The Wednesday Letter #211 - 3/13/2024

THIS WEEK: Bet on the Bull?; Haiti and the 'Greatest Heist in History'; How Putin Became and Remains President.

BET ON THE BULL?

Did the cover of Barron’s magazine (below) last weekend ring the bell on the US equity market? It is a widely shared view on Wall Street, even if not a very robust one, that magazine covers are lagging indicators. When the cover of a prominent magazine encourages you to buy/sell a certain stock or to increase/decrease your position in the market, it is often time to do the opposite. The grandfather of such covers was BusinessWeek’s ‘Death of Equities’ in August 1979, not long before the start of a decades long bull market. There have been many others since then, for example BusinessWeek’s ‘Is Inflation dead?’ in April 2019, or the Economist’s ‘Crypto’s Downfall’ in November 2022. One of our favorites is Fast Company’s ‘Nokia’s Plan to Rule the World’ in September 2009, and in smaller print its ‘bold bid to trounce Apple’.

This is not a science, let alone a perfect science. There have been many similar covers that turned out to be right. But when the market looks overval…