News, insights and thought leadership from the City Different team.
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...” Rudyard Kipling Yesterday, I noticed Warren Buffet was in the press quoting this Kipling piece, one of my...
If you’ve ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind (filmed on campus while I finished my degree in economics!), you’ll remember the pickup scene in the bar. John Nash (played by Russel Crowe) stumbles...
Around age 40, my annual checkup started including additional tests. These tests are meant to keep me healthy, but they also have the ancillary effect of stressing me out while I await the results....
If you’ve ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind (filmed on campus while I finished my degree in economics!), you’ll remember the pickup scene in the bar. John Nash (played by Russel Crowe) stumbles...
Around age 40, my annual checkup started including additional tests. These tests are meant to keep me healthy, but they also have the ancillary effect of stressing me out while I await the results....
This week, a surprising announcement from China’s Deep Seek sparked a lot of market chatter (and, ya know, vaporized nearly $600B in market value from Nvidia). Deep Seek claims it developed an...
9/10 is an exceptional mark in almost all applications. If a restaurant has a 9/10 on Yelp or Foursquare (yes, Foursquare is still an excellent restaurant rating app), it means the restaurant is...
For years, Warren Buffett’s advice has been pretty clear — for most investors, the S&P 500 is the safest bet. “Just buy the index,” he’s famously said. And for the past decade, he’s been pretty right...
In the 1980s, very few equity fund managers adhered to an indexing strategy. Fund managers were actively picking stocks to generate alpha for their clients. But over the course of the 1990s and...
There’s a great metaphor that describes in pretty perfect detail how you should think about investing. It comes from Ralph Wanger, a legendary investor (as quoted in The Four Pillars of Investing):...
When it comes to share price, nothing has been quite so good to companies these past couple of years as making waves in A.I. Much of the S&P 500’s gains over that period have been powered by a few...
Excerpt from Hidden Value Stock Newsletter: Connor Browne and Rob MacDonald are two of the co-founders of City Different Investments. Both serve as portfolio managers, and Browne runs the firm....
When my three daughters were little, they loved Easter egg hunts. As I’m sure many of you also do, we’d put candy in plastic Easter eggs and hide them around the house. My high-energy oldest daughter...
Investing can be demanding. It can require some serious brain power… but more importantly, it’s a battle within yourself. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you’re too emotional or too biased to...
In my last blog post, I talked about how “thinking like an endowment trustee” can provide a real advantage to both financial advisors as well as retail investors when thinking through your investing...
Among the things I’ve been lucky enough to do in my professional life in Santa Fe, NM, two stand out: I’ve enjoyed a successful career in finance and have been involved with several nonprofits...
The Big Three U.S. auto workers went on strike in September. Labor and management couldn’t come to an agreement about how to split the proceeds from producing automobiles. This is such a pivotal...
Like many people during the pandemic, I decided to pick up a new hobby. With basically everything shut down, and the outdoors being one of the only relatively safe spaces available to us, my quest...
There’s been an interesting discrepancy between the stock market performances of U.S.-listed large vs. small-cap companies in 2023. The S&P 500, which comprises the largest 500 companies listed in...
Long-term investment horizons are often talked about, but not always practiced. For most clients, investment goals are measured in years (or maybe even decades). But many investment professionals...
Our investment philosophy follows a fundamental belief — the stock market functions much like the classic jelly-bean-counting experiment. That might sound strange, but hear me out:
Risk management often carries the reputation of being “command and control.” Is it possible for institutional-class risk management to exist in a culture of freedom and responsibility?
With a large reversal in factor returns over the last two years, we’re hearing this question a lot: Can active management deliver outperformance that isn’t dependent on systematic factors?
Shrewd investors often start out with long-term financial plans designed to meet their future needs — things like saving for college, retirement, etc. But sticking with the long-term plan becomes...
Investment Holding Profile: FLEX Ltd. With the Fed making headlines again, it's easy to get caught up in the extreme short-term market volatility. But it’s important to remember that when you buy a...
Investment Holding Profile: FTI Consulting (FCN) It’s easy to get caught up in the extreme headlines of short-term market volatility. But it’s important to remember that when you buy a stock, you...
It’s easy to get caught up in the extreme headlines of short-term market volatility. But it’s important to remember that when you buy a stock, you don’t own a ticker, you own a piece of a business....
