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: […]

Those investors pulled toward short-term Treasuries for their multi-decade peaks may wish to look beyond near-term highs at the front end of the yield curve to ensure they have a plan for those funds when maturities arrive. Such generous yields might not then be on offer. That “reinvestment risk” might mean that longer-term bonds may […]

What started out as a positive quarter for stocks turned quite negative, as investors seemed to worry anew about potential ongoing implications for a higher interest rate environment. Here at home, Value stocks gained back a bit of lost ground over the quarter, while Outside the U.S Value stocks were flat amidst a broader-market selloff. […]

Investors routinely, seemingly instinctually, look to the past for clues to qualify the present and gauge the future. We certainly place a great deal of weight on, for example, characteristics of individual stocks that have tended to lead to longer-term outperformance. But past as proxy for long-term expectations seems to us far more defensible than […]