The first quarter of 2023 is already behind us and what a change from our last note. Year to date the S&P is up 7.5%, the Nasdaq is up 17%, and MSCI EAFE is up 6.7%. Growth outpaced value as fear of missing out took over after 2022’s losses. Yet despite the gangbuster start to…
2023 is upon us and most investors are happy to bid 2022 adieu. It’s been a turbulent year, to say the least, with inflation, aggressive rate hikes, war, and significant losses across asset classes. Correlations between equities and fixed income turned positive, and investors felt the sting of losses in equities and bonds simultaneously. The…
The third quarter of 2022 has brought little reprieve since our last writing. The S&P is down -23.9% YTD and the Nasdaq is down -32% YTD. Bonds haven’t fared much better with the Barclay’s Aggregate down -14.6% YTD. The Federal Reserve continues an aggressive pace of rate increases, yet inflation remains stubbornly high. The market…
The second quarter of 2022 seems to have eclipsed the first in negative news. We entered into a technical bear market and have chalked up the worst first half for the S&P 500 since 1970. At the end of Q2, the S&P was down -16% YTD and NASDAQ was down -29%. As we predicted last…
The ever-increasing inflation and the subsequent economic tightening of the Federal Reserve in response dominated the first quarter of the 2022 market. Surprisingly, the COVID headlines we’ve seen for two years have begun to fade into the background. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean COVID’s effects on the supply chain have eased: China is still amid a…
2021 ended with the S&P 500 up nearly 27% and the NASDAQ up 21%. Year to date, US Large Cap Growth outperformed Value by almost 10%. For a year marked by uncertainty, the market produced fantastic returns. Looking back, the S&P was up 16% in 2020 and over 28% in 2019. That’s three years of…
As we enter the third quarter of the year, the stock market is at new highs, Treasury rates are historically low and the economy is running hot. Shortages, long delivery times, a glut of service workers, and booming demand for nearly everything will make for an interesting summer. True to form, stocks are at all-time…
As we enter the second quarter of the year, U.S. stock markets are at all-time highs, interest rates are historically low, and the economy is growing faster than it has in decades. We’re now vaccinating over 3 million people per day, with over 165 million doses administered so far. Life is returning to normal and…
Last year, Barron’s magazine asked ten top strategists to predict where the S&P 500 would end 2020. Their range was 3,000 to 3,700. The final number was 3,756 for a year-over-year return of 16.3%—much better than expected. Had the strategists possessed foreknowledge that a global pandemic would shut down the services economy and send unemployment…
2020 is making it harder to talk about “markets” as if they are a common entity and not thousands of individual companies facing dramatically different challenges and opportunities. I could say that “the market” is up through the third quarter, but that would be a poor description of the year so far. What has really…
