This is, in my opinion, the most interesting chart in all of finance. This shows the return from gold versus the total return of the S&P 500 since 1/1/2000. As you can see, gold's return has exceeded that of stocks by almost 3 to 1; it isn't even close. If you had bought gold at the turn of the century, [...]
Was that it? Was that the top? A week ago, the market fell 2.7% as President Trump announced an additional 100% tariff on Chinese goods starting November 1st. Since that Friday selloff, the market has stabilized and recovered a little over half that one day loss. The S&P 500 is now down just about 1.5% from its all-time high. Is [...]
The federal government shut down last week so we didn't get the monthly employment report last Friday and I think that may be the best news investors have gotten all year. I expect a lot of government generated economic reports to be missed during the shutdown, which I think could drag on a lot longer than previous versions. With the [...]
Nuance: A subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound. A subtle difference or variation. The origin of the word nuance is a Latin word, "nubes", which means cloud. It is also from the French "nuer" which means "to shade". Why am I parsing the meaning and origin of the word nuance? Because we seem to have lost [...]
The first half of this year saw a lot of old trends turned upside down. Foreign stocks outperformed US stocks, gold had its best first half performance since 2007 and the dollar its worst start to a year since 1973. It was that year that the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates breathed its last. It had started to [...]
But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions... - Alan Greenspan, The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society, at the Annual Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., December 5, 1996 Are investors too optimistic? [...]
As we enter the final quarter of 2024, there are a lot of questions facing investors. There are, of course, always a lot of questions because investors are always dealing with the future, but today's environment does seems to have more than usual. Some of these questions concern short-term considerations and while they are important, it is more important to [...]
The 2nd quarter is officially over and it was one of the strangest I’ve experienced in my 33 year career. To jump straight to the punchline, if you owned large cap growth stocks, you had a great quarter. If you owned almost anything else, you didn’t and you likely lost money. I don’t know when the bear market in doing [...]
The S&P 500 is up 4.8% in the 2nd quarter to date but that is far from the whole story. The bull market over the last year has become ever narrower with the index return pulling away from the average return. This quarter the average return of the stocks in the index is actually negative, down 2.4%. Over the last [...]
The S&P 500 reached a milestone recently. Or at least I think so. The technology sector, as of this week, is now 33.6% of the index. If you count the Communications sector as technology - and you should since 49% of the sector is Meta and Google - the allocation to technology oriented companies is 42.8%. The top 3 companies [...]
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