Posts Tagged
‘investments’

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 [...]

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 US economy is struggling through its worst decline since the 1930s. Corporate earnings have plummeted, and numerous CEOs are refusing to offer forecasts for upcoming quarters. Nonetheless, the major stock indexes have rallied to or above all-time highs. Investors appear willing to disregard weak fundamentals so long as the Federal Reserve continues to produce [...]

In just under two months, stock prices worldwide have plummeted from historic highs to bear market lows and have rocketed part way back up again. The coronavirus has infected nearly 2 million people, killing over 100,000, and shut down vast swaths of the world economy. In less than one month, our way of life has [...]

In our January Commentary, we noted that the Fed had dropped short-term interest rates in late-2019 in three distinct quarter point increments to the year-end level of 1.50-1.75%. As the coronavirus spread around the world in early-2020, the central bank cut interest rates on March 3 by half a percentage point, its biggest single cut [...]

Readers of our reports over the past few years know that we have described the condition facing investors as a bet. Older market veterans who have lived through a number of market cycles would tend to bet on what has always ultimately played out-- that the equity markets would eventually revert to their historically normal [...]

In my 52 years in the investment industry, I have never seen anything like the stock market activity of the last month. From its Feb 12 all-time high, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by more than 35% (about 10,500 points) to its Wednesday low, just below 19,000. That significant decline was the fastest in [...]

On Sunday evening of this week, the markets experienced a brief dip into negative yields for the 3-month US Treasury bill. Once again on Wednesday, bills with maturities from four weeks to three months were slightly negative. In other words, investors were willing to pay the US Treasury to hold their money for the next [...]

As we head into the decade of the twenties, welcome to the casino! You can double your money on red or black, or you can lose it all. Never in the lifetimes of people living today have speculators faced the alternative of investments so ripe with positive potential while simultaneously saturated with the risk of [...]