Dr. John Rutledge is chief investment strategist of Safanad, a global principal investment house, and a member of its investment committee, directing investments in private equity, real estate, and marketable securities. Dr. Rutledge wrote the Business Strategy column for Forbes magazine for more than a decade and was a regular cast member of Forbes on Fox for many years. He is a senior research fellow and clinical full professor at Claremont Graduate University where he teaches complexity economics and finance and chairs dissertations. He is a member of the board of directors of several privately owned companies including Global School Management, Pansophic, Early Learning Academies, and Element Critical data centers. Dr. Rutledge has had a long career in private equity investing and served on many boards of directors. He is the founder of Rutledge Capital, a private equity investment firm focused on US middle market companies, where he led more than 30 leveraged buyouts.
Forget the Fed. That’s yesterday’s story. The next move will be down. Inflation rates will surprise on the downside. Structural flaws in the CPI overstate inflation. Spending growth will disappoint. COVID cash has now all been spent. Banks are closed to small business lending. Stock prices will more and more reflect company performance, not Fed policy. Investors need to understand intrinsic value, a company’s ability to generate growing, sustainable cash flow, and intrinsic risk, the factors that can shut off that cash flow. Bottom line: After 40 years of Fed-driven markets, investors need a new set of tools to identify and capture intrinsic value and monitor and control intrinsic risk. This talk will help investors master those tools.