Investing

How a Protective Options Collar Cushioned a Loss in Korean Stock Fund EWY

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

After being convinced by a series of favorable articles, I bought a few shares last month of the EWY fund, which holds shares of major South Korean companies. The narrative seemed compelling: the vast production of compute processing chips for AI has led to a structural supply shortage of fast memory chips. South Korean firms excel in making these chips, and so high, growing profits seemed assured. What could possibly go wrong?

What I didn’t know was that thousands of other retail investors were thinking the exact same thing, and hence had bid the price of EWY up to possibly unreasonable levels. Somehow, my bullish analysts missed that point. In particular, the South Korean market is driven by an unusually high level of margin trading, where investors borrow money on margin to buy shares. A market drop leads to margin calls, which leads to forced selling, which really crashes prices.

The other thing I did not know was that, two days after my purchase, the attacks on Iran would commence. Oops. Among other things, this would drive up the world price of oil, which impacts energy importers like South Korea. This seems to have been the trigger for the sharp stock drop.

Here is the six-month price chart for EWY:

As it happened, I bought pretty much at the top, and as of Monday midday when I am writing this, EWY was down about 17%. That doesn’t look like much of a drop on the chart, because of the long run-up to this point, but it is an unpleasant development if you just bought in two weeks ago.

Fortunately, when I bought the EWY shares, I set up a protective options collar, since this was not a high conviction buy. First, I bought a put with a strike price about 7% below my purchase price, which would limit my maximum loss on the EWY shares to 7%. A problem is that this put cost serious money (about 11% of the share price), so my maximum loss could actually be 7% plus 11% = 18%. Therefore, I offset nearly all the cost of the put by selling a call with a strike price about 17% above the current EWY share price. That meant that I could profit from a rise in EWY share price by up to 17%, while being protected against a drop of more than 7%. That seemed like a favorable asymmetry (7% max loss vs 17% max gain).

This arrangement (buying a protective put to limit downside, financed by selling a call which limits upside) is called an options “collar”. I’d rather accept a limited upside than have to worry about doing clever trading to mitigate a big loss.

As of Monday, my collar was working well to protect the overall position. As might be expected, the value of my put increased, with the drop in EWY share price. But also, the value of my call decreased, which further helps me, since I am short that call. The net result was that about 75% of the loss in the stock price was compensated by the changes in values of the two options.

This is just a small, experimental position, but it was nice to see practical outcomes line up with theory.

Disclaimer: As usual, nothing here should be considered advice to buy or sell any security.

Ricardian Equivalence: Reasonable Assumption #2

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

There are several requirements for Ricardian Equivalence:

  1. Individuals or their families act as infinitely lived agents.
  2. All governments and agents can borrow and lend at a single rate.
  3. The path of government expenditures is independent of financing choices

Assumption 2) appears patently absurd on its face. I certainly cannot borrow at the same interest rate that the US Treasury can. QED. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The yield on 1-year US treasuries is 3.58%. I can’t borrow at that rate… Or can I?

Let’s do some casuistry.

What is a loan?

It’s a contract that:

  • Provides the borrower with access to spending
  • with or without collateral
  • with a promise to repay the lender at defined times, usually with interest.

So, when you borrow $5 from a friend and pay it back on the same day, it’s a loan. The contract is verbal, there is no collateral, the repayment time is ‘soon’ with flexibility, and the interest rate is zero.

A mortgage is a collateralized loan. You borrow from a bank, make monthly payments for the term of the loan, and accrue interest on the principal. The contract is written, the house or a portion of its value is the collateral, and the interest rate is positive.

What about a Pawnshop loan? Most of us are probably unfamiliar with these. In this circumstance, a person has valuable non-assets that and the pawnshop has money.  They engage in a contractual asset swap. The borrower lends the non-money asset to the pawnshop as collateral and borrows money from the pawnshop. The pawnshop borrows the non-money asset and lends the money to the borrower. The borrower can use the money as they please, but the pawnshop can not use the non-money asset – they can simply hold it. They collect interest in order to cover their opportunity costs.

