I have spent more than five decades on Wall Street. Along the way I founded a brokerage firm, Alliance Financial Group, and a registered investment advisory firm, Capital Ideas. For thirty-five of those years I did two jobs at once, running my firms during the week and teaching investing and financial planning at Southern Methodist University, and the teaching is the work I am proudest of. Teaching markets while I was actively trading them is where it became clear to me that the point is not to predict the market. It is to recognize the patterns that repeat, decade after decade, as one technology gives way to the next.
This letter is where I do that work in public, every week. The format does not change much: a read on the economy, a read on the market’s technical condition, and my prognostication for the year ahead. I write it the way I taught and the way I talked to clients, directly and from experience, without the hedged language that lets a forecaster be wrong in both directions at once.
My focus right now is what I call the Second Wave, the capital cycle building out artificial intelligence, and the historical analogs that tell us how it tends to play out. That work also became a book, Investing in the Second Wave, published through Greenleaf Book Group. These letters are the thinking behind it, kept current as the cycle moves.
I live in Dallas with my wife, Joy, of fifty-five years, and two cats with no interest in markets whatsoever. Subscribe if you want a long-memory take on a fast-moving market. It is free.
