If there is one adjective we have heard repeatedly in the last year and a half it is “unprecedented”. It has been applied to describe the amount of monetary and fiscal stimulus that’s been poured into the economy. It has been used in relation to the pandemic lockdowns and reopenings, and the record-breaking runs in stock, bonds, real estate, and commodity markets. Is there no historical precedent for these events?  Who better to ask than this week’s WEALTHTRACK guest, Niall Ferguson? Ferguson has studied booms, busts, the rise and fall of empires, the power of social networks, and catastrophes of all sorts including plagues and pandemics?     He is one of the world's leading historians and an influential commentator on contemporary politics and economics. Ferguson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, along with being the author of numerous articles, and a regular columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. His most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which analyzes how societies have reacted to crises from the Roman response to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to how various governments have handled Covid-19. According to Ferguson, experience has taught him that understanding history does help make us better investors. In this week’s interview, he explains why. WEALTHTRACK #1803 broadcast on 07-16-21 More info: https://wealthtrack.com/using-history-to-predict-the-markets-with-renowned-historian-niall-ferguson/ Bookshelf: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe - https://amzn.to/2Ujtdw3 Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire - https://amzn.to/2VL2HvP The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West - https://amzn.to/3epbI48 The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - https://amzn.to/3z8p0u6 The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook - https://amzn.to/3B9jKrH

Part 2 of 2 When legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham turned 80 he made two resolutions: “to be prepared to write a cheque up to the limits of your ability”, and to “say what you think you should say to everybody”.  He is following through on both commitments. He is saying what he thinks he should say to everybody including us, to our benefit!  In the first of our two-part interview last week, Grantham warned we are in a bubble of “epic proportions” in the U.S. stock markets, bond market, and global real estate and commodity markets.  In this week’s show,  Grantham shares his views on climate change, why he calls it the “Race of Our Lives” and how he is investing to combat it.   WEALTHTRACK #1802 broadcast on 07-09-21 More Info: https://wealthtrack.com/jeremy-grantham-shares-his-views-on-climate-change-why-he-calls-it-the-race-of-our-lives/

Part 1 od 2 We are celebrating the launch of WEALTHTRACK’s 18th season on public television this week! We feel so fortunate to serve you. When WEALTHTRACK launched in July of 2005 our mission was to help our audience and ourselves build financial security to last a lifetime through disciplined, long-term, diversified investing. We vowed to seek out the best minds in the financial business to guide us. This week’s guest is unquestionably one of them. We’ll be joined by legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham, Co-Founder of the global investment management firm, GMO, Grantham is known for his prescient calls about market extremes and game-changing turning points. I will add that being far out of consensus is never popular. He saw the tech stock bubble inflating in 1997, three years before it actually burst. It was an early call that cost GMO half of their asset allocation book of business at the time. In the late 2000’s he warned of the developing subprime mortgage and credit bubble and came close to calling the actual 2008 bull market peak. He then called the market bottom nearly to the day in March of 2009. When Grantham appeared on WEALTHTRACK in 2018 he was predicting a possible market melt-up, a powerful late-stage two to three-year-long market rally before an inevitable decline. He got the melt-up right, even when figuring in the brief, 2020 pandemic induced bear market. And of course, the bull continues to this day. The U.S. stock market had an impressive first half of the year. The S&P 500 gained 14.4% to close at 4297.5, it’s 34th record close for the year. Grantham will explain why he is calling this a bubble of epic proportions and suggest ways that investors can handle it. WEALTHTRACK # 1801 broadcast on July 02, 2021 More info: https://wealthtrack.com/jeremy-grantham-shares-his-most-compelling-evidence-that-we-are-in-a-bubble-of-epic-proportio

For financial historians and serious market observers, the current era has all the signs of a developing market bubble.  Money is abundant, a wide range of financial assets have risen to record or near-record levels, and enormous amounts of money are flowing into stocks. Private equity funds are flourishing and bonds continue to attract huge sums.   Demand for residential real estate is soaring as are home prices. And despite recent dramatic declines, innovative products such as digital currencies have appreciated at breathtaking speed. Speculative trading by individual investors has also increased as a new growing community of online traders has emerged as a potent market-moving force.  The combination of all of these forces caused me to reach out to this week’s WEALTHTRACK guest.  We’ll be joined by Jason Zweig, a leading financial journalist who since 2008 has written the widely read The Intelligent Investor column for The Wall Street Journal. Zweig will share his analysis of the current market climate and advice for investors. WEALTHTRACK #1752 broadcast on June 25, 2021

How strong and lasting is the current rebound we are seeing in the economy? What about the resurgence in inflation? Those are major debates raging on Wall Street right now.   This week’s WEALTHTRACK guest is looking beyond the current rebound and focusing on what he sees as massive problems which will act as drags on recovery.  Robert Kessler, Founder, and CEO of Kessler Investment Advisors, a manager of fixed-income portfolios with a specialty in U.S. treasuries. Even before COVID, Kessler has been warning about economic and stock market risk.   On the program this week, he will discuss why he believes those risks have been exacerbated and the market is in a danger zone.   WEALTHTRACK #1751 broadcast June 18, 2021 More info: https://wealthtrack.com/exclusive-with-robert-kessler-on-why-100-years-of-stock-market-history-are-signaling-danger/

