Author Archive

In our April Quarterly Commentary (please visit 2023 1st Quarter Market Commentary - Mission Management & Trust Co.), I analyzed Warren Buffett’s counsel that in the short run the stock market is a voting machine, while in the long run, it’s a weighing machine. In the recently concluded second quarter, voters clearly dominated. Excitement and [...]

The bear markets that began for all major US stock indexes between November 2021 and April 2022 got a reprieve in this year’s first quarter. The bear markets for domestic investment quality fixed income indexes began even earlier, from early to mid-2020, but likewise saw returns improve in this year’s first quarter. The worst returns [...]

I don’t always agree with what is written on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, but the following was part of a particularly insightful editorial from its year-end edition: "[F]ree money can’t last forever… is the reality that financial markets brought home in 2022 as U.S. stocks finally fell back to earth after being inflated [...]

The Future Is Now Virtually all investors have suffered so far in 2022.  As the table shows, the traditional 60/40 stock/bond portfolio lost more than 20% of its value.  Even far less aggressive portfolio allocations experienced significant declines.  And most investors did even worse, because the most popular stocks substantially underperformed the major market indexes. [...]

Almost No Place To Hide, Part II In the first half of 2022, the S&P 500 experienced its worst start in more than a half century, and bonds declined by more than in any other year on record. Falling by 16.1% in the second quarter, the S&P’s return for the first half was -19.6%. Again, [...]

Almost No Place To Hide There was little opportunity for profit in traditional asset categories in this year’s first quarter.  The S&P 500, against which most equity returns are measured, rallied nicely in late-March but finished down for the quarter by 4.6%.  The Nasdaq Composite, which includes most of the mega-tech companies that have led [...]

Because I’m writing for a newly expanded readership, many of whom have never before seen our commentaries, I’m going to take a somewhat different approach in this issue. It is always advantageous to know the biases of a writer and, ideally, to know what he/she has identified previously as the factors likely to influence markets [...]

If we’re unconcerned about the price we pay, there are several reasons to buy stocks today. Thanks to copious stimulus from the Federal Reserve, common stock indexes have continued their march upward, and most securities analysts are forecasting further gains. Notwithstanding the Fed’s generosity, however, U.S. Treasury notes and bonds and investment-grade corporates  lost money [...]

The securities markets experienced drama in positive and negative directions in the year’s first quarter, as the Federal Reserve and most other world central banks continued to flood their respective economies with newly printed money. Only risk-free securities avoided the excitement. In fact, Three-Month Treasury Bills barely registered a pulse with a 0.01% return. By [...]

-The Good, The Bad and The Ugly- This graph highlights the stark dichotomy between what investors view as “good” and “bad” on the current investment landscape. The tan line traces the cumulative growth of the S&P 500 over the past half century. Most noteworthy is the explosive growth in the nearly dozen years since the [...]