Macro Environment

Juuuust outside of the Wall Street-y, firm-based kinds of investing, buying and selling stocks and bonds, lives a broader world. One filled with variegated national currencies, war risk, oil shocks, leverage covenants of countries, outbreaks of disease, drought. Those external things comprise the macro environment under which portfolio managers invest.

Like...you might love a stock at $22 a share, believing it's going to $50 as soon as it gets its next product line out. But the macro environment might be so bubblicious that you don't want to invest, because when everything is cratering, it's really hard for that Little Engine That Could to go up the hill in a huge downdraft of cratering macro elements.

So you wait until after the global crash to put your cash to work.