The MercadoLibre Paradox
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Over the past five years, MercadoLibre has grown both revenue and profit dramatically — yet its stock price has gone nowhere. Could this be an opportunity?
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Insights Blog
News, insights and thought leadership from the City Different team.
The MercadoLibre Paradox
What Investing Can Teach Us About March Madness
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We've officially entered my absolute favorite time of the sports calendar year. As millions of others around the country have done this past week, I sat down to fill out my bracket for the annual Van...
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Are Treasuries Still Safe?
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Since April, I've had a lot of conversations about whether Treasuries are still a viable safe haven investment. After “Liberation Day,” 10-year Treasuries sold off by ~50 basis points, creating a...
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The Morning Jerry Investor
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One of my favorite Seinfeld standup routines compared “Morning Jerry” or “Nighttime Jerry.” Well-rested Morning Jerry was rational and responsible; he made decisions that benefitted himself in the...
One Portfolio or Two?
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Why We Believe SMID Cap Core Can Beat Separate Small & Mid Allocations Many investors instinctively split their equity sleeve into a “small-cap fund” and a “mid-cap fund,” assuming that...
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Popping Tags
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At dinner the other night, my youngest daughter asked what I actually do all day in my office. I work from home pretty often, so from her perspective, I just disappear behind a closed door for hours...
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Hug an Economist
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Connor and I both majored in economics. We spent four years steeped in macro theory, poring over models of trade, labor, and monetary policy. Since then, we’ve found… let’s say, limited use for most...
When Lower Beta Still Outperforms
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There’s always a case for owning small and mid-cap U.S. stocks… but right now, it’s hard to ignore just how compelling that case has become. Small and mid-cap U.S. stocks are currently trading at a...
The Dangers of Zero-Sum Thinking
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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...
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Learning to Love Binary Outcomes
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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....
The Deep Seek AI Shockwave
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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...
The Last 10%
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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...
Goldman’s Bearish Prediction
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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...
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How active is your fund manager, really?
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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...
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Long Term Investing—A Walk in the Park
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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):...
AI HYPErinflation
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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...
Hidden Value Stocks Feature
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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....
What Easter egg hunts can teach us about investing
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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...
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Investing Tips from Beer-League Hockey
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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...
Decrease Volatility by Embracing it
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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...
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Helping Nonprofits Turn Profits
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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...
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Henry Ford, Labor Strikes, and Investing
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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...
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Grippy Mountain Bike Shoes
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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...
Small-cap, large-cap, index funds, oh my!
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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...
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The Power of Long Term Investing
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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...
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The Wisdom of Crowds
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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:
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Risk Management
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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?