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Dark Accounting Matter

Harvard Corporate Governance

The S&P 500 currently trades at a price to book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80%, appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

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Good (Bad) Banks and Good (Bad) Investments: At the right price.

Musings on Markets

In this post, I will begin by looking at how to value banks and follow up with an examination of investor views of banking have changed, by looking at pricing, before examining divergences in how banks are priced in the market today. All Equity, All the time!

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A Follow up on Inflation: The Disparate Effects on Company Values!

Musings on Markets

In my last post , I discussed how inflation's return has changed the calculus for investors, looking at how inflation affects returns on different asset classes, and tracing out the consequences for equity values, in the aggregate. The former is short hand for the small cap premium and the latter is the proxy for the value factor in returns.

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Japan Megabanks’ Strategic Share Sale Marks Big Priority Shift

Global Finance

Significantly, Mizuho CEO Masahiro Kihara said the bank will either pass on the proceeds from its sales of equity holdings to investors as dividends or invest them in growth-directed activities, and Sumitomo Mitsui aims to reduce the market value of its equity holdings to less than 20% of the value of its consolidated net assets.

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Market Resilience or Investors In Denial? A Mid-year Assessment for 2023!

Musings on Markets

In my second data update post from the start of this year , I looked at US equities in 2022, with the S&P 500 down almost 20% during the year and the NASDAQ, overweighted in technology, feeling even more pain, down about a third, during the year. US Equities in 2023: Into the Weeds! that was lost last year.

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Interest Rates, Earning Growth and Equity Value: Investment Implications

Musings on Markets

The first quarter of 2021 has been, for the most part, a good time for equity markets, but there have been surprises. Those rates stayed low through the rest of 2020, even as equity markets recovered and corporate bond spreads fell back to pre-crisis levels. to close to zero, and the ten-year T.Bond rate declining to close to 0.70%.

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Data Update 3: Inflation and its Ripple Effects!

Musings on Markets

Corporate Bonds: No Shortage of Risk Capital In my last post, I chronicled the movement in the equity risk premium, i.e. the price of risk in the equity market, during 2021, but the bond market has its own, and more measurable, price of risk in the form of corporate default spreads.