin D Supplementation

I’ve been following Dr. John Campbell for quite a while. He’s always struck me as reasonable, restrained, and believable. In this short but informative video, he talks about how good levels of Vitamin D can protect people from all sorts of health dangers, including some forms of cancer and all sorts of viruses, including COVID-19.

As to Vaccines, Texans Are Pro-Choice!

The Texas GOP polled more than 2 million voters in their March 12 primary, asking if they thought they should be free “to give or withhold consent for any vaccine without coercion.” 91.7% said yes and 8.43% said no.

Trends in Wokeness

Trudeau’s Canada Just Keeps Getting Woker and Woker! 

Tell me this is a hoax:

Bill C-6, a new law proposed by Trudeau’s party, will make any crime designated as a “hate crime” punishable by life imprisonment.

Here’s the language:

“Everyone who commits an offense under this act or any other act of Parliament, if the commission of the offense is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for life.”

It gets scarier. Another provision offers cash rewards to Canadians that anonymously snitch on their neighbors:

“It [C-6 bill] allows someone to make a complaint of a discrimination anonymously… if that hateful complaint is found legit, a maximum of 20,000 [Canadian] dollars goes to that person.”

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The Economy & Investing

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Chart of the Week: The Effect of Money Supply on Inflation 

I’m not a stock market analyst. I’m not even interested in stocks. But I have a sizable percentage of my wealth (about 20% to 25%) in stocks because the stock market is a historically strong developer of wealth, averaging about 10% over the last 200 years. 

About 12 years ago, working with several of the best stock analysts I know, I developed a system that I call Legacy Investing. It’s basically like investing in an index fund, but with some adjustments I made that I hoped would boost my return by 3% to 5% – in other words, give me the hope of being able to get a 13% to 15% ROI on my stocks over the long term.

So far, it’s worked out well. So I know the sensible thing to do is to is leave my portfolio alone, since trying to time the market’s ups and downs usually results in getting an ROI from it that is considerably lower than the 10% historical average. (Most individual investors trying to play that game earn about 2.5%.)

Notwithstanding this investing philosophy, I do keep my eye on about a half-dozen economic and market analysts who I know personally and whose thinking I know (from experience) is very good. And once in a while, when most of them are worried about the same dangers or excited about the same opportunities – and when their doubts and fears match my gut – I do make adjustments.

In the last year or so, I’ve become increasingly concerned about a significant drop in the value of my stock portfolio, and I’ve been thinking about what I can do about it. After reading Sean’s piece today, I decided to start taking some profits from my growth stocks and move that money into dividend-paying stocks and even some high-yielding but relatively safe bonds. – MF 

This week’s chart of interest comes from the folks at EPB Research.

To understand the pressure that money supply has on inflation, they compared the broadest measure of money supply (called “M4”) to the pre-pandemic trendline:

M4 measures how much money is in the US economy, including demand deposits, time deposits, and Treasury bills.

The quantitative easing during the 2020 pandemic flooded the economy with money through both monetary policy and fiscal stimulus.

Even with efforts to remove money from the economy, called quantitative tightening, we are still about 2.6% higher than where we would expect to be had trends continued from last decade.

According to the analyst Lyn Alden, “per-capita money supply growth is one of the most closely correlated variables to consumer price inflation.”

Naturally, with this above-trend supply of money, we see from the latest data that inflation remains stubbornly high as well – up 0.4% in February 2024, for a total CPI increase of 3.2% over the previous 12 months.

That’s far higher than the Fed’s 2% target, meaning that we should not be expecting a rate cut anytime soon.

But at the same time, if the Fed keeps tightening and reducing the money supply, there will be little money for economic growth. That means fewer jobs.

And even with Fed tightening, the big culprits in our sticky inflation problem are transportation services, shelter, and food away from home.

The Fed can print money. The Fed cannot print cheaper houses, cheaper cars, and cheaper food.

So even if the Fed does successfully tighten money supply back to “normal,” that still probably will not be enough to fix the inflation problem in the US.

At least, not anytime soon.

As we get closer to the end of the year, bonds and dividend-paying stocks are going to appear more attractive as growth projections appear more unrealistic due to all this sticky inflation.

Over time, this will likely cause stock market prices to drag – especially since growth stocks now make up an outsized portion of the overall market.

– Sean MacIntyre

Check out Sean’s YouTube channel here.

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Worth Watching

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Munich, The Edge of War 

Directed by Christian Schwochow
Based on the book Munich, by Robert Harris
Starring George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, Jeremy Irons, and Sandra Hüller
Released in 2021
Currently streaming on Netflix 

Watch Time: 2 hrs, 11 min

Someone had recommended it to K. I liked the title. We sat in the den, dishes of spaghetti and glasses of a red blend by Prisoner, a brand I can recommend, and hit the Play button.

Munich: The Edge of War is a spy thriller. And a good one, I thought. But it is also an account of England’s diplomatic relationship with Hitler in the years just before WWII.

