I’m headed in for carpal tunnel surgery today, so I might not be able to type my usual long missives for a little while… and that means you get your Friday File a day early. Hopefully the recovery will be quick and easy, as my doctor expects, and my fingers will be dancing on the keyboard with reckless abandon in a few days… but if you don’t hear as much from me for a week or two, that’s why.

So… what’s going on this week? Other than a market that remains obsessed with trying to figure out exactly when inflation will be really tamed, I should say — on that front nobody can know, of course, but we’re certainly all overreacting to the Fed’s guesstimates. Humans are excellent at drawing straight trend lines from whatever is happening at this minute into the future… it’s dealing with messy numbers that jump around every month that freaks us out, and that’s certainly how inflation looks these days. There’s something poetic about the world holding its breath while we wait for some economists to decide what last year’s milk prices might mean about next year’s rents. It’s nice to see bonds become a rational place to park some money again, after years when we had to ignore them, but maybe they’ll become downright exciting again if rates keep climbing.

I do have one meaningful purchase to share with you this week, the latest company to reach a “full allocation” in the Real Money Portfolio (for my philosophy about that, check out this Friday File from a few weeks ago — basically, I try to make sure I’ve invested no more than 4% of my equity money into any one company, with a few exceptions for stocks where I have an extreme level of confidence). That’s Keysight (KEYS), which I mentioned a couple weeks ago was tickling my “preferred buy” range after an earnings report that disappointed investors — they had their Investor Day this week, reassured me, and reached my buy price, so I’ve now maxed out my KEYS position. Here’s what I sent out as a Trade Note on Tuesday, in case you missed it:

Keysight (KEYS) hosted its Investor Day in NY today, and I remain impressed with their strategy and their consistently strong execution. The big press release headline from the presentation is that they raised their outlook, they ...