By: Matt Garrott Year-to-date, markets are still mostly down.  The S&P 500 is down 13.1% through the end of November and the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index is down 12.6%.  November itself was a positive month, however.  The S&P 500 gained 5.6% while the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index clawed back 3.7%.  A [...]

By: Matt Garrott By the time the time you read this, the midterm elections will be over and the votes counted (at least most of them).  Longtime clients know that our advice is to keep politics separate from your portfolio. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had its best month since 1976, up 14%.  [...]

By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 was down 9.2% for the month, down 4.9% for the quarter, and is down 23.9% year-to-date.  The dollar hit parity with the Euro while the joke of the moment is that the British Pound is now only worth 15 ounces.  The 10-year US Treasury yield kissed 4%.  [...]

By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 was up 9.2% in July.  Year-to-date, the index is down 12.6% and down 5% over the last 12 months.  Bonds have taken a beating this year, too, with the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index down 7.7% and muni bonds down 4.6%.  Economic data dominated the headlines, however.  [...]

By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 was flat in May, but managed to snap a streak of 7 negative weeks in a row.  At one point, investors were less than 2% away from a bear market.  The S&P 500 did briefly dip below the bear market threshold on an intra-day basis, but didn’t [...]

By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 dropped 8.7% in April bringing the index’s return to -12.9% on the year.  The Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index fell 3.8% during the month.  Its performance is -9.5% for the first four months of the year.  The Federal Reserve is poised to hike interest rates further.  Inflation [...]

By: Matt Garrott This was the kind of quarter where we find out what kind of investors we really are.  It’s the hypothetical scenario on every risk tolerance questionnaire.  What would you do if the stock market dropped suddenly?  If you didn’t know before, you know now.  At one point in the quarter, [...]

By: Matt Garrott A recent Goldman Sachs commentary wondered if the Chinese year of the Tiger would really be the year of the Hawk as the Federal Reserve was expected to raise rates aggressively.  There is another hawk issue now – war in Ukraine.  Social media is beaming the war straight to the [...]

By: Matt Garrott “Well it’s Groundhog Day…again…” says Bill Murray’s character who is forced to relive the same day over and over again.  Investors may feel the same way about the markets.  Stocks are volatile once more and investors have been reminded that values can actually go down, after the steady climb in [...]