Having attracted only limited investor interest for over two decades after reaching a record in December 1989, Japanese stocks surged ahead last year in a rally that came very close – within 6% – to the earlier record in mid-January.

I’m going to start this multipart series about Cuba with a report of my personal visit to a region outside the Havana area. Readers will see why shortly. So, here’s Cuba Series, Part 1: Bay of Pigs.

It should have been no surprise that the FOMC decided at its first meeting of 2024 to hold rates constant. Its rationale was based upon a moderating but strong labor market, a low unemployment rate, an expanding economy, and a slowing inflation rate, but still above target.

Let’s begin this commentary with a hat tip to my friend Chris Whalen (Chairman, Whalen Global Advisors LLC, www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com), who sent out the following tweet about “gamma.” In it, Chris is quoting Nomura Secu

Hundreds of millions of dollars spent; thousands of hours of media time consumed; incessant political punditry from the usual TV sources interspersed with a constant flow of disinformation from the auto-bot manipulators (even robocall fake voices); and continuous poisonous hate messaging – all…

This is a brief overview of Cumberland Advisors’ thoughts on financial markets as we head into 2024. We are coming off an unusual 2023, which was helped by good bond and equity markets late in the year. One of our basic investment tenets is that markets revert to the mean over periods of time,…