Technology, growth and value

“In Europe, the relative underperformance of value [stocks] versus growth has not been as sustained since the early 1980’s. In the US, according to research by O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, investors have to go back to 1926-1941 to find a comparable period of sustained relative performance.”

That’s from Inflection Point, a blog post in which Marc Rubinstein takes a long term look at the valuation of stocks and the impact of technology on markets and the economy. The article has a lot of references.

Update: Chris Meredith of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management talked about his research on Odd Lots.

Luxembourg is eating Trump’s lunch. Sad!

President Trump couldn’t buy Greenland from Denmark. In response, he tweeted that most NATO members don’t pay their fair share.

For example, Belgium, home of the NATO headquarters, spends only 0.93% of its GDP on defense. But the worst offender is Luxembourg at 0.55%.

Defense expenditures of NATO member states. Graph tweeted by Trump.

At the same time, Luxembourg is enabling massive tax arbitrage for American multinationals like Amazon.

Source: Brad Setser

Luxembourg should pray it doesn’t wake up to the following tweet 🙂

Luxembourg has to pay BILLIONS in tribute for U.S. Military Protection! 
Its secret deals with Jeff Bozo (Amazon Washington Post) cost our great Nation so much. Grand Duke Henry should fix soon!

What’s behind the low valuation of European banks?

Great explanation by Johannes Borgen on Twitter:

In summary: banks are more robust than they used to be, but they have profitability issues.

To learn more about bank stocks, listen to the recent episode of Odd Lots with John Hempton.

See also this thread by Marc Rubinstein:

I also blogged about bank stocks in my 2017 post A lost decade (for bank investors).

Back in business

A lot has happened since my last blog post.

I have changed jobs! I’m back at Ghent University, studying financial networks. I intend to use this platform to share thoughts on my research, in addition to the usual topics.

Posts about local issues (e.g. Belgian taxes or personal finance) will be written in Dutch and sometimes crossposted on the Facebook page of my book Hoe bankiers geld scheppen.