Posts Tagged
‘market valuation’

  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 [...]

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 [...]

This year’s third quarter was unproductive for investment assets. Domestic stock markets were mixed, with the S&P 500 fractionally positive but the Dow Jones Industrials, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange Index all negative. Risk-free Treasury Bills continue to pay virtually nothing. Bloomberg’s U.S. Aggregate Bond Index was also essentially flat and remains negative [...]

For several years, investors have wrestled with a profound dilemma. With Federal Reserve and other substantial government stimulus, stock prices have risen to and remained at valuation levels that have, throughout history, ultimately been severely punished. As the years rolled on and the Fed consistently provided one sort of stimulus or another whenever stocks appeared [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]