You know it’s late August when corporate earnings season is over, the market is trading off of whatever little news is available, and volatility increases (many Wall Street people are on vacation, trading volume is low, so market moves tend to be exaggerated). That’s where we are now.  It feels the same as last August, [...]

The market took a big dive yesterday and the news media screamed about an inverted yield curve and a recession. You might ask, so what is an inverted yield curve?  During most times, investors require higher payments (yields) for buying longer-dated bonds. Or think of a CD –  a bank typically pays you more interest [...]

Mark Twain once joked, “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The same can be said for investors. Since the financial crisis, investors have spent a lot of time and energy worrying about events that seemed destined to send the markets into another deep dive. Remember these events? [...]

Today, the US economy broke a record for the longest expansion in history. The last recession ended in June 2009, so the US economy is now in its 121st month of growth.  With this record in place, the drumbeat of pundits predicting the next recession is likely to increase. And with it come questions from [...]

Over the past weeks, volatility picked up in response to the trade deal with China (or lack thereof). For much of this year, we’ve expected the trade deal to go through and for news related to China to fade from the front page of the papers. However, that all changed and President Trump is keeping [...]

It’s amazing how quickly sentiment can change. And the change from last December shows the importance of focusing on data and not sentiment. During last fall’s downturn, it seemed that everywhere you looked, people were talking about a global slowdown and a coming recession in the United States. Pessimism abounded, yet much of the data [...]

Over the past week, volatility picked up in response to the trade deal with China (or lack thereof). For much of this year, we’ve expected the trade deal to go through and for news related to China to fade from the front page of the papers. However, that all changed and President Trump is back [...]

We hope you have had a good start to 2019! The New Year is shaping up quite nicely. The markets have recovered well from the December lows, although not back to the all-time highs from early October. We think the market reaction to events late last year was overblown and that the January/February recovery was [...]

The New Year is shaping up quite nicely. The market is up roughly 18% from the December lows, although not back to the all-time highs from early October. As I said in several emails, I think the market reaction to events late last year was overblown. Likewise, I think the January/February recovery is not telling [...]

Despite the historical bias for December being the best-performing month for the S&P 500 going back to 1950, the market volatility certainly hasn’t let up in December 2018.  As a matter of fact, the NYSE Bullish Percent, which is our guide to risk levels in the U.S, equity markets, reversed back into a column of [...]