One outcome is that the borrower repays the loan and interest by the maturity date and reclaims their non-money asset. Another outcome is that the borrower retains the option to default without any further obligation. But they lose the right to reclaim their property according to the repayment terms. If the borrower exercises the option to default, then the pawnshop acquires full rights to the non-money asset. The pawnshop often resells the asset at a profit. The profit is relatively reliable because the illiquidity of the non-money asset allows the pawnshop to lend much less than its retail value. That illiquidity is also why the borrower is willing to accept the terms.

If we accept that the pawnshop contract is a loan, which is just a collateralized loan with a mostly standard default option, then get ready for this.

Continue reading →

Iran on Markets, Markets on Iran

James BaileyLeave a comment

We’re bombing Iran, and Iran is now bombing most of its neighbors. Oil prices are up ~20% since the bombing began last weekend, and stocks are down.

Iranian “Supreme Leader” Khamenei is now dead. Prediction markets sort of saw this coming; I mentioned here a month ago that markets thought it more likely than not that Khamenei would be “out of office” this year.1

Real-money US-regulated exchanges can’t directly cover the war, but others can and do, such as the international Polymarket:

Polymarket’s argument for why they offer these markets

This market shows that regime change is likely, but will take time- a 51% chance by the end of the year, but only a 13% chance by the end of the month.

How would this be achieved? Markets see a 60% chance that there will be US troops in Iran this year, though this market could be triggered by just a few special forces operators, or by troops visiting for humanitarian purposes after domestically-driven regime change. There will likely be a US-Iran ceasefire by the end of May. It’s not clear at all who will be running Iran at the end of the year:

Iran is far from the only country whose future leadership is unclear. Last month I noted that the current leaders of Britain, Hungary, and Cuba would likely be out of office by year end. These are all now looking even more likely than they did a month ago:

So I’ll repeat:

Myself, I find most of these market odds to be high, and I’m tempted to make the “nothing ever happens” trade and bet that everyone stays in office. But even if all these markets are 10pp high, it still implies quite an eventful year ahead. Prepare accordingly.

  1. US-regulated exchanges can’t offer markets on death. Kalshi’s rules stated that if Khamenei died, the market would refund everyone at current prices rather than paying as if he were “out of office”. When he died many people got mad at Kalshi- some who had bet he’d be “out of office” and were mad that they weren’t paid at 100%, others that Kalshi was offering something too close to a death market- “how else would he lose power” (even though Maduro and Assad provide clear recent examples) ↩︎

My First Exit

James BaileyLeave a comment

I invested in my first private company in 2022; my first opportunity to cash out of a private investment came this year when Our Bond did an IPO, now trading on Nasdaq as OBAI.

I’m happy to get a profitable exit less than 4 years after my first investment, given that I’m investing in early-stage companies. Venture funds tend to run for 10 years to give their companies time to IPO or get acquired, and WeFunder (the private investment platform I used) says that “On average, companies on Wefunder that earn a return take around 7 years to do so.” The speed here is especially striking given that I didn’t invest in Our Bond itself until April 2025.

Most private companies that raise money from individual investors are very early stage, what venture capitalists would call “pre-seed” or “seed-stage” companies looking for angel investors. Later-stage companies often find it simpler to raise their later stages (Series B, et c) from a few large institutional investors. But a few choose to do “community rounds” and allow individuals to invest later. This is what Our Bond did right before their IPO, allowing me to exit in less than a year.

This helps calm my biggest concern with equity crowdfunding- adverse selection:

The companies themselves have a better idea of how well they are doing, and the best ones might not bother with equity crowdfunding; they could probably raise more money with less hassle by going to venture funds or accredited angel investors.

My guess is that the reason some good companies bother with this is marketing. Why did Substack bother raising $7.8 million from 6000 small investors on WeFunder in 2023, when they probably could have got that much from a single VC firm like A16Z? They got the chance to explain how great their company and product is to an interested audience, and to give thousands of investors an incentive to promote the company. Getting one big check from VCs is simpler, but it doesn’t directly promote your product in the same way.

All this is enough to convince me that the equity crowdfunding model enabled by the 2012 JOBS Act will continue to grow.

