“We believe the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.” — New Yorker cartoon

When we published “Not Built for This: The Argument for Infrastructure Investing in an Unstable Climate” in January 2025, our thesis was straightforward: climate destabilization would drive urgent, massive infrastructure spending as aging systems fail under environmental pressures they were never designed to withstand. Just two months later, this argument has been dramatically reinforced—not despite, but because of aggressive federal climate policy rollbacks.  The New York Times offered this assessment on Continue reading →

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that are designed to be used in bond ladders with target maturities have been around for over a decade. They come in Corporate Debt BBB-Rated, High Yield, Inflation-Protected, U.S. Treasury General, and Municipal Bond Lipper Categories. They have the advantages of simplicity, diversification, liquidity, flexibility, and low expense ratios. The disadvantages are that an active investor may be able to selectively pick higher-yielding bonds, some of the bonds held in the ETF may be callable, the dividends are not as predictable as individual bonds, and in the final year the bonds that have matured are invested in Treasury bills.

Invesco manages Bulletshares bond funds and BlackRock manages iShares iBonds. A summary is shown in Table #1. Included in the iShares iBond ETFs totals Continue reading →

I wrote Business Cycle: Boring Bond Funds at Seeking Alpha in June 2019, describing the yield curve and that conditions were favorable to increase allocations to bonds. In hindsight, I believe that a “soft landing” would have been achieved had it not been for the COVID-induced recession. The conservative accounts that I manage are now fully invested in bonds. In this article, we will look at “Spicy Bond Funds” for those who are interested in high yield and safety. Spicy, but not too hot, and easy to manage!

There are several important considerations for investing in bonds. First, the S&P 500 earnings yield is less than the 10-year Treasury which Continue reading →

Investors are increasingly skittish. They are warned frequently that the top of the US equity market is feverishly overpriced and might bring the rest down when it falls. And, too, chaos in the national government is making them worried if not yet ready to abandon their lovelies. Interest is growing in finding ways to book gains independent of the stock market. One manifestation of that is the insane growth in economically inefficient buffered funds, and another is the rising interest in securing access to private equity. “Private equity” describes the wide world of corporations whose shares are Continue reading →

In the investment world, there’s an old saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Yet the latest crop of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) offering both daily liquidity and exposure to illiquid assets might seem to promise just that—a financial equivalent of eating decadent cheesecake without gaining an ounce. Continue reading →