News, insights and thought leadership from the City Different team.
Everywhere you look right now, headlines seem dour: the dollar is weakening, inflation is simmering, geopolitics are rocky (at best)... it’s enough to worry even seasoned investors. But there’s...
I’ve been feeling uneasy about financial markets lately… not because I think we’re headed for a carbon copy of 2008, but because a few old patterns are starting to bubble back up. Not in the same...
There’s a line from the movie The Last Boy Scout that’s always stuck with me: "Water's wet, the sky is blue..." (gunna add my own spin on it here) ... and market risks, Jimmy, they’re out there and...
Everywhere you look right now, headlines seem dour: the dollar is weakening, inflation is simmering, geopolitics are rocky (at best)... it’s enough to worry even seasoned investors. But there’s...
In July, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). The name sounds like it was a placeholder until they came up with something better… then just forgot to rename it before launch, but...
I’ve been feeling uneasy about financial markets lately… not because I think we’re headed for a carbon copy of 2008, but because a few old patterns are starting to bubble back up. Not in the same...
There’s a line from the movie The Last Boy Scout that’s always stuck with me: "Water's wet, the sky is blue..." (gunna add my own spin on it here) ... and market risks, Jimmy, they’re out there and...
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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...
I’ve worked in this industry for 25 years at this point. I’ve seen trends come and go, asset classes boom and bust, and countless firms try to differentiate themselves on everything from process to...
Why we focus on ‘total return’ (and what that means for your portfolio) When evaluating the performance of our strategies from our fixed income desk, we focus on total return. In our view, it’s the...
Open the Wall Street Journal today (or yesterday… or the day before…) and you’ll find some breathless headline about how AI is transforming the global economy. That’s not wrong, necessarily… but it’s...
I’ve been in this business for almost 25 years. And I’ve seen the same thing happen over and over again: firms get big, add layers, professionalize everything to death… and in the process, completely...
Jong recently traveled to the UK with his family over Easter. And because he can never stop thinking about investing, below he describes how a trip that started out as a soccer fan’s pilgrimage to...
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...
Tariffs: The Illusion of a Quick Fix in a Complex Global Economy Tariffs are one of those ideas that sound simple enough on paper: we tax imported stuff... that makes domestic products more...
Alternative investments are having a moment... but is the hype justified? In this candid conversation, Chris Ryon (co-founder of City Different Investments and half of our fixed income desk) sits...
“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...
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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....
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So you wanna sell your business. As you can probably imagine, there’s a lot of steps between that thought and executing on it. To that end, we previously published a post outlining the 6 steps to...
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...
If you’ve ever bought or sold a business (or are just a follower of publicly announced mergers and acquisitions), you’ve likely heard the term “rollover equity." Rollover equity is basically any...
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...
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Every few years, it seems like the municipal bond market can’t resist a good scare story. This time, it’s the potential for Congress to alter the tax-exempt status of muni bonds — an idea making the...
Explaining Wednesday’s complete market route. All markets, be they equity or fixed income, took a proverbial kick in the shorts on Wednesday. The S&P 500 index finished the day 178.45 points lower...
