Thoughts from the Frontline

One of today's trickiest investment questions revolves around interest rates and bond investing. We are in an economic environment in history like no other, so we have few direct parallels from which to draw wisdom. Should we keep our bond investments short-term and suffer pathetic yields, or move out the interest rate curve, getting more income but subjecting ourselves to the possible ravages of inflation should it rear its ugly head? Yet, even as there may be no direct historic repetitions, there are perhaps some rhymes which can yield some insight.

This week we tackle some rather odd discrepancies in the employment numbers - are we adding jobs or losing them? Then is there a relationship between those numbers and the stock market? Are businesses getting ready to hire and spend money? All good questions, and I will try to shed some light on them as we see if we can fit some rather disparate pieces of the information puzzle together to form a picture that we can recognize.

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.

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!

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 investments.

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 analysts who seem more sure of their view of the future than they have been in the last few years.

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.

This week we see what oil has to do with the price of tea in China, what they both have to say about the US stock market and the implications for the ongoing recovery. Plus, we travel a little far afield, from Rotterdam to Saudi Arabia, Iran to Venezuela, and then end up in your back yard to see what you can do to shed some light in Myanmar. It will make for a very interesting e-letter.

Today we look at recent Fed statements, which give us more than a few clues as to what is really happening in the economy, plus a few thoughts on the markets. The song in my mind the past few days has been "Free at Last." My book in progress is finished - all 24 chapters! It's in the hands of my staff and the capable editors at Wiley. They tell me it will be 400 plus pages, bordering on 500. I left about 300 pages on the editing floor. More on that below.

Insanity, my bride tells me again and again, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This week we return to the concept of Bringing Out Your Inner Spock. We look at four more reasons why our psychological make-up makes us prone to making major investment mistakes. For those who missed it, I discussed one of them with Ron Insana and Sue Herera on CNBC yesterday afternoon. They invited me over to their spiffy new studios for some on air chat time about the markets. Hopefully next time I will know in advance and alert you.

This week we look at two very intriguing studies, one from James Montier where, safely perched in England, he forecasts future real returns on the US stock market. Then we give you Master Trader Dennis Gartman's 22 Rules of Trading, many of which you can apply to all sorts of life situations, as well as the markets. I really need to thank these two gentlemen for letting me use their work almost verbatim, as I am finishing the last (!) chapter of my book this weekend and really need every hour I can get (see more below). In any case, readers will be well served by these two short epistles.

Whenever I venture from my "assigned" space of economics and investing, and roam into the realm of politics, I am sure to offend more than a few readers. But today, I see the world of economics and politics meshing, as the threat of an international trade war is becoming more and more real. From Senators proposing insane 30% tariffs on the Chinese, (our new whipping boy, probably to the relief of Japan) to boneheaded steel tariffs, we put the economy of the world at risk. And the reasons are more political than economic, so I weigh in. I am sure I will be able to offend most everyone at some point, but I hope I will give us all a few things to think about as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. For the readers who can't stand political heat, you've been warned.