It’s not business; it is personal First and foremost, a shout out to all the sung and unsung heroes fighting an enemy that concerns all of us. We know that, statistically, heroes always rise to a challenge but we don’t always know who and where you are. You make all of us look better and you have our respect and support. During the first quarter of 2020, we were able to limit our clients’ losses between -3.9% and -11.8% (depending …

It is a windy and cold day in New York City and I am driving my cool new electric car down Broadway towards the downtown offices of J.P. Morgan where I have a meeting to discuss Investment Trust Funds, an investment vehicle that has become so popular that Goldman Sachs & Co launched a separate company, the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp, to sell an unprecedented amount of Investment Trust shares to the public. Never mind most of them are sold …

i-Cthru’s consolidated time-weighted return over Q3 2019 is USD 0.23%; EUR 4.53% (YTD USD 4.52%; EUR 9.76%). These results are unleveraged, net of all trading costs, fees, dividend tax withholding for non-US clients and cost of protection of individual portfolio holdings. Phew, what a quarter, up – down, up – down, mostly driven by one-line “news” headlines. I hope you were not following every step during the last three months. Like an inexperienced free climber on El Capitan, Yosemite National …

Serengeti, located in Tanzania, Africa, bordering Kenya, is a place of unparalleled beauty. Abundant wildlife lives in one of the most productive ecosystems on earth and it is one of only two locations where hominid fossils, estimated to be more than 2 million years old, have been found, pointing to our very early beginnings as human sapiens. Some roving descendants of those early hominids made it through Asia, over the (frozen) Bering Straight into Silicon Valley, North America and onwards: an unbelievable …

i-Cthru’s consolidated time-weighted return over Q2 2019 is USD 0.22%; EUR -0.98% (YTD USD 4.95%; EUR 5.92%). These results are unleveraged, net of all trading costs, fees, dividend tax withholding for non-US clients and cost of protection of individual portfolio holdings. “Be fearful when others are greedy” so say the wise. But it’s complicated, right? Just last December we saw a rather negative outlook on the equity markets with interests rates set to rise significantly as communicated by the Fed. …

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one. Yes, this amounts to something like 100 billion people against 7.5 billion. And yet, we ignore the accumulated experience of such a large majority of humanity at our own peril. Since the development of the spoken word, the invention of the printing machine and “lately” of the Internet, you could argue that there is no excuse for large mistakes to be repeated because they are all “recorded” and their lessons “available”. Therefore, …

I am dreaming. It is cold and dark. I must be in one of those ice-times. I have no clue why I dream about them or why these ice-times come and go, but it seems that every 100,000 years or so it gets very cold, almost like clockwork. It apparently has a lot to do with one of our astronomical cycles, which are much longer than our seasonal cycles. Our planet seems to be influenced by small cyclical changes in elliptical eccentricity, obliquity, axial …

Losing money is asymmetrical, as it feels proportionally so much worse than making a little, right? 2018 was, as opposed to 2017, a negative year and we feel the pain like a familiar punch in the stomach handed by the markets’ many humbling ways. Risk and uncertainty are part of the DNA of the equity markets and the likes of Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger have stated you should be willing to lose 50% if you are investing in the …