• January 30, 2004

The Super Trend Puzzle

I start this week's letter somewhere over Kansas on the way to Lake Louise outside of Calgary, Canada. I have been giving a great deal of thought to a speech I will do tomorrow and have decided to make the speech the subject of this week's letter. I have been given no particular topic other then to talk about something that I find of interest, but to keep it to 40 minutes and 20 minutes for questions.

• January 23, 2004

How to be a Top 20% Investor

This week we re-visit one of my favorite themes: Why Investors Fail. I am doing the final edits on my book, Bull's Eye Investing, and when I came to the chapters on the psychological hard-wiring we have as humans, which causes us to make the same investment mistakes over and over, it just reminded me how important it is to understand why we do the things we do, and then stop doing them!

• January 16, 2004

The Supercycle of Debt

Debt and the dollar, employment and interest rates, the US economy and world trade, money supply and inflation/deflation, taxes, deficits, commodity prices, politics, war, regulation plus a host of other variables. They are all related in a very complex and dynamic fashion. Changing one of them may change each of the others in often unpredictable ways, which in turn affect all the others. Today, we start a series trying to understand how they fit together and what the implications are for our...

• January 9, 2004

Forecast 2004: The Silver Lining Economy

For the last 10 days, I have been reviewing over 500 pages of forecasts, predictions, and data from a wide variety of sources. Some have been extremely bullish and others make you want to just slit your wrists and get it over with. But even ignoring the extremes, which are almost always universally wrong, never in all my years have I seen such a wide range of opinion and disagreement accompanied by an increased hardening of those opinions. With a few notable exceptions, there are a lot of...

• January 2, 2004

The Outlook for the Housing Market

This is always a fairly intensive research time of the year for me, as I begin to format my thoughts about the possible trends for the coming year. Next week, I will sit down on Thursday and Friday to write my annual forecast edition. It will be a shorter letter this week, as I husband my energy for next week's marathon.

But today we will preview one part of the puzzle that will be 2004: the housing market and its implication for interest rates.