Is The 'Everything Bubble' Reaching Its Expiration Date?

Kevin Duffy and Michael Oliver return as guests on this week"s radio program.

As manager of the Baring Fund, Kevin has had a magnificent track record in protecting wealth from stock market crashes. With the current equity bull market among the longest on record and with legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio just now proclaiming the beginning of a bond bear market and predicting a stock market crash, we turn to Kevin for his thoughts about the direction of various markets in 2018 and to learn how the Bearing Fund is positioning its investors.

Michael, who had been calling for a slow equity market decline and has now joined the growing number of market pros who envision a sharp decline rather than a version of a more tame bear market, provides an update.

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Kevin Duffy entered the investing business in 1985 as an analyst and also as a strategist. He co-founded a money management firm in 1988 after the "87 crash and cut his short selling teeth during the late "90s tech bubble. After the bubble burst, he co-founded Bearing Asset Management in 2002.

Bearing warned about the housing and credit bubble of 2005-07, shorting stocks such as New Century Financial, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, MBIA, Countrywide Financial, Wachovia, and Citigroup. Kevin wrote extensively on the subject, including articles, "Alan, We Have a Problem," "Mr. Mozilo Goes to Washington," and "Honey, I Shrunk the Net Worth." The firm"s two long/short hedge funds profited from the unwind including Bearing Fund, the more aggressive of two, which gained over 100% in 2008 when most 401ks were turned into 201k accounts.

Michael Oliver entered the financial services industry in 1975 on the Futures side, joining E.F. Hutton"s International Commodity Division, NYC. He studied under David Johnson, head of Hutton"s Commodity Division and Chairman of the COMEX.In the 1980"s Oliver began to develop his own momentum-based method of technical analysis. In 1987 Oliver, along with his futures client accounts (Oliver had trading POA) technically anticipated and captured the Crash. Oliver began to realize that his emergent momentum-structural-based tools should be further developed into a full analytic methodology.

In 1992 he was asked by the Financial VP and head of Wachovia Bank"s Trust Department to provide soft dollar research to Wachovia. Within a year Oliver shifted from brokerage to full-time technical research. MSA has provided its proprietary technical research services to financial and asset management clients continually since 1992. Oliver is the author of The New Libertarianism: Anarcho-Capitalism.