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 […]
Cash holdings may provide comfort, but inflation diminishes the value of uninvested cash over time. Outside of purchase delays and product substitutes, there is little more consumers can do to directly address inflation. Investors, on the other hand, have a range of options to address that potential drag. The greater the expected return of a […]
Podcast: Play in new window
Wall Street loves itself a forecast. Fulfilling that want, there are groups of folks whose business it is to estimate the future paths of most meaningful financial metrics. Regular readers know we don’t place too much stock, as it were, on market or macroeconomic prognostications. As generally unreliable as they might be, though, we don’t […]
So long as one did not carry too substantial an amount of interest rate risk in portfolios, markets provided a solid foundation for generally positive returns over the past quarter and year. While fixed income returns have yet to register the now higher yields on offer (recall that yields up = price down in bonds), […]
Podcast: Play in new window
While it’s understandable that investors may get excited about future prospects of new industries and business models, that enthusiasm may need to be tempered when it comes to the associated investment cases. Early investors may see substantial gains from the immense risks they took on when potentially grand success was merely imagined. But even later […]
Podcast: Play in new window
It’s not rare that we sit scratching our heads at obvious contradictions expressed by investment markets. But that generally is not because obviously opposing opinions are surprising. After all, any individual trade requires that the buyer and seller have opposite opinions on whether to hold a particular security. That’s not a paradox…it’s a market. But […]
Over the past three months investors struggled with intransient inflation and policy makers’ efforts to tame it. Still, stock and bond markets remain well off troughs set last fall. While longer-duration bonds suffered the most in 2022, the first quarter of 2023 reversed a good portion of those losses as rates fell on account of […]
