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 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...
When we’re chatting with clients, we often get the same flavor of questions about bonds (we would bet if you have exposure to the bond market, you’ve wondered some of these as well…). So we wanted to...
Vanguard just dropped the hammer on ETF fees again, slashing its average expense ratio to a jaw-dropping 0.07%. That’s a big deal in an industry segment where “fees are one of the most important...
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...
Given Trump’s upcoming policy guidance, there are reasons to believe that inflation could soon be on the rise. This begs the question, “Are we in a temporary inflation lull? To answer that, let’s...
We believe that a strategic, actively managed approach to fixed income investing often outperforms the alternative. You might be familiar with active management when it comes to equities, but what...
Much as truly active equity investing can result in greater returns for investors (even net of fees), so too can active management of fixed income securities. We’re big believers in the power of...
City Different Investments is known for finding compelling opportunities that may lie off the beaten path of Wall Street. Last week we caught up with our intrepid portfolio manager Vin Walden, on the...
A decade ago, fixed income trade analysis was like a country club — very few people had access to it, the asymmetry of information was staggering, and so much of the market was effectively word of...
Vin Walden recently sat down with the Wall Street Transcript to discuss potential dangers lurking in the stock market. Find out which companies he thinks investors should avoid. Electric Cars and AI...
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....
Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) have grown from 3% of the total Municipal Market to approximately 23% market share in the last decade (as of 3/31/2023). Mutual funds, on the other hand, make up...
Size can have its advantages — when going with a bigger firm; you may be hoping to experience lower fees because of volume and scale. But, it can also leave many advisors feeling like a “drop in the...
“Don't fight the Fed” — it’s an adage for a reason, and it’s one we believe in. Why? Because history has mostly demonstrated the Federal Reserve, with its monetary policy tools, is overwhelmingly...
U.S. homeowners are facing the dual challenges of more frequent weather events as well as disappearing property insurance. One company has been steadfast in insuring coastal properties in Florida for...
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...
Serving Registered Independent Advisors (RIAs) is at the heart of what we do at CDI. Numerous RIA partners have come to us wanting to either incorporate or diversify their clients’ portfolios (more...
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...
“We can and we must reduce Russian LNG exports to phase them out completely.” -- EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson
Last week, the Fed announced that it would not raise the Fed Funds rate in September. By our way of thinking, though, they left the door open for future increases (data dependent). This left us...
We have long written about the two periods when the municipal bond market organically generates the most cash flow into the market — the January / February period and the June / July period. These...
Companies have been rethinking how they do business across industries, geographies, etc. Remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office, fractional executives, outsourcing, you name it. But we think a huge change...
