The big picture continues to be inscrutable. Inflation is coming down, quite clearly, and the Federal Reserve is still talking tough about making sure that it comes down much more before they think about cutting rates, especially with unemployment still near record lows. Employers still have tons of open jobs and can’t find employees… except on the coasts, where layoffs of high-salaried employees at big tech companies are grabbing the headlines. Europe is in a critical period as they live through winter without Russian natural gas, but, thanks to unseasonably warm weather and aggressive storage-filling over the past six months, European natural gas prices are now back down below where they were when Putin invaded Ukraine, helping to keep US natural gas prices low, too. China is reopening and will probably spur more demand for commodities and energy as a result, but also, after years of “Zero COVID” policies and low vaccination rates (and effectiveness), the Middle Kingdom could be the petri dish in which awful new strains of the COVID virus mutate and scare the heck out of everyone. We’ve got massive increases in military spending and aid to Ukraine, including now armored vehicles from the US and Germany adding to the Ukrainian defense forces, but also a signal from the House of Representatives, in the form of the Republican dispute over leadership, that they’re REALLY not going to be able to get anything done this year… which probably means we’ll have a government shutdown to look forward to at some point — maybe next Fall, when the debt ceiling gets breached again — and that’s typically bad news for the companies who depend on government contracts.

If you know what’s going to happen to interest rates or economic growth or energy prices or the Federal Government, then I salute you… for me, I’m keeping my focus tighter, on the companies that I can hope to understand, and on what I think those companies will be able to do over a long period of time. I’m not in a rush to make any big bets at the moment, and did not make any trades this week, but there are certainly some prices that look more appealing today than they have in a long time. So let’s see what wisdom we might glean about our Real Money Portfolio companies of late…

There’s been quite a bit of ...