The Sizemore Investment Letter

Last week, I announced to the world what a momentously bad investment I had just made (see “I just made a horrible investment”). Yes, dear reader, I was dragged kicking and screaming against my will into homeownership by my wife and two-year-old son.  My days of enjoying my Saturday mornings as an urban yuppy, drinking [...]

The February 13 issue of Barron’s made a statement that caught my eye:  Americans are paying down their mortgages.  (See “Paying Down the Mortgage.”) 50% of all refinancings now result in smaller loans that the previous mortgage.  Rather than using their homes as a virtual ATM machine, extracting equity (if you have any) to meet [...]

I read a fact this week that I never expected to read in my lifetime: “The Japanese government is expected to announce Wednesday that the country recorded its first annual trade deficit since 1980″ (see ” End of Era for Japan’s Exports “). Trade deficit? Japan? Japan’s economy has been a slow-motion train wreck for [...]

“Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda…. “For [...]

Charles Sizemore recently gave his thoughts on Whole Foods (NYSE: $WFM) t0 MarketWatch writer Matt  Andrejczak (see “Whole Foods Shareholders Big Payday“) Whole Foods, bolstered by stronger cash flows, is again paying a dividend, hiking it last month 40% to 56 cents a share on an annual basis. That’s less than a 1% yield but [...]

If you browsed the title of this article quickly, your eyes probably played a trick you.  Chances are good you saw “Western” instead of “Eastern.” It appears that the sentiment of moral decay in the West is a popular one.  Doing a Google search for “Decline of Western values” returned over 30 million hits.  Searching [...]

Experienced debaters are familiar with the Latin term reductio ad absurdum. This is a tactic in which your opponent’s proposition is disproven by taking it to a logical extreme—or reducing it to the absurd. For example, the statement that “Stocks always rise over the long run” or that “Over the long run, the economy will [...]

Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction. Germany, and particularly the former East Germany, has a tradition of public nudity that goes back to the early 1900s. Seven million Germans claim to regularly sunbathe in the buff, and there is even a formal organization—the German Free Body Culture—that boasts 500,000 registered nudists. Yet it appears [...]

The rating agency lowered Japan to “AA-,” citing Tokyo’s lack of a coherent strategy for dealing with its soaring debt, which now stands at 200% of GDP.

In January, the world watched in shock as a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor lit himself on fire to protest the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and sparked a revolution that spread across the Middle East like wildfire—today even threatening governments thought to be untouchable, like the Baathist Assad Regime in Syria. Shortly after the [...]