Still, things could have easily gone better for me, as these markets are clearly inefficient and have complexities I’m still learning to navigate. Profitability is not just about choosing the right companies to invest in, but about managing exits. I expected the typical IPO roadshow would give me months of heads-up, but Our Bond surprised its investors with a direct listing. The first thing I heard about the IPO was a February 4th email from “VStockTransfer” that I thought was a scam at first, since it was a 3rd-party company I’d never heard of asking me to pay them money to access my shares. But Our Bond confirmed it was real- VStockTransfer was the custodian for the private shares, and charges $120 to “DRS transfer” them to a brokerage of your choice where they can be sold.

I submitted the request to move the shares to Schwab the same day, but Schwab estimated it would take a week to move them. Neither Schwab nor VStockTransfer ever sent me a notification that the shares had been transferred, and by the time I noticed they had moved a week later, the stock price had fallen dramatically:

As I write this on February 18th, the OBAI price represents a 1.3x return on the price I invested in the private company at last April. When I was first able to sell some stock on February 11th, the price represented a 3x return; if I’d been able to sell right away on the 4th without waiting for the brokerage transfer process, it would have been a 10x return.

By the Efficient Market Hypothesis this timing shouldn’t be so critical, but I knew there would be a rush for the exits as lots of private investors would want to unload their shares at the first opportunity, an opportunity some would have waited years for. Sometimes old-fashioned supply and demand analysis is a better guide to markets than the EMH: demand for OBAI stock had no big reason to change in February, but freely floating supply saw a big increase as private shares got unlocked and moved to brokerages.

Getting a 10x return vs a 1.3x return on one of your winners is the difference between a great early investor and a bad one. I always thought such differences would be driven by who picks the best companies to invest in, but at least in this case it could be driven by who is fastest on the draw with brokerage transfers.

If I ever find myself holding shares in another company that does a direct listing, I’ll be doing whatever I can to make sure the transfer goes as fast as possible (pick the fastest brokerage, check on the transfer status every day, et c). This process also seems like one reason to do fewer, larger private investments- a fixed $120 transfer fee is a big deal if the initial investment was in the low hundreds but wouldn’t matter much for a larger one.

Being accredited would help there, allowing access to additional later-stage, less-risky companies. But I’ll call OBAI a win for equity crowdfunding, and a big win for asset pricing theories based on liquidity and flows over efficient estimation of the present discounted value of future cashflows.

Disclaimer: I still hold some OBAI

Broad Slump in Tech and Other Stocks: Fear Over AI Disruption Replaces AI Euphoria

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Tech stocks (e.g. QQQ) roared up and up and up for most of 2023-2025, more than doubling in those three years. A big driving narrative was how AI was going to make everything amazing – productivity (and presumably profits) would soar, and robust investments in computing capacity (chips and buildings), and electric power infrastructure buildout, would goose the whole economy.

Will the Enormous AI Capex Spending Really Pay Off?

But in the past few months, a different narrative seems to have taken hold. Now the buzz is “the dark side of AI”. First, there is growing angst among investors over how much money the Big Tech hyperscalers (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, plus Oracle) are pouring into AI-related capital investments. These five firms alone are projected to spend over $0.6 trillion (!) in 2026. When some of this companies announced greater than expected spends in recent earning calls, analysts threw up all over their balance sheets. These are just eye-watering amounts, and investors have gotten a little wobbly in their support. These spends have an immediate effect on cash flow, driving it in some cases to around zero. And the depreciation on all that capex will come back to bite GAAP earnings in the coming years, driving nominal price/earnings even higher.

The critical question here is whether all that capex will pay out with mushrooming earnings three or four years down the road, or is the life blood of these companies just being flushed down the drain?  This is viewed as an existential arms race: benefits are not guaranteed for this big spend, but if you don’t do this spending, you will definitely get left behind. Firms like Amazon have a long history of investing for years at little profit, in order to achieve some ultimately profitable, wide-moat quasi-monopoly status.  If one AI program can manage to edge out everyone else, it could become the default application, like Amazon for online shopping or Google/YouTube for search and videos. The One AI could in fact rule us all.

