(New York)

Is New York a bellwether of US real estate performance or is it an isolated enclave with no real relevance to the majority of the country? Hard to know, but if the former, then there is a lot to worry about. NY home sales are plummeting and just showed their worst decline since the Financial Crisis. Median sales prices in Q3 dropped 12% from the previous year, the sharpest drop since 2009. Average home value fell below $1m for the first time in four years.

FINSUM: In our opinion, this is idiosyncratic to New York. The city is seeing a huge flux of newly built apartments that are boosting inventory, and at the same time there is a new progressive mansion tax hurting demand.

(New York)

Well they might not have exactly said what is in this headline, but they might as well have. The bank is urging investors to rotate into European equities and out of US stocks, shifting the former to “overweight” and the latter to “neutral”. The bank argues that European stocks represent a much better value after their underperformance over the last year. They believe European stocks have a great deal of upside and look close to “outright cheap”.

FINSUM: European stocks do seem to have a lot more room to move higher, but they also have a giant morass staring them in the eye called Brexit.

(San Francisco)

2019’s IPOs could hardly have gone worse. If you take the average performance of the top IPOs this year—Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, and Chewy—you see a loss of 30%. That is phenomenally poor considering the hype of these companies coming into their IPOs. And what’s worse, that figure doesn’t even count the worst one of all—the failed WeWork IPO. However, one company which looks like it has suffered unnecessarily and deserves a long-term bet is Slack, the office communications technology. It has a highly sticky user base and is not burning cash at anything close to the rate of the others. Users report that it is almost impossible to stop using Slack’s service once your office has converted to it.

FINSUM: Slack is essentially trying to replace internal office email. That is a long road but there has been a lot of early success. It seems like it is worth of a long term bet, especially after selling off by 43% this year.

(New York)

Over the last few years, Goldman Sachs has undertaken one of the biggest bets in its history. It is trying to change its DNA as a pillar of high finance to become a broad financial services company that includes a large consumer-facing business. This led to the launch of its new business, Marcus, which is a consumer investment and lending unit. So far, the results have not been pretty. The bank has lost about $1.3 bn from investing in Marcus, and the default rates on its loans have been much higher than average, causing it to pull back from the space somewhat. It has also caused a lot of internal tension at the bank, with many senior partners leaving as the company completely overhauls itself. On the positive side, the bank has pulled in $50 bn in consumer deposits, which is a new source of funding it never thought it would have access to.

FINSUM: Goldman’s stock is still at 2014 levels. That says it all.

(New York)

The market has been very up and down lately. 50 bp losses or gains in a day feel pretty standard by now. But all of that may be wreaking havoc on investors’ nerves and portfolios. So what is the best way to hedge against the volatility? Most low volatility funds invest in stocks with a low beta, or those that change little compared to market movements. However, there may be an even better way to go about hedging. AGF has an ETF call BTAL, which not only buys low beta names, but also shorts high beta ones, all in equal weight with equal sector balance. In bouts of volatility, those shorts tend to really help gains in a way that holding long-only positions does not.

FINSUM: This seems like a smart approach that gives a sophisticated level of protection to investors. Worth a look.