About

CapitalSpectator.com is a finance/investment/economics blog that’s edited by James Picerno, who’s also the director of analytics at The Milwaukee Company, a wealth management firm. CapitalSpectator.com focuses on macroeconomics, the business cycle and portfolio strategy (with an emphasis on asset allocation and related analytics).

CapitalSpectator.com has been published continuously since 2005.

Picerno is the author of Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return (Beta Publishing, 2018), Dynamic Asset Allocation: Modern Portfolio Theory Updated for the Smart Investor (Bloomberg Press, 2010) and Nowcasting The Business Cycle: A Practical Guide For Spotting Business Cycle Peaks (Beta Publishing, 2014). His articles on finance and economics have appeared in a variety of publications and news outlets over the years, including The Atlantic, Financial Advisor, BankRate.com, HorsesMouth.com, and Bloomberg Briefs: Economics, and the Saxo Group’s TradingFloor.com. In addition, Picerno publishes The US Business Cycle Risk Report, a weekly newsletter that quantitatively evaluates US recession risk in real time.

Picerno has been writing about investing and macroeconomics since the early 1990s at Bloomberg, Dow Jones and other media groups before becoming an independent writer/analyst in 2008 and joining The Milwaukee Company on a full-time basis in 2022 (he previously consulted with the firm for several years).