“This has been the worst year for active managers in history. We have never seen numbers of people missing benchmarks so large. As the markets have moved up, the tracking error has grown. People are missing about a third of the upside in the markets,” said Thomas Lee, a chief equity strategist at JP Morgan. [...]

My next global strategy webinar will be held on Wednesday, September 12 at 12:00 noon EST. This webinar will be broadcast from back home in San Francisco, so everything should work. I’ll be giving you my updated outlook on stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, precious metals, and real estate. The goal is to find the cheapest [...]

Since nothing less than the fate of the free world depends on the judgment of Ben Bernanke these days, I thought I’d touch base with David Wessel, the Wall Street Journal economics editor, who has just published In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic. I doubted David could tell me anything [...]

A number of readers have asked me why I’m not trading now. Since I put out my calls to sell Treasury bonds in August (click here for “The Great Treasury Bond Crash of 2010” ), and buy US stocks in September (click here for “My Equity Scenario for the Rest of 2010” ), I have [...]

The gold rush is back on in California. On my way back from Lake Tahoe recently, I saw that every bend of the American river was dotted with hopeful amateur miners, looking to make a windfall fortune. Weekend hobbyists were there panning away from the banks, while the hardcore pros stood in hip waders balancing [...]

I have just finished reading the best financial book ever, and I have read most of them. It is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson. It gives you a great explanation of how the broad sweep of history delivered us to the doorstep of today’s crisis. [...]