Presidium Partners

Inspiration for the day!

Interesting ideas!

Interesting article....timeless lessons.

With high tax rates in states like California, tax-free municipal bonds still make a lot of sense for generating high quality tax-fee income. The correction in November and December provided some good pricing as is the current environment with the potential of rising rates. The problem with municipal bonds is that most investors still don't know what they are paying for the bonds they buy. Their brokers hide the inside mark-up on the bond. Savvy investors know to ask what they are paying.

Life settlements has a very low correlation to the public equity and fixed-income markets. The standard deviation is very low (2+%) with a very high risk adjusted return. The Sharpe ratio is a 4.2 which is very high and basically says that the manager is taking very little risk/volatility to get an equity like return. With the Trump Rally people tend to lose sight of the risks of downside volatility. It has been a long time since the market has corrected but when it does these lower volatility asset classes maintain their steady returns. In 2015 with the S&P up slightly, these funds still maintained double digit returns. It is a protective trade and also a nice income surrogate vs. low yields in fixed-income