December 8th, 2025 Thoughts of the Week Nobody talks about Japan, but we will.  Last week the President of Japan's central bank said that they could start increasing interest rates as inflation has, at last, stabilized at relatively high levels. Now for them, this is a good thing, because Japan has been plagued by deflation (i.e. negative inflation) for more than 30 years. At the same time, the new government also announced plans for increased spending, at a time when both de

December 1st, 2025 Thoughts of the Week November disappointed, despite the long-standing very positive seasonal pattern. But as we had mentioned in our newsletter at the dawn of this month, nothing has worked according to seasonal patterns this year, which had made us put a question mark on a potential November mini-rally, back then. If the patterns return to normal however, December should produce very decent returns. This typically positive finish to the year has given

November 24th, 2025 Thoughts of the Week It has been a remarkable year, primarily because of the polarization in returns among stocks and industries. In the US, everything related to AI, chips and data centers has been flying sky-high, while Consumer Staples (the likes of Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola and Colgate) have been left in the doldrums. In Europe, the shares of most defense companies have doubled and cement makers to Spanish banks have produced more than 50% of retur

November 17th, 2025 Thoughts of the week Investors have started questioning, and rightly so, the economics of the relentless spending on AI (infrastructure and software)  and for the older generation, memories of the 1999 bubble have inevitably resurfaced. The ultra-bulls will say that we are more closer to 1996 when the bubble had just started forming and the internet started presenting itself to the mass populations. Hence, they claim, we still got a few years of a strong r

November 10th, 2025 We copied the title from our newsletter two weeks ago, referring to Gold at that time . The reason is that the US Technology sector fell 4%, which is the worst weekly performance since the April sell-off. This negative performance was not the product of any bad news or developments for the sector, on the contrary, market darlings like AMD and Palantir announced solid results but still sold off. We point out this significant underperformance of the Tech se

November 3rd, 2025 The last two months of the year are usually the best for equities. Traditionally it is the time of the year where portfolio managers start to window-dress their portfolios and hedge funds as well as banks' trading desks are trying to boost performance, since the 30th November is for many of them their fiscal year-end, when performance fees and bonuses will be calculated. Also in November, most of the 3rd quarter results have already been announced, so the p