Posts Tagged
‘recession’

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, [...]

Two articles from The Wall Street Journal weekend edition struck me as particularly helpful to readers seeking insight into prospects for the pandemic, the economy and the investment markets. Relative to the coronavirus pandemic and its potential effect on the economy, let the authors Louise Radnofsky and Ben Cohen speak for themselves: There has always [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over the past year, the major factors affecting stock market movement—expectations of Federal Reserve policy and administration comments about the China trade dispute—have remained largely the same. What has changed is that market reactions are unfolding in an increasingly compressed time frame. At the long end of a three-year process of Fed interest rate “normalization”, [...]