The hottest Asset allocation Substack posts right now

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A Flywheel of Chaos

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 30 implied HN points • 23 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The Federal Reserve is pursuing a modest, gradual expansion of its balance sheet so far, and a truly large round of monetary printing would likely mean multi‑trillion dollar measures rather than the current pace. This gradual path could be forced higher by major shocks like recession, financial war, or kinetic war.
  2. The war with Iran and the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz have already pushed energy prices up and raised the risk of sustained supply shocks, stagflation, and rising Treasury yields. If those energy and financial stresses cascade, they could drive much larger fiscal deficits and a bigger Fed balance sheet response.
  3. Given the elevated risk of stagflation and political/financial cascades, prioritizing scarce, high‑quality assets and commodities while holding cash equivalents makes sense; a three‑pillar approach (profitable equities, commodities/hard money, and cash) offers better balance than a simple 60/40 in this environment.

Top Links 1004 Hedge fund correlations. The great fashion reshuffle. Soviet rocket man and China in Myanmar.

Chartbook • 357 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Hedge funds are moving more in step with the stock market, which weakens their role as protection against big market crashes.
  2. The fashion industry is in the middle of a major reshuffle as brands, retailers, and supply chains reorganize in response to changing consumer habits and financial pressures.
  3. A Soviet-era ‘rocket man’ figure is linked to Chinese projects in Myanmar, illustrating how old Cold War expertise is being repurposed within modern Chinese strategic initiatives.

If Financials Fall, Does the Bull Market Follow?

Spilled Coffee • 24 implied HN points • 11 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The financial sector is now sending a clear warning that could precede a broader market pullback, and that signal feels important to watch.
  2. A technical breakdown first flagged on Feb 28 has continued to deteriorate, making the concern more urgent than before.
  3. The full, detailed analysis and updates are available only to paid subscribers, indicating deeper coverage behind a paywall.

One ETF Up 13% This Year And Another I Like

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 20 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. I’m watching two non‑U.S. investments: one is up about 13% this year versus roughly 1% for the S&P, and the other was added to reduce concentration risk and sharpen the thesis.
  2. The core idea is that U.S. stocks trade at very high valuations (around 40x earnings) while the rest of the world is much cheaper, so relative valuation could start to matter again.
  3. If we see dollar weakness, Fed easing, and modest capital rotation away from U.S. concentration, these non‑U.S. ETFs should benefit, and it’s likely still early to own them.

Valuations Don’t Matter When Money Is Fake

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 61 implied HN points • 19 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Central bank money printing and nonstop liquidity have decoupled prices from fundamentals, so extreme valuation multiples can persist because liquidity, not earnings, drives markets.
  2. That liquidity is uneven, concentrating in a handful of mega-cap firms that prop up indexes while most stocks and the real economy lag behind.
  3. Given these distortions, protecting wealth matters more than timing the market — diversify into sound money, real assets, and non-dollar exposure instead of relying on historical valuation limits.
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If I Had To Buy 4 Stocks Monday Morning...

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 25 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. A curated 26-stock portfolio is outperforming the S&P 500 by about 5% on an equal-weighted basis, which suggests the selection process is working.
  2. If forced to buy only four stocks, the approach would be three familiar names plus one new small position added recently.
  3. The four picks are chosen across different risk profiles and narratives to blend pessimism, durability, and long-term optionality.

Our Liquidity Addiction Continues

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 21 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The Fed has begun a modest, ongoing balance-sheet expansion—buying short-dated Treasuries to keep banks flush with reserves and control short-term rates—which is a "gradual print" that should be mildly supportive for asset prices and mildly dollar-negative.
  2. Severe shocks like a recession, a large-scale financial or kinetic conflict, or sudden foreign sell-offs could force much larger, faster Fed purchases measured in the trillions, while a change in Fed leadership might try to shrink the balance sheet but would only have limited, mostly technical effects.
  3. Japan’s rising bond yields are a real risk but not an immediate systemic collapse: the BOJ owns a large share of the debt and Japan has big FX reserves and a current-account surplus, so policymakers have tools (yield-curve control, reserve sales) to manage it; investors should favor high-quality, scarce assets and rebalance away from overheated areas.

