A battle between The Fed, Sentiment and Valuation One of the most important drivers, if not the pre-eminent force, propelling asset prices since the Great Financial Crisis has been Central Bank Policy, both here and abroad. The below chart outlines this notion quite dramatically. If current fiscal and monetary policies continue the path they have [...]
The most important change in Fed Policy four decades In his press conference during March, Chairman Powell emphasized that monetary stimulus will remain until the labor market has achieved maximum employment and inflation is above their 2% target, for some period of time. Since Volcker broke the back of runaway inflation in the early 80’s [...]
How has the market done this year? An easy question one would think. And often, it is quite easy, but not this year. Below is a table of different market indices with performance up to but not including the big dive in the market last Thursday. The second index from the top with the [...]
Is the Stock Market overvalued? We are going to try to answer this age-old question, but before we do, we want to remind you what we think of valuing the markets. Valuation should never be used to judge if the market should be bought or sold. Valuation is a way to measure the potential for [...]
Why did the market go down so much, and why has it rallied so much? The market started the year with upside momentum and the hope that a US China trade deal would help kick start the global economy. The market was up about 10% by February, but the outbreak of Covid-19 quickly derailed the [...]
We want to remind clients why we outline our thoughts on the markets every quarter, and more often when volatility picks up. We believe that following the trends in the market is far more effective than predicting an often-uncertain future. We seldom attempt to “call a high” in the market, as this is usually [...]
Review and Outlook The third quarter ushered in a tremendous amount of volatility as global financial markets reacted as perceptions for whether a trade deal with China was crumbling or not. So far, as we are writing this piece, it has been much ado over nothing as the S&P 500 ended in the black, up [...]
Review and Outlook During the second quarter the market moved modestly higher with a quick pullback in May. Our outlook is for a choppy range in the second half of the year with the bulk of the returns this year having been front loaded. There are many opposing forces the market will have to navigate [...]
Review and Outlook In our January Outlook we noted that “the fundamentals did not support a move much worse than this…as the market had become very oversold in December…we saw significantly large breadth in buying…this combination…rarely results in the market doing materially worse”. What resulted was in fact quite a rally, the extent of which [...]
Review and Outlook In our October outlook we warned of more volatility to come. As it turned out, we got even more volatility than we expected. The market declined 13.5% during Q4, putting the S&P 500 at -4.4% for the year. The average stock in the S&P did even worse as the equal weighted [...]