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 [...]
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 [...]