The main characters are fictionalized, but the story is largely factual. It is true that Chamberlain did take the view that by giving some concessions to Hitler, he could keep England out of the war. It is also true that Chamberlain went to Munich and signed an agreement that England would do nothing against Germany, so long as Hitler promised to cease his planned invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler agreed to and then reneged on.

What I Liked About It 

The plot is tight. The mood is tense. It takes place in 1932, when we meet the main characters, Hugh Legat and his German friends Paul von Hartman and Paul’s girlfriend Lena, at a party celebrating their graduation from Oxford University.

It jumps from there to 1938. Legat is working as the private secretary of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister. Germany has invaded Poland and it’s clear to many that he aims to conquer all of Europe. But Chamberlain is part of a considerable contingency of political leaders and Englishmen that believe Britain can – and maybe should – avoid getting into a war with Germany.

Hitler convinces Chamberlain to come to a meeting in Munich to work out a deal (The Munich Agreement) whereby England will allow Germany to seize control of Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

Meanwhile, his old friend Hartman, who was a Nazi supporter when the two were in university, is now working days as a translator in Berlin for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and nights plotting to overthrow Hitler, who, he thinks, will destroy the Germany that he loves.

What I Also Liked About It 

As regular readers know, I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Arab/Israeli conflict and the Israel/Hamas war. One thing I’ve learned that is indisputable is that the history of Palestine since the end of WWII is the history of Arab terrorists in Palestine attempting to commit genocide against Israel – and then, when Israel defended itself successfully, those same Arab and Palestinian leaders (some of whom had direct ties with Hitler during the war) asking England and the US to arrange peace between them so they could find a “two state” solution. And each time they achieved a cease fire, they immediately attacked Israel again.

It’s impossible to watch this movie without noticing the similarity with what has been going on since England engineered the famous Partition Agreement in 1947. It boils down to the question of whether it is possible to believe that someone or some group of people committed to genocide can be trusted. Hitler proved to Chamberlain and the rest of the world that he could not be trusted. It makes me wonder why so many US presidents, and now so many Americans, believe that the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah can be trusted today.

Critical Reception 

As I said above, I thought this was a very good movie – easily as good as all the movies that were nominated for this year’s Academy Award. So I was surprised to discover that the critical reception of Munich: The Edge of War was mixed, at best. A few examples:

* “A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.” (New York Times)

* “Once various ducks have been gotten in a narrative row and the conference starts, the movie becomes pretty good.” (Boston Globe)

* “A mixture of well-researched historical fact and pure fiction, Munich: The Edge of War is a smart and entertaining thriller that suffers from just one thing: We all know how it ends.” (Washington Post)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Worth Reading

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

By Jared Diamond
480 pages
First published March 1997

I meant to read this 26 years ago when it was first recommended to me. (The title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations and maintained dominance.) I bought it. Shelved it. And forgot about it.

It came up on my app as a recommended read, and I’ve been listening to it for about a week. It’s probably a good thing that I waited so long to read it, because my interest in the big questions it raises about the world and its disparate cultures was only casual back then.

Now, I have an insatiable appetite for this kind of book. I’m about halfway through it and have been very happy so far. It’s dense with geological, evolutionary, anthropological, and historical facts leading to an understanding of our world today that, while by no means identical to my own view, is complementary.

Critical Reception 

In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. Many critics noted that the large scope of the work made some oversimplification inevitable while still praising it as a very erudite and generally effective synthesis of multiple different subjects.

* “The great thing about Guns, Germs, and Steel is the detail. Jared Diamond starts with [the] proposition that all humans are born with much the same abilities – then proceeds to argue, through meticulous and logical steps, that the playing field of prehistory was anything but level.” (The Guardian)

* “Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse [its sequel] represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation.” (The New York Times)

* “Artful, informative, and delightful.” (New York Review of Books)

A documentary based on the book, produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005. Click here to watch Part 1.

And for a quick, four-minute cartoon summary of the book, click here.

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Fun and/or Interesting

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What’s Good About Menopause?

This is something that surprised me. Most mammals remain fertile throughout their lifespan, allowing them to maximize the number of their offspring. Only humans, chimpanzees, and five species of whales are known to experience menopause – the physiological process marking the end of a mammal’s ability to reproduce. And those five species of whales live longer, as much as 40 years longer, than whales that do not go through menopause. Click here and here for two scientific explanations.

566,000? 

566,000 is the number of immigrants that arrived in the 50 largest US metropolitan areas last year, up 15% from a year ago, according to a WSJ analysis of new figures from the Census Bureau. The analysis shows that immigration was the main factor in slowing or reversing population losses in large metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest after an exodus during the pandemic.

In case you’ve been wondering…

Smithsonian Magazine reports that the Pentagon has “no evidence” of alien technology in “most sightings” of “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” Click here.

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Readers Write

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From GM re the “How Much Do You Know About Beer” quiz in the March 13 issue:

“I got 19 out of 21. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or if I should be worried about myself.”

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