"The End Of The Monetary Road": Larry Lepard On Gold, Silver & Bitcoin

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 32 implied HN points • 28 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The global monetary system looks like it's nearing a major breaking point, with charts pointing to a secular change and rising monetary chaos.
  2. Gold and silver have already made stratospheric moves, and investors who positioned early saw huge gains (one fund reported about 170% in 2025).
  3. These market signals are getting little mainstream attention but deserve close watching into 2026, especially for precious metals and Bitcoin as potential hedges.

Repost: Armed conflict investor survival guide

Klement on Investing • 6 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Don’t panic — most geopolitical shocks don’t hurt equity performance beyond a few weeks, so avoid rushing to sell and consider buying risky assets when they dip.
  2. Use a simple checklist before acting: ask whether infrastructure is damaged, whether inflation will stay high, and whether real interest rates will shift, since each outcome calls for different sector decisions.
  3. Only make major portfolio changes if the effects are persistent (more than a year) on inflation, earnings, or rates; short-term market fear is usually noise and a buying opportunity.

Dry Powder

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 25 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Keep significant dry powder—cash or short-term investments—so you can act quickly on big opportunities or cover emergencies; if possible aim for millions, but at minimum have enough (e.g., $100k+) to avoid forced selling.
  2. US equities look richly priced by several measures (market-cap-to-GDP, Shiller PE, and heavy tech concentration), which raises the odds of low or negative returns in the years ahead.
  3. Investor complacency and low volatility mean now is a time to be defensive and plan to buy optionality during market stress (and consider writing optionality when volatility spikes), using cash to take advantage of forced-selling opportunities.

The 1%

Market Sentiment • 589 implied HN points • 09 Apr 23
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Many millionaires invest their money wisely, not just through income.
  2. The top 1% of Americans own more stocks than the other 99%, highlighting the importance of investing in equities for wealth growth.
  3. Affluent retail investors typically have a long-term risk orientation with high equity exposure and minimal panic selling tendencies.

My Personal Investing Journey

Jay's Data Stream • 5 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Buy-and-hold only reliably works for broad index funds, because they spread risk across many companies; individual stocks or crypto can go to zero, so you can’t treat every asset the same.
  2. True diversification means different exposures, not just different labels — owning the S&P plus a bunch of U.S. tech bets is still concentrated; an automated, multi-asset portfolio with regular rebalancing helps you survive big drawdowns.
  3. Use clear rules and position sizing: keep a small YOLO bucket, only hold individual bets you would buy at today’s price, and pay attention to fees and fine print because small differences compound over time.

3 Fund Portfolio

Market Sentiment • 452 implied HN points • 19 Mar 23
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Successful investing comes down to diversification, low costs, and discipline.
  2. The 3-fund portfolio includes U.S. stocks, international stocks, and bonds to ensure balance and minimize risks.
  3. International diversification balances home country bias, while bonds provide stability during stock market downturns.

Portfolio Update

Spilled Coffee • 20 implied HN points • 20 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. A top investment conviction for 2026 is being doubled down.
  2. The move specifically involves one of the 'Mag 7' stocks, meaning a major tech position is being adjusted.
  3. The full portfolio update is behind a paywall and available only to paid subscribers.

Do emerging and frontier markets diversify?

Klement on Investing • 1 implied HN point • 03 Mar 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Correlations between developed, emerging, and frontier markets rise as the investor’s time horizon lengthens, so diversification benefits shrink over longer horizons.
  2. Despite higher long-run correlations, optimal minimum-variance portfolios still hold a meaningful share of emerging and frontier markets—typically around 20% or more—even at the longest horizon tested.
  3. Typical investor allocations to emerging markets (around 10–15%) are likely lower than the allocation suggested by these optimal portfolios, implying many investors may be underinvested.

The Damocles Sword of Asset Allocation

Lewis Enterprises • 235 implied HN points • 11 Oct 23
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The assumption of negative correlation between stocks and bonds is being challenged in asset management.
  2. Traditional portfolio strategies like 60/40 have faced challenges due to changing asset behavior.
  3. Investors may need to reconsider fixed asset allocations based on historical correlations to adapt to market changes.

Daily Chartbook #167

Daily Chartbook • 1493 implied HN points • 24 Mar 23
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. New home sales showed an increase for the third month in a row
  2. Truckload market is facing potential challenges with freight volumes
  3. US economic activity was below trend in February according to the Chicago Fed

Do HNWI get better advice?

