Fixation with Rates: Unproductive and Unprofitable?
In recent years, investors have been increasingly fixated on interest rates. How high? How long? When is it coming down? Will it come down? Is this the new normal? The curve is inverted, and steepening! What does this mean? What does history say about rate cycles? And so on and so on. This is understandable. Interest rates play an outsized role in asset prices. When rates go up, asset prices go down, and vice versa. This is because an asset is worth all its future cash flows discounted to the present day. A higher interest rate means a higher discount rate, which in turn means a lower present-day value of these cash flows. If you can forecast rates correctly, you have a better grasp of the true worth of an asset.
