Weekly Commentary

With the first full week of trading for Q4 2018 underway, we’d like to take this opportunity to present you with our Q4 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 Q4 2018 Look Ahead: The year is projected […]

The record bull market is still handily underway and continues to be driven by strong earnings and revenue growth; which in a large part, has been driven by the much-publicized Tax Cuts and Jobs Act coming out of the Trump administration.  But after 3,493 days without a 20 percent or greater market correction, many investors […]

As I write this post, I’m currently on a visit to one of the smallest economic engines in the European Union: Portugal.  In my opinion, speaking Portuguese is exponentially harder than speaking Spanish and that has caused me to rely on some new technology.  There is a translation app called iTranslate, that, along with earbuds […]

  Considering all the chaos throughout Emerging Markets, the U.S. equity markets have been remarkably calm over the past few weeks. The indication for this calm is the low and declining levels of volatility in the U.S. equity markets, as reflected by the VIX Index below. [i]     Chaos, on the other hand, is […]

Ten years ago, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.  That event symbolized the ultimate consequence of excessive lending by banks. [i] Over the period to follow, known as the “Great Financial Crisis,” the three major U.S. stock market indices—the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Nasdaq—saw their values decline […]

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 […]