For many people, January is a time for resolutions. Start with the end in mind. Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” If you made a resolution to improve your financial health for the new year, quantify your goal. Here are some more tips from Fairway to [...]
By: Matt Garrott What Happened in 2021 US stocks did very well while International stocks climbed but lagged the US. The Barclays Aggregate Bond Index was down slightly, but Municipal Bonds and TIPS were up. Even though a moderate portfolio likely had a higher return than the historical average for US Large Cap [...]
By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 was down 0.7% in November as a new COVID variant was discovered. Equity markets fell 2% on the Friday after Thanksgiving or “Bleak Friday” as Schwab’s Liz Ann Sonders is calling it. Once again we saw that when risk assets go down, they all tend to drop [...]
By: Matt Garrott Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market was a book published in 1999 that predicted the Dow Jones Industrial Average would hit 36,000 within 5 years. The Dow topped out at 11,750 before the Tech Bubble burst. 22 years later, on November [...]
By: Matt Garrott Commodities were up 6.6% for the quarter, while the Energy and Materials sectors were down. Two Federal Reserve presidents resigned amid a securities trading controversy. Major political uncertainties swirl around the debt ceiling and spending bills. Supply chain issues are pushing inflation up. Employers are scrambling to find workers. A [...]
By: Matt Garrott I saw an infographic on social media recently with a breakdown of COVID infections in the United States by county. What caught my eye was the state with the fewest infections – Louisiana with zero. How could this be? The author’s reply in the comments: The computer program used to [...]
By: Matt Garrott Through July, the S&P 500 is up 18%. While this is coming on the back of a staggered recovery from pandemic lockdown, the index hasn’t had a 5% or greater pullback in over a year. Not to jinx things, but in an average calendar year, we see a drawdown of [...]
By: Matt Garrott Halfway through the year, the S&P 500 is up 15.25%, including dividends. Yet at times, headlines read as if the market is down 15%. Two weeks ago, the big story was how June 18th ended the worst week for the S&P 500 since February. One week later, the S&P set [...]
By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 continued its bull run, returning 5.3% during the month of April. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, though. Instead of cheering increased vaccination numbers, inflation worries dominate the news. Inflation has picked up by 2.6%, but it is not present across the entire economy. Home prices [...]
By: Matt Garrott The S&P 500 dropped 9.5% on March 12th, 2020. It fell 12% on March 16th, 2020. It didn’t hit bottom for another week. Today, the market is hitting all-time highs. Even if you had the exact worst timing and invested in the S&P 500 at the pre-pandemic peak last February, [...]