Many Companies May Get Disrupted By AI

We wrote last week on the crash in enterprise software stocks like Salesforce and ServiceNow (“SaaSpocalypse”). The fear is that cheaper AI programs can do what these expensive services do for managing corporate data. The fear is now spreading more broadly (“AI Scare Trade”);  investors are rotating out of many firms with high-fee, labor-driven service models seen as susceptible to AI disruption. Here are two representative examples:

  • Wealth management companies Charles Schwab and Raymond James dropped 10% and 8% last week after a tech startup announced an AI-driven tax planning tool that could customize strategies for clients
  • Freight logistics firms C.H. Robinson and Universal Logistics fell 11% and 9% after some little AI outfit announced freight handling automation software

These AI disruption scenarios have been known for a long time as possibilities, but in the present mood, each new actual, specific case is feeding the melancholy narrative.

All is not doom and gloom here, as investors flee software companies they are embracing old-fashioned makers of consumer goods and other “stuff”:

The narrative last week was very clearly that “physical” was a better bet than “digital.” Physical goods and resources can’t be replaced by AI like digital goods and services can be at an alarming rate

As I write this (Monday), U.S. markets are closed for the holiday. We will see in the coming week whether fear or greed will have the upper hand.

SaaSmageddon: Will AI Eat the Software Business?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A big narrative for the past fifteen years has been that “software is eating the world.” This described a transformative shift where digital software companies disrupted traditional industries, such as retail, transportation, entertainment and finance, by leveraging cloud computing, mobile technology, and scalable platforms. This prophecy has largely come true, with companies like Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb redefining entire sectors. Who takes a taxi anymore?

However, the narrative is now evolving. As generative AI advances, a new phase is emerging: “AI is eating software.”  Analysts predict that AI will replace traditional software applications by enabling natural language interfaces and autonomous agents that perform complex tasks without needing specialized tools. This shift threatens the $200 billion SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) industry, as AI reduces the need for dedicated software platforms and automates workflows previously reliant on human input. 

A recent jolt here has been the January 30 release by Anthropic of plug-in modules for Claude, which allow a relatively untrained user to enter plain English commands (“vibe coding”) that direct Claude to perform role-specific tasks like contract review, financial modeling, CRM integration, and campaign drafting.  (CRM integration is the process of connecting a Customer Relationship Management system with other business applications, such as marketing automation, ERP, e-commerce, accounting, and customer service platforms.)

That means Claude is doing some serious heavy lifting here. Currently, companies pay big bucks yearly to “enterprise software” firms like SAP and ServiceNow (NOW) and Salesforce to come in and integrate all their corporate data storage and flows. This must-have service is viewed as really hard to do, requiring highly trained specialists and proprietary software tools. Hence, high profit margins for these enterprise software firms.

 Until recently, these firms been darlings of the stock market. For instance, as of June, 2025, NOW was up nearly 2000% over the past ten years. Imagine putting $20,000 into NOW in 2015, and seeing it mushroom to nearly $400,000.  (AI tells me that $400,000 would currently buy you a “used yacht in the 40 to 50-foot range.”)

With the threat of AI, and probably with some general profit-taking in the overheated tech sector, the share price of these firms has plummeted. Here is a six-month chart for NOW:

Source: Seeking Alpha

NOW is down around 40% in the past six months. Most analysts seem positive, however, that this is a market overreaction. A key value-add of an enterprise software firm is the custody of the data itself, in various secure and tailored databases, and that seems to be something that an external AI program cannot replace, at least for now. The capability to pull data out and crunch it (which AI is offering) it is kind of icing on the cake.

Firms like NOW are adjusting to the new narrative, by offering pay-per-usage, as an alternative to pay-per-user (“seats”). But this does not seem to be hurting their revenues. These firms claim that they can harness the power of AI (either generic AI or their own software) to do pretty much everything that AI claims for itself. Earnings of these firms do not seem to be slowing down.

