Weekly Commentary

If you’ve caught any of the recent news headlines, you would know Emerging Markets have been hit hard in 2018.  If you haven’t, a Google search will probably yield something like the following: [i] Year-to-date, the Emerging Markets Index has fallen 7.78 percent; however, as trade war rhetoric tensions grow, and since the prior market […]

Despite all of the political news saturating the media day in and day out, discussion of the housing market has certainly found its voice.  If you follow the news, headlines suggest housing is on a slowing trend. “Housing market is showing signs of cracking: ‘Anything-goes list-price strategy is no longer working’” – CNBC [i] “The […]

  Fear sells!  There is no question about it, especially when it comes to the uncertainties associated with investment performance.  To the untrained eye, or simply to regular investors managing their own portfolios, it’s extremely difficult to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake.  Just look at some of the content I had to wade […]

Second quarter earnings reports are approximately 91 percent complete; needless to say, it’s hard to be disappointed.  So far, according to FactSet, S&P 500 companies have reported earnings-per-share growth of 24.6 percent, exceeding the expectations of 20 percent growth. [i] One surprise has been the impact of a strengthening U.S. dollar on corporate earnings.  When […]

Trade war rhetoric continues to dominate the headlines, and in some respects has put a damper on capital flowing into U.S. equities; perhaps this is overshadowing the fact that we continue to see strong U.S. corporate earnings growth. [i] [ii] On a positive note, there have been some encouraging headlines related to trade talks.  The […]

This past week was filled with market-moving surprises. First, Facebook announced slower growth ahead and lower margins due to increased spending on security and data integrity.  Following this announcement, the company lost approximately $120 billion of their market cap in a single trading session, marking one of the largest single-day declines for the stock. Facebook […]

  A few times a year I like to call out some bad behavior, but not the normal, everyday type of bad behavior. I’m talking about the bad behavior of investors. You might wonder what behavior has to do with investing.  Investing is simple: buy low and sell high. That’s easier said than done.  If […]

The last couple of weeks of trade war rhetoric has turned decisively real.  Our view was, and still is, much of the trade war talk is overplayed.  However, we are now seeing the first phase of implementation. [i] Consistent with the chart above, the United States has begun its first round of tariffs on China […]

“The Fed’s High-Wire Act” Today marks the start of the first full week of trading for Q3 2018.  We’d like to take this opportunity to present you with our Q3 2018 Look Ahead. For a PDF presentation, click here. For a narrated video presentation, click here. Below, we’ve highlighted three key themes from our Q3 […]

The Federal Reserve got the green light to continue raising interest rates as May inflation reports [x] showed it had finally reached its 2 percent target inflation rate after five years of waiting. [i] [ii] [iii]   Given that the Fed has met its inflation objective, I don’t see any reason that would warrant any […]