Archive for the
‘Markets & Economy’ Category

  Market Update and Economic Developments • Markets ended a bumpy month higher, with commodities, bonds and global equities notching gains despite uncertainty in international trade, interest rates, and the future of AI. Freshly inaugurated, President Trump wasted no time rolling out dozens of executive orders and policies to implement his campaign promises, with markets [...]

  The fourth quarter looked like the last three years in miniature. The S&P 500 had a positive return, but most of its component stocks did not do well. A small number of stocks, especially the Magnificent 7, performed remarkably well, but a large number lost money. The total return of the capitalization weighted index [...]

  The major U.S. stock market indexes have experienced powerful positive momentum for the past two years. Rising prices over an extended period of time invariably breed the expectation of continued rising prices, and that has certainly occurred this year among equity investors. The unprecedented level of money creation over the past decade and a [...]

The exciting narrative about artificial intelligence has dominated equity market news in recent years. AI’s effect, however, has produced positive results in just a narrow segment of the stock market. The market performance results above testify to the outsized influence that the Magnificent Seven mega-tech stocks (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) [...]

The Asterisk Era Sports fans with at least a little grey hair remember well the steroid era in baseball, ranging from the late-1900s into the early-2000s. Performance-enhancing steroids were outlawed but commonly used, and sluggers like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were shattering decades-old home run records. Fans with respect for cleanly earned [...]

Fundamentals vs. Technicals Over the past century, U.S. securities market technical conditions have been in agreement with fundamental conditions most of the time. As we enter 2024, fundamentals and technicals are clearly at odds with one another, creating highly uncertain prospects for investors (for readers unfamiliar with those terms, see Appendix A for explanations). Financial [...]

Bull Market or Bear? The markets have just concluded a weak quarter, a mixed year-to-date, a mostly strong trailing 12 months, and a significantly negative period overall since the end of 2021. The worst fixed-income decline in U.S. history has been unfolding for more than three years. In the minds of many, however, it is [...]

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 [...]