February 24, 2022 – Keeping Calm in Turbulent Times “The thing to do is to keep your mind when the world around you is losing theirs.” – Warren Buffett Over the long-term, no asset class has provided returns as strong as stocks. In fact, it is not even close. However, in order to achieve those … [Read more…]
January 25, 2022 – Why Midterm Election Years See Some of the Largest Pullbacks It feels as though we just completed the last election, yet attention will soon focus on this November’s midterm election. Before it becomes everyone’s focus, we thought now would be a good time to take a step back and consider what … [Read more…]
December 22, 2021 – The Largest Buyer of Stocks For a number of years large corporations have been massive buyers of their own stock. Admittedly some of this is just to offset the stock options granted to employees. However, many companies are nicely reducing the overall share count, thereby increasing their earnings per share. In … [Read more…]
October 27, 2021 – The Consumer Can’t Be Stopped Inflation. Stagflation. Pandemic. Energy costs. Lack of Supply. Name your concern and the U.S. consumer, at least for now, does not seem to care. Personal consumption, as shown below, has surged to new highs well above pre-pandemic levels. There are always plenty of factors to worry … [Read more…]
September 29, 2021 – Expectations If you have been reading our notes over the years you are aware one of our favorite topics is investor sentiment. Despite an increasing number of ways to judge sentiment it has become more difficult to analyze in recent years due to information overload and how fast opinions are changing. Regardless, today … [Read more…]
August 25, 2021 – What is Expensive? The past few years and even the past decade, have seen most asset prices increase significantly. Prices have increased so much that many investors are worried about valuation. To be fair, many of these same investors have been worried about valuation for years. We can see in our … [Read more…]
July 28, 2021 – Comparing Mega Caps to History It is no secret that large cap U.S. stocks have dominated for years. They have done so for so long and to such an extent that there has been an increasing frequency of comparisons to past large cap bubbles. Most notably would be the Nifty Fifty bubble … [Read more…]
June 16, 2021 – Market Internals Showing Some Signs of Weakness The S&P 500 continues to trade at or near new highs. However, less stocks are themselves trading with strength. This can be represented in various ways, but today we look at a chart showing the percent of stocks over their 50-day moving average. It … [Read more…]
This past week’s Barron’s cover story was all about inflation. It has been the most discussed topic in many recent client meetings and is connected with many aspects of our lives right now. We have discussed inflation a couple of times earlier this year and our views have remained mostly the same, but with so … [Read more…]
April 21, 2021 – A Different Look At Tech Sector Now Versus 1999 A great deal has been said in recent months comparing aspects of this market, especially the run in the technology sector, with that of the late 1990’s. There are some important similarities and differences. One key difference is our chart today. In … [Read more…]