Say A Little Prayer

Monthly Investment Outlook from Bill Gross

I’m not what you would call a “prayerful” type of guy. Even at 30,000 feet, when the air gets rough, I never invoke the “God” word, settling instead for promising myself that if I ever get back to terra firma, I will never fly again, which I promptly forget days or even hours later. It’s not that I’m a non-believer in prayer’s ultimate destination, but more of a cynical take on why the Lord would hand out party favors to everyone that asked, or to those that asked most intently.

…

Funny, too I think, about how I learned two different versions of the Lord’s Prayer: one – the Protestant litany – spoke to “forgiving our debts as we forgive our debtors”; the other – maybe a more traditional Catholic influenced version – substituted “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The differences never much bothered me as I prayed less and sinned more into my teenage years, but later I got to thinking about it as I entered the bond market and began to contemplate the odds of paying and being paid, or trespassing and being trespassed against with other people’s money. Given a chance, I thought I would infinitely prefer forgiving a trespasser as opposed to a debtor.

When Scary Headlines Don’t Scare – Climbing The Wall Of Complacency

From “Scary Headlines Don’t Deter Investors” by Bernard Condon, originally posted by Associated Press,

The U.S. economy is growing at a painfully slow pace. Greece still threatens the euro. Chinese stocks have just pulled out of a frightening free-fall. Big companies in the U.S. are struggling to boost profits.

You might think it’s been a rough year for investors, but it’s mostly been a smooth ride – and a profitable one.

Money is flowing into bonds issued by the riskiest of companies, home prices in some big U.S. cities are soaring, shares of technology companies are still near all-time highs – even after a drop this week – and auction houses are enjoying record sales of art. A Picasso painting sold at Christie’s for $179 million in May, the highest ever for an artwork at auction, prompting one dealer to exclaim, “I don’t really see an end to it.”

Major Money Manager Braces for Bond-Market Collapse

TCW Group Inc. is taking the possibility of a bond-market selloff seriously.

So seriously that the Los Angeles-based money manager, which oversees almost $140 billion of U.S. debt, has been accumulating more and more cash in its credit funds, with the proportion rising to the highest since the 2008 crisis.

“We never realize what the tipping point is until after it happens,” said Jerry Cudzil, TCW Group’s head of U.S. credit trading. “We’re as defensive as we’ve been since pre-crisis.”