Investment hypotheticals are imaginary scenarios of portfolio returns. They are summaries of theoretical past or future circumstances that can serve as powerful tools for instruction. We think they can be particularly effective when the goal is as much to convey how investment math works as it is to convey the results of that math. We […]
After a dicey April, stocks and bonds both saw gains sufficient to pull into the green for the quarter. And fixed income exposures now largely are in the green year-over-year. Both the trailing quarter and year saw stocks struggle at the beginning, only to pull higher by period end. The U.S. continues to lead the […]
The are many questions regarding market expectations that we tend to find sufficiently addressed using historical data. “What’s your outlook for returns over the next x years?” generally gets a, “Well, historical x-year returns show a range of y% to z%, so likely something within that range.” The answer may not be satisfying, but it […]
This session, I ponder the motivations of and position our work against the "do this now!" punditry.
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While stocks have recovered well beyond their second-half-2023 drawdown, bonds of longer durations have struggled this year. The first quarter saw global stocks further Q4 2023 gains, with the U.S. again dominating the leaderboard. Growth stocks extended a substantial lead over Value in the first quarter, expanding a historical gap. Meantime large-cap stocks soared above […]
Though still relatively narrow in terms of the breadth of contributing stocks, the ongoing recovery from the 2021-22 bear market remains historically short and shallow. Past performance may tell us little in particular about the market’s future. But the historical context may offer fair reasons to maintain an otherwise risk tolerance-appropriate market exposure, despite the […]
In this podcast, I provide some early glimpses of the power of artificial intelligence in practice. I also discuss some concerns I have for the technologies' broader usage in investment management and allow Microsoft's CoPilot to chime in.
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The year saw gains most everywhere one looked, but those gains came with a fair share of volatility as investor sentiment shifted along with expectations for interest rates and macroeconomic growth. Reversing the negativity of Q3, the final quarter saw across-the-board gains for stocks both here and abroad. Growth stocks extended a substantial lead over […]
This month five years ago, we provided a data-focused retrospective showing performance subsequent to investments in the domestic stock market at near-term peaks. At the time, we had just experienced a year like no other: each month in 2017 saw a market peak (including the effects of dividends) higher than that achieved the prior month […]
A bit contrary to the old saw that diversification is your friend, just a handful of stocks generated the bulk of the market’s historically generous performance for the year to date. These enormous, mostly Technology-oriented companies also dominated market conversation in 2023. A good bit less covered are other distinctions of this year’s market momentum: […]
