INVESTING TRACK RECORD
Throughout its history, the Levy family has always invested based on the forecasts and analysis of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center.
The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center’s oldest client is the Levy family. Three generations of the Levy family have used the Profits Perspective for their own business and investment activities. Some highlights:
- 1917 to 1929: Jerome Levy uses the profits equation to successfully manage his wholesale goods business through numerous key shifts in the economy, including aggressive moves to acquire inventories in 1917, liquidate merchandise in 1920, and liquidate his business in 1929 ahead of the stock market collapse.
- Post World War II: Based on S Jay Levy’s insights from the Profits Perspective, Leon Levy goes to Wall Street with tremendous optimism about the U.S. economy’s prospects. When hiring members of Oppenheimer & Company’s research staff in the early 1950s, he makes it a rule not to hire anyone old enough to remember working during the depression because they would not be bold enough. Oppenheimer becomes a great Wall Street success story.
- Throughout the postwar era: S Jay Levy, heir to Jerome as family economist and forecaster, successfully speculates in the stock market, commodities, bonds, and interest rate futures and options, with 90% of his insights coming directly from his economic research.
- 1980s and early 1990s: Odyssey Partners (including Leon Levy, Jack Nash and others from Oppenheimer) capitalizes on major cyclical bond plays based entirely on Jay’s and his son David’s forecasts, setting firm records for profitability.
- 1991: David and Jay are serving on the Board of a not-for-profit organization financed by Leon Levy. David has been speculating in options on eurodollar futures, and Leon asks him to build and manage a $350,000 portfolio for the organization. The positions are liquidated a couple of years later with a value of over $9,000,000.
- 2003-2009: David predicts that the accelerating expansion will end with a severe financial mess and recession that will force the Fed to cut interest rates to the floor. He sets up the Levy Forecast® Fund in 2004 to capitalize on that move. The fund closed in March 2009, having produced a 500% net gain over the duration for its investors.
“I have followed the Levy forecasts for 45 years. If I had to make do with only one tool to help me succeed, it would be the insights of the Levy Forecasting Center.”
Brian F. Wruble, former Chief Investment Officer and Executive Vice President of Equitable Life; former CEO, the Delaware Group Mutual Funds“Mainstream economic theories are not adequately explaining consumer and government behavior in this cycle. Wall Street practitioners are thus turning to alternative theories, and the Levy-Kalecki formula—independently developed by New York physicist-entrepreneur Jerome Levy in 1914 and Polish economist Michal Kalecki in 1935 and then unified by American economist Hyman Minsky in the 1960s—is helping to better elucidate the relationship among debt, savings, and profits.”
Jon Markman, MSN Money“[T]he key determinant of [economic] system behavior remains the level of profits. [My] financial instability hypothesis incorporates the Kalecki-Levy view of profits, in which the structure of aggregate demand determines profits.”
Hyman Minsky, seminal 20th century economist whose financial instability hypothesis has gained popularity in the wake of the financial crises of recent years. Often overlooked by his admirers is that the Profits Perspective was at the core of his analysis.“[Jay and David Levy’s] predictions of the decline and fall of the economy have been right as rain. Father and son, they’ve been at this game a lot of years, and while not infallible (a quality restricted to popes and financial journalists), they have a truly extraordinary record of being right.”
Alan Abelson, Barron's“I have followed the work of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center for well over a decade and have found it a uniquely valuable and insightful resource. The Center's dual focus on the sources of profits and the effects of financial activity on the economy substantially differentiates the analysis from traditional Wall Street macroeconomic research. As an aid to me in anticipating economic events and formulating investment strategies in these turbulent times, it stands heads above any other research available.”
Chuck Clough, Chairman and CEO, Clough Capital Partners, LLC; former Chief Investment Strategist, Merrill Lynch“I learned to pay attention to the connections between economic theory and daily events by watching my father [Jerome Levy] investing according to his theories on the interplay of capital spending, profits, and the course of the economy... [L]ong after Dad died, I continued to turn to Jay, and then David as well, who have turned Dad’s ideas into a set of tools for making economic predictions.”
Leon Levy, former senior partner of Oppenheimer & Co.; founder of the Oppenheimer mutual fund empire; founding partner in Odyssey Partners