Friday, August 12, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
In my Empire Financial Daily essay last Thursday, the buzzword was 'recession'... We discussed what recessions are, how they happen, and whether they really matter to the stock market or our strategies. This week, we want to tackle another big economic buzzword – inflation – and consider some of the same questions. The first issue […]
Thursday, August 4, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
If you pay attention to the financial news like I do, you've probably heard the word 'recession' about 1,000 times in the past week alone... The media needs a constant stream of topics to talk about, and when they get something as ominous sounding as a recession... they are all over it! They know that […]
Monday, June 27, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
Since the beginning of 2022, it has been a rough stretch in the markets... Looking at the big picture, we don't think that much has changed in the past few months. The stock market moved from a period of great visibility on earnings and liquidity to an environment with much less visibility. This type of […]
Saturday, June 25, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
I began my career working at the now-infamous Lehman Brothers... My first job on Wall Street was working there on the fixed-income syndicate desk, which was responsible for selling new bond issues. If you're not familiar with the history of Lehman Brothers, it was considered one of the great bond houses like Salomon Brothers. The […]
Friday, June 24, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
On Saturday, we shared some insights from legendary investor Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management... As we mentioned, we recently received a copy of one of Philippe's investor presentations and found tons of great insight there. The first insight was that Philippe and his fund have gone almost all cash in their public investing vehicle. This […]
Saturday, June 18, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
One of the great benefits from a career in investing at some of the highest levels for 25-plus years is the opportunity to have grown up with and met many great investors... One of those investors – with whom I used to frequently speak more than 20 years ago – is Philippe Laffont of famed […]
Saturday, May 21, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
The major stock indexes have had one of the worst starts to a calendar year in stock market history... The question to ask, though, is, "What happens next?" When we look back at similar periods of stock market performance, the next phase of the market usually falls into one of two patterns: a "correction" or […]
Friday, May 20, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
'I went to fashion week in the metaverse'... These were the words of Leah Dolan, a fashion reporter who attended the four-day event in late March. It wasn't held in some historic venue in Paris or Milan, but rather in "Decentraland" – a 3D virtual world in an Internet browser-based platform. Here, people could log […]
Monday, May 2, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
Would you pay $450,000 to be neighbors with a celebrity? And that's not all... What if it was to be a digital neighbor? Well, that's how much one person spent to own a plot of virtual land next to rapper Snoop Dogg's "house" in a digitally created space back in early December. The headline-grabbing amount […]
Saturday, April 23, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
It's no exaggeration to say that COVID-19 has changed everything about our day-to-day lives... Think back to life in January 2020... We commuted to work, sometimes in a subway with hundreds or even thousands of strangers... spent time sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in busy conference rooms... hopped on a plane and traveled across the country for work […]
Friday, February 25, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
The market is full of 'rules'... And despite what you may think, many of them don't actually work. When it comes to most things, I'm not a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. However, I'd estimate that 90% of what you hear from the financial media and investment managers can not only prevent […]
Thursday, February 24, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
He's one of history's great military strategists, but you likely haven't heard of him... Colonel John Boyd was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and joined the Army Air Corps in 1944, while he was still in high school. After graduating from the University of Iowa, he was commissioned into the Air Force during the Korean War […]
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
My parents met in a casino in Reno, Nevada, in 1970... My mother worked as a cigarette girl. My dad spent a lot of time in Nevada. Although he ran a chain of beauty shops in the area and worked as a hairdresser, he would tell you he was first a professional gambler. When I […]
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
One of the most important lessons I've learned over more than 20 years of managing money is that when it comes to investing, you're buying stocks, not companies... When you buy a company, you control its cash flows and can use them for anything you want: acquiring other companies, reinvesting in the business, or paying […]
Saturday, February 19, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
One of my favorite sayings about the stock market – and human systems – is 'History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes'... This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, although there's some debate about the actual origin. It captures the fact that although no events in human history are exactly the same, […]
Friday, February 18, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
Editor's note: The Empire Financial Research offices are closed on Monday in observance of Presidents' Day. Look for the next Empire Financial Daily in your inbox on Tuesday, February 22, after the Weekend Edition. February kicked off with a bang in the markets... In two consecutive days, we saw the largest market cap decline ever […]
Saturday, February 12, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
It's the question on many of your minds... Is this a stock market "bubble"? This actually needs to be tied to the answer to another question: What is a stock market "bubble"? As much as pundits talk about "bubbles," they seldom spend time talking about what it means. I believe that a "bubble" is about […]
Saturday, January 22, 2022
By Enrique Abeyta
There seems to be a broad consensus on the topics that have dominated the conversation in the market for the last few months... The consensus couldn't be more wrong. Everyone is talking about inflation. According to a lot of the pundits, it's the only factor that's driving the markets... And I couldn't disagree more. People […]
Saturday, December 11, 2021
By Enrique Abeyta
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... At least, that used to be the case when it came to the "taboo" hobby of sports betting. That is, until May 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act ("PASPA") unconstitutional. The PASPA was the federal law that essentially kept sports […]
Saturday, September 11, 2021
By Enrique Abeyta
► The desire to accumulate 'things' seems to be inherent to humans... It ranges across societies – from the little girl who collects Barbie dolls to the billionaire who owns dozens of sports cars. For some folks, the thrill of searching for and acquiring a specific item is the whole point of the activity. Others […]