February 24, 2013

Gross, Dalio, Gundlach…Minerd?

This week’s Idea Farm links to a couple research sources I don’t hear much about, but are high on my reading list – aiCIO and Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd.  We are pairing the two this week since aiCIO has a profile piece […]
February 20, 2013

Going Weimar

Back when I was giving more talks on global tactical asset allocation I would hand out some hyper-inflated currencies as a reward for guessing the correct answer to a few questions during the talk.  You can buy them on eBay […]
February 17, 2013

Hoisting a Red Flag-2

This week’s piece comes from a relatively new newsletter, but from the first few issues, it looks like a good one.  The Macro Trader focuses on a lot of topics, but one of the nice features is it often includes […]
February 13, 2013

Hoisting a Red Flag

I remember reading Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, Third Edition back in college for a class on Security Analysis.   The world of forensic accounting fascinated me – and one project was to see how […]
February 10, 2013

The Fiscal Cliff and Your Portfolio

There are a few shops that I consider to be absolute must reads for everything they publish. Research Affiliates, GMO, and Leuthold are a few such shops we have featured on The Idea Farm, and this month’s research note by […]
February 5, 2013

My #1 Read of the Year

I’m taking the red-eye to Colombia tonite, so I have printed out a big stack of papers for the plane.  I am super excited to be reading probably my favorite update of the year, the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns […]
February 4, 2013

House View

Headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life manages over $100billion and has been around since 1825 (at least the parent company).  I’ve never been to Scotland, but supposedly that’s where my name derives from – Mebane is Southern (US), derived from Scottish (McBain […]
January 31, 2013

Ultra Long Trends

I’ve featured Eric Crittenden and Cole Wilcox a number of times on the blog over the years with their previous firm, Blackstar.  They have changed the name to Longboard (which being a rather poor but aspiring surfer I like), and […]
January 27, 2013

Ivy Update

We took a deep dive into how the top universities managed their endowments in our book The Ivy Portfolio.  Hallmarks of the endowment style include a true global focus, a heavy weighting to equity like assets, and active management in asset […]
January 23, 2013

Harnessing the best ideas from academia

It is really, really difficult to stay abreast of all of the white papers and academic papers that come out on a daily basis.  There used to be a service called Alpha Letters (not sure what happened to it) that […]
January 20, 2013

Top FX Strategy in 2012

I’m sure many of you already have Bloomberg terminals on your desk, and therefore likely already receive their Bloomberg Brief. For those that don’t want to shell out over $20k for a terminal, here is a nice end of year […]
January 15, 2013

The Good Without the Awful

Most of you are likely already familiar with John Hussman.  His weekly commentary is a must read of economic and market analysis that he has been writing since 1988.  Below is a recent piece that constructs a multi-factor model for […]
January 12, 2013

Fewer Storms, More Sunny Breaks

Before we get into this week’s issue, I wanted to direct readers to a post I did on my blog on profit margins.  It has links to pieces by Whitebox’s Redleaf , GMO’s Montier, Siegel, and Hussman.  A fun read with […]
January 10, 2013

Income Outcome

Note:  I’m upgrading the technology we use to send out our emails.  If you don’t want to receive The Idea Farm emails, please click ‘unsubscribe’ below. I was at a conference in 2012 (I can’t remember which, although it was in LA), […]
January 6, 2013

Calm Before the Storm

Since we have profiled Grant’s Interest Rate Observer before, I’m not going to do an intro and excerpt, just straight to the issue.  Enjoy! —- Download the PDF here: Calm Before the Storm http://www.grantspub.com About Grant’s: Grant’s Interest Rate Observer […]