With the recent stock price crash, the P/E for NOW is around 24, with a projected earnings growth rate of around 25% per year. Compared to, say, Walmart with a P/E of 45 and a projected growth rate of around 10%, NOW looks pretty cheap to me at the moment.

(Disclosure: I just bought some NOW. Time will tell if that was wise.)

Usual disclaimer: Nothing here should be considered advice to buy or sell any security.

After the Crash: Silver Clawing Back Up After Epic Bust Last Week

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A month ago (red arrow in 5-year chart below), I noticed that the price of silver was starting into a parabolic rise pattern. That is typical of speculative bubbles. Those bubbles usually end in a bust. Also, the rise in silver price seemed to be mainly driven by retail speculators, fueled by half-baked narratives rather than physical reality.

Five-year chart of silver prices $/oz, per Trading View

So I wrote a blog post here last month warning of a bubble, and sold about a quarter of my silver holdings. (I also initiated some protective options but that’s another story for another time.) I then felt pretty foolish for the next four weeks, as silver prices went up and up and up, a good 40% percent over the point I initially thought it was a bubble. Maybe I was wrong, or maybe the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, per J. M. Keynes.

When the crash finally came, it was truly epic. Below is a one-month chart of silver price. The two red lines show silver price at the close of regular trading on Thursday, January 29 (115.5 $/oz), and at the close of trading on Friday, January 30 (84.6 $/oz):

This is a drop of nearly 30% in one day, which is a mind-boggling move for a major commodity. Gold got dragged down, too:

These aren’t normal moves. Over roughly the past 25+ years (through 2025), gold’s price has changed by about 0.8% per day on average (in absolute percentage terms). Silver, being more volatile, has averaged around 1.4–1.5% per day. If you’re scoring at home, that’s about a 13 Sigma move for Gold and 22 Sigma move for Silver! You’re witnessing something that shouldn’t happen more than once in several lifetimes…statistically speaking. Yet here we are.

After the fact, a number of causes for the crash were proposed:

  • The nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair.  Warsh is perceived as a hawkish policymaker, leading investors to expect tighter monetary policy, higher interest rates, and a stronger U.S. dollar—all of which reduce the appeal of non-yielding assets like silver. 
  • Aggressive profit-taking after silver surged over 40% year-to-date and hit record highs near $121 per ounce. 
  • Leveraged positions in silver futures were rapidly unwound as prices broke key technical levels, triggering stop-loss orders and margin calls. 
  • CME margin hikes (up to 36% for silver futures) increased trading costs, forcing traders to cut exposure and accelerating the sell-off. 
  • Extreme speculation among Chinese investors, leading the Chinese government to clamp down on speculative trading. (And presumably Chinese solar panel manufacturers have been complaining to the government about high costs for silver components).

What happens next?

Silver kept falling to a low of 72.9 $/oz in the wee hours of February 2, a drop of 40% percent from the high of 120.8 on Jan 26. However, it looks to my amateur eyes like the silver bubble is not really tamed yet. For all the drama of a 22-sigma crash one day crash, about all that did was erase one months’ worth of speculative gains. The charts above are showing that silver is clawing its way right back up again.  It is very roughly on the trend line of the past six months, if one excludes the monster surge in the month of January.

There is a saying among commodities traders, that the cure for high prices is high prices. This means that over time, there will be adjustments that will bring down prices. In the case of silver, that will include figuring out ways to use less of it, including recycling and substitution of other metals like copper and aluminum. However, my guess is that the silver bulls feel vindicated by the price action so far, and will keep on buying at least for now.

Disclaimer: As usual, nothing here should be regarded as advice to buy or sell any security.

The Wealth Ladder

James BaileyLeave a comment

The Wealth Ladder is a 2025 personal finance book from data blogger Nick Maggiulli. The core idea is good: that the best financial strategies will be different based on your current wealth level. Maggiulli divides people into 6 net worth levels based on orders of magnitude, from less than $10K to over $100M. The middle of the book has separate chapters with advice for people in each level, so a book that is already a fairly quick and easy read as a whole could be even quicker if you skipped the chapters about levels other than your own.