Klement on Investing • 3 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Advised private-bank clients tend to have more diversified portfolios with less home bias, lower turnover, and lower volatility.
  2. Despite lower risk and fewer behavioral errors, advised portfolios often show lower average returns and higher fees, partly because advisers move money into expensive alternative funds.
  3. Adviser incentives can steer clients toward high-fee products that cut net performance, so getting advice isn’t a guarantee of better outcomes.

Optimism & Fear

Things I Didn't Learn in School • 117 implied HN points • 30 Jun 23
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. There are optimists and pessimists on Wall Street, correlating to equity and bond investors.
  2. Over time, optimists have been more right than wrong, especially in holding US stocks.
  3. A perfect investment portfolio combines the fears of bond investors with the optimism of equity investors.

The comeback of European growth stocks

Klement on Investing • 3 implied HN points • 28 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. European growth stocks are staging a comeback, with renewed investor interest in growth names across the region.
  2. Over shorter horizons of about one year, share prices are far more sensitive to changes in government bond yields than to earnings or valuation shifts.
  3. For near-term investors, movements in bond yields will often drive returns more than earnings improvements or valuation changes, so watching yields matters most.

Buybacks shouldn’t matter, but they do

Klement on Investing • 5 implied HN points • 06 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The textbook capital-allocation theory says buybacks and dividends are equivalent in a frictionless market, so buybacks should not change share prices.
  2. In practice buybacks do move prices — the impact depends on stock volatility and the share of daily trading bought back, so small daily buybacks repeated over time can produce large cumulative price gains.
  3. Buybacks force investor rebalancing (investors sell into the buyback then need to buy to restore allocations), which pushes the market higher, making buybacks an effective tool for lifting a weak share price.

How long is the long run?

Klement on Investing • 5 implied HN points • 17 Dec 25
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Over nearly a century U.S. small-cap stocks beat large caps on average, but that average hides very long stretches of underperformance that can last decades.
  2. Factors like value and size can stop working for longer than investors can stay invested, so multi-decade waits make them impractical for many investors.
  3. Academic evidence for factor outperformance can be sample-dependent and misleading, meaning results that look strong in one historical period may reverse in another.

2025 Portfolio Results

Subsack • 4 implied HN points • 04 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. The portfolio delivered strong returns (about 28% YTD) and beat the S&P by roughly 10%, with healthy CAGR and Sharpe, but remained closely tied to the market (beta ~1.05) and a tariff-driven drawdown lowered the Kelly %.
  2. Holdings are split into a risk-on sleeve of thematic growth baskets (AI, pharma, semiconductors, crypto, etc.) and a risk-off sleeve of low-volatility, high-dividend assets, rebalanced quarterly; position sizing uses Hierarchical Risk Parity with a denoised correlation matrix which improved outcomes versus other weighting methods.
  3. Planned improvements include moving to Interactive Brokers for broader market access, mining simple low-volatility/high-Sharpe strategies with VectorBT and probabilistic Sharpe analysis, and adding tools like earnings-call sentiment, options panels, and a bio-pharma catalyst strategy to enhance edge.

FOMO and the optimal portfolio size

Klement on Investing • 2 implied HN points • 12 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. Random global portfolios need hundreds of stocks (often 250–750) to meaningfully diversify stock-specific risk and narrow return outcomes, because a few big winners drive returns while many stocks fail.
  2. ESG-weighted portfolios converge even more slowly, so applying ESG selection typically increases the number of holdings required to stabilize volatility and returns.
  3. Concentrated portfolios still make sense for genuinely skilled active managers because concentration amplifies and reveals skill quickly; if managers are effectively random, broad indexing or very large portfolios are the better choice.

When Europe sneezes, Asia catches a cold

Klement on Investing • 1 implied HN point • 22 Jan 26
💰 Finance Asset allocation
  1. When Europe suffers a debt shock, international bond funds often sell assets abroad, so Asian bond markets get hit even if their fundamentals are fine.
  2. Fund managers sell Asian bonds much more aggressively than European peripheral bonds—Asian holdings fell about three times as much after Eurozone credit shocks.
  3. Liquid sovereign bonds are sold first, causing sovereign holdings to drop quickly and corporate holdings to fall later, leaving Asian bond portfolio weights roughly one percentage point lower after six months.