The consensus for the economy is bullish. After a 6.4% annualized increase in real GDP, that’s without inflation, in the first quarter, recent forecasts are for 10% GDP growth in the second quarter, 7.5% in the 3rd, and 5% in the fourth.  As for inflation expectations, they are up. Again the consensus is that the combination of a rapidly rebounding economy, supply shortages, and tight labor market will lead to a sustained rise in prices.  The most prominent skeptic on that front is Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and other Fed officials who believe the price increases we are seeing now are transitory.  This week’s guest, influential economist Dave Rosenberg is in the Powell camp on this one and believes the recent jump in inflation is temporary and that the overall bullishness on the economy and markets is wrong and will be challenged before the year ends.  Dave Rosenberg is the outspoken and often contrarian Chief Economist and Strategist at his independent economic consulting firm Rosenberg Research. I began the interview by asking Rosenberg why he is as convinced that the bullish consensus is wrong as he was when he went against the crowd at the height of the tech bubble in 2000 and the housing bubble in 2007. WEALTHTRACK #1750 broadcast on June 11, 2021 More Info: https://wealthtrack.com/why-david-rosenberg-is-convinced-that-the-bullish-consensus-about-the-economy-and-markets-is-wrong/ For more detail about the evidence behind Dave Rosenberg’s convictions, he is generously sharing a recent comprehensive report, “No New Era” with us.  https://bit.ly/3io9XHu

Times they are a-changin'…  With COVID vaccinations becoming widespread, savings rates high, and consumers ready to spend, the economy is reopening and rebounding with gusto.  All of these developments are creating new opportunities and challenges for bond investors.  Bond prices fall when interest rates rise and vice versa. After a 40-year bull market in bonds, with interest rates declining to record lows, has the bottom finally been reached after many false starts? How real is this uptick in rates and what does it mean for bond investors?  Our guest on WEALTHTRACK this week is Mary Ellen Stanek, Chief Investment Officer of Baird Advisors, and President of the Baird Funds, where she heads up the Fixed Income Team overseeing $91 billion dollars worth of bond investments.  Stanek discusses the rapidly changing conditions and her team's all-weather bond strategy in what she calls uncharted waters. WEALTHTRACK Episode #1747 broadcast on May 21, 2021 More Info: https://wealthtrack.com/new-opportunities-and-challenges-for-bond-investors-with-top-rated-bond-manager-mary-ellen-stanek/

“Jack be nimble Jack be quick” isn't a concept one usually associates with long-term value investors but sometimes extraordinary times call for exceptional responses. The first quarter of 2020 was one such event for this week’s guest.  Steven Romick, who has appeared on WEALTHTRACK since our launch in 2005 rarely does television interviews which is one of the many reasons we are delighted to have him with us this week. For those of you not familiar with him, he is Co-Portfolio Manager of the FPA Crescent Fund which he founded in 1993 and ran for many years before bringing on his current team. Since its inception this go anywhere, invest in anything balanced fund has delivered better than 10% annualized returns besting the stock market and its balanced portfolio benchmarks by substantial margins.  WEALTHTRACK #1746 broadcast on  May 14, 2021 More Info: https://wealthtrack.com/great-investor-steven-romick-loaded-up-on-unloved-stocks-during-2020-sell-off-whats-his-plan-now/

There is a rule of thumb on Wall Street that when a fund knocks it out of the park in any given year or has an exceptional winning streak for a couple of years it is bound to fall to earth sooner rather than later and lag the market, its peers, or both for several years. It's called reversion to the mean. With few exceptions, this week’s guest has been in the winning streak category for a while. He is Michael Lippert, Head of Technology Research at Baron Capital and portfolio manager of the firm’s high-growth stock oriented Baron Opportunity Fund Morningstar’s one caveat about the fund’s performance has been its volatility, as it focuses entirely on companies with high rates of growth, not on the mitigating effects of returning capital to shareholders with stock buybacks or dividends. Volatility is a topic Lippert tackled in-depth in a recent quarterly letter to fund shareholders. I ask him to share his views with us. WEALTHTRACK #1745 broadcast on May 07,2021 More Info: https://wealthtrack.com/?p=22536 “The Volatility of Stock Investor Returns” Ilia D. Dichev, Emory University, Xin Zheng, University of British Columbia, 1/22/2021 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3663350

The shift from COVID lockdown to COVID reopening has been stunning. Depending upon the stage of reopening economies around the world are rebounding. The markets’ response has been swift and dramatic particularly in the U.S. So what do you do if you are running a highly concentrated, large-cap growth fund? That is the challenge facing this week’s guest. Damon Ficklin is head of the Large Company Growth team at Polen Capital. In his first appearance on WEALTHTRACK I will begin with the basics. I will ask him to describe Polen’s high conviction, the low turnover strategy of focusing on the highest quality growth companies with margins of safety.  What does that actually mean? WEALTHTRACK #1544 broadcast on April 30, 2021 More info: https://wealthtrack.com/focusing-on-highest-quality-growth-companies-with-margins-of-safety-pays-off-at-polen-capital-2/