The beginning of the book tries to develop some simple rules phrased in a way that they can apply across every level, because they are based on a percentage of your net worth. I like the idea but don’t think it really worked. His “1% Rule” says you should only accept an opportunity to earn money if it will increase your net worth by at least 1%. But in practice, whether an earning opportunity is worth your time depends less on how many absolute dollars in generates as a % of your net worth, and more on how many $ per hour it generates. The “0.01% Rule” (don’t worry about spending money on anything that costs less than 0.01% of your net worth) is better. But whether it is a good rule for you will depend on your age and income.

In short, while tailoring his advice in 6 different ways for the 6 wealth levels of his ladder is an improvement on one-size-fits all personal finance books, even this much tailoring isn’t enough. Having a $1 million net worth is normal for a household in their 60s but would be exceptional for one in their 20’s; and vice-versa for a household with under $10k net worth. Chapter 10 explains the data on this well, but it kind of undermines the ideas of the previous chapters. Households with the same net worth should be making very different decisions in their 20s vs 60s.

The strongest part of the book is the use of data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to show how people differ by wealth level and how people move from one level to another. For instance, he shows that the poor have most of their wealth in cash and vehicles; the middle class in homes; the wealthy in retirement accounts and stocks; the very rich in private businesses. Americans tend to climb the wealth ladder slowly but steadily; over 10 years they are twice as likely to move up the ladder as to move down; over 20 years, 3 times as likely. The median person who made it to one of the top 3 rings (i.e. the median millionaire) is in their 60s.

If you get ahold of a copy of the book it’s definitely worthwhile to flip through all the tables and figures, but I won’t be adding to to my short list of the best personal finance books. The core metaphor of the ladder carriers the implicit assumption that everyone should be trying to get to the top of the ladder. But if someone is satisfied with less than $10 million, why should they take on lots of time and effort and risk to start a business for a small chance to go over $100 million?

Continue reading →

Is the Silver Bubble Bursting?

Scott Buchanan3 Comments

This is a five-year chart of the silver ETF SLV:

By most standards, this pattern looks like we entered a bubble a few months ago: speculative froth, unjustified by fundamentals. Economic history is replete with such madness of crowds. It is accepted wisdom on The Street that these parabolic price rises seldom end well. I lost a few pesos buying into the great gold bubble of 2011. All sorts of justifications were given at the time by the gold bugs on why gold prices ought to just keep on rising, or at least reach a “permanently high plateau” (in the famous words of Irving Fisher, just before the 1929 crash). Well, gold then proceeded to go down and down and down, losing some 60% of its value, until the price in 2015 matched the price in 2009, before the great bubble of 2010-2011.

Today, similar justifications are proffered as to why silver is going to the moon. There is a long-standing deficit in supply vs. demand; it takes ten years for a new silver mine to get productive; China has started restricting exports; Samsung announced a breakthrough lithium battery that can charge in six minutes, but requires a kilogram of silver; AI infrastructure is eating all the silver. These narratives seem to feed on each other. As the silver price moved higher in the past month, out came yet wilder stories that ricochet around the internet at high speeds: the commodities exchanges have run out of physical silver to back the paper trades; and the persistent claim that “they” (shadowy paper traders, central banks, commodity exchanges, the deep state, etc.) are “suppressing” silver and gold prices by means of shorting (which makes no sense). Given this popular shorting myth, it was with great glee that the blogosphere breathlessly spread the bogus story that some “systematically important bank” was in the process of being liquidated because it got squeezed on its silver short position.

The extreme price action at the very end of December (discussed below) was like rocket fuel for these rumors. Having bought a little SLV myself so as to not feel like a fool if the silver rally did have legs, I spent a number of hours as 2025 turned to 2026 trying to sort all this out. Here are some findings.

First, as to  the medium term supply/demand issues, I refer the reader to a recent article on Seeking Alpha by James Foord. He shows a chart showing that silver demand is increasing, but slowly:

He also notes that as silver price increases, there is motivation for more recycling and substitution, to compensate. He concludes that the current price surge is not driven by fundamentals, but by paper speculation.

