Author: YH Wong

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point to a range of 3.75%-4.00% which came as no surprise to investors. Fed funds futures had put the probability of a hike at better than 90%. Variable-rate borrowers will feel it relatively quickly while those with fixed-rate mortgages will be largely insulated from the…

There is an interesting thing about difficult people. They can be out of your life for hours, days or even years, yet somehow continue to occupy space in your mind. I have experienced this myself. Someone says something unpleasant, behaves badly or creates unnecessary problems, and long after the encounter is over, the conversation continues…

I asked a trader friend what he made of the repeated use of the word “temporary” by Trump officials. He laughed: “Temporary compared to what?” Fair point. Washington manages the narrative but the market manages the shortage. And it is the shortage that ultimately moves the price of diesel. Chevron CEO made a similar point…

Back from a trip. Back to the home office. “No proper office ah?” Heard that one plenty of times. Truth is I have been working from home for years long before it was fashionable and long before it needed an excuse. No traffic, no wasted hours getting anywhere, and when a client in New York…

The AI doomsday narrative is back and the calls for slowing things down are getting louder. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s blog post has clearly re-energised the debate. It has also prompted responses from some of the other major players, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman as well as Elon Musk and SpaceX who appear to agree that…

A PhD in finance corners you in a meeting and asks what I think of the efficient frontier and mean-variance optimization. Fair question. My honest answer is that the theory has earned its keep. It gave the industry a common language and a useful starting point. The problem starts when people begin treating the model…

I’m writing this at the train station, waiting for a train. Seemed like the right place for it where everyone around me looks faintly annoyed in a world where trains, on the whole, run better than they ever have in human history. Well, I told some friends this at dinner recently. They did not believe…

A recent article caught my attention and I thought I would share it here before some clients start coming to me with another “the dollar is collapsing” story. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund which manages around USD2.3 trillion is proposing to reduce government bonds from 70% to 50% of its bond allocation. Based on current holdings,…

I will be away over a couple of days, so the blog will be taking a short break. That said, I know myself well enough. If I find a quiet moment in an airport lounge, on a train, or somewhere in transit, I will probably end up writing something anyway. Old habits are hard to…

There is no shortage of reasons to be bearish at the moment. We have war, oil heading toward USD90, inflation still hanging around and, just to make things more interesting, the possibility of the Fed hiking rates. The Fed meets September 15–16 which means Friday’s inflation report comes at a pretty interesting time. The market…