The last ten days or so have been a wild ride, which merits some explanation. Here is the last 30 days of SLV price action:

Silver prices were rising rapidly throughout the month, but then really popped during Christmas week, reaching a crescendo on Friday, Dec 26 (blue arrow), amid rumors of physical shortages on the Shanghai exchange. To cool the speculative mania, the COMEX abruptly raised the margin requirements on silver contracts by some 30%,  from $25,000 to $32,500, effective Monday, Dec 29. I think the exchange was trying to ensure that speculators could make good on their commitment, and the raise in margin requirement would help do that. (Note, the exchange is liable if some market participant fails to deliver as promised and goes BK).

Anyway, this move forced long speculators to either post more collatoral or to liquidate their positions, on short notice. Blam, the price of silver dropped a near record amount in one day (red arrow). For me, a little minnow caught in the middle of all this shark tank action, the key part is what came after this forced decline. Was the bubble punctured for good? Should I hold or fold?

As shown above, the price has traded in a range for the past week, with violent daily moves. Zooming out to the a one-year view, it looks like the upward momentum has been halted for the moment, but it is unclear to me whether the bubble will deflate or continue for a while:

I sold about a quarter of my (small) SLV holding, hoping to buy back cheaper sometime in the coming year. Time will tell if that was a good move.

Usual disclaimer: Nothing here is advice to buy or sell any security.

P.S. Tuesday, Jan 6, 2025, after market close: I wrote this last night (Monday, Jan. 5) when silver was still rangebound. SLV was about $69, and spot silver about $76/oz. But silver ripped higher overnight, and kept going during the day, up nearly 7% at the close to new all time high. It looks like the bubble is alive and well, for now. Congrats to silver longs…

How Good Were 2025 Forecasts?

James Bailey1 Comment

Last January I shared a roundup of forecasts for the year from markets and professional economists. Were they any good? Here was their prediction for the US economy:

WSJ’s survey of economists reports that inflation expectations for 2025 were around 2% before the election, but are closer to 3% now. Their economists expect GDP growth slowing to 2%, unemployment ticking up slightly but staying in the low 4% range, with no recession. The basic message that 2025 will be a typical year for the US macroeconomy, but with inflation being slightly elevated, perhaps due to tariffs.

The verdicts (based on current data, which isn’t yet final for all of 2025):

Inflation: Nailed it exactly (2.7%)

GDP: We’re still waiting on Q4, but 2025 as a whole is on track to be a bit above the 2.0% forecast.

Unemployment: 4.6% as of November 2025, a bit above the 4.3% forecast

Recession: Didn’t happen, making the 22% chance forecast look fine

So the professional forecasters were probably a bit low on GDP and unemployment, but overall I’d say they had a good year. What about prediction markets?

For those who hope for DOGE to eliminate trillions in waste, or those who fear brutal austerity, the message from markets is that the huge deficits will continue, with the federal debt likely climbing to over $38 trillion by the end of the year. This is one reason markets see a 40% chance that the US credit rating gets downgraded this year.

While the US has only a 22% chance of a recession, China is currently at 48%, Britain at 80%, and Germany at 91%. The Fed probably cuts rates twice to around 4.0%.

Deficits: Nailed it, the federal debt is currently around $38.4 trillion.

US Credit Downgrade: It’s hard to score a prediction of a 40% chance of a binary event happening, but in any case Moodys downgraded the US’ credit rating in May, so that all three major agencies now rate it as not perfect.

The Fed: Cut rates a bit more than expected.

Foreign Recessions: China and Britain avoided recessions. Germany had a recession by the technical definition of Kalshi’s market, but not really in practice (FRED shows -0.2% Real GDP growth in Q2 followed by 0.00000% growth in Q3). Britain avoiding recession when markets showed an 80% chance was the biggest miss among the forecasts I highlighted.

Overall though, I’d say forecasters did fairly well in predicting how 2025 turned out, in spite of curveballs like the April tariff shock.

If you think the forecasters are no good and you can do better, you have more options than ever. Prediction markets are getting more questions and more liquidity if you’re up for putting your money where your mouth is; if you don’t want to put your own money at risk, there are forecasting contests with prizes for predicting 2026.