New Year New Highs The S&P 500 advanced 1.12%, reaching record highs on Monday and Wednesday. For 2021, the Index set 70 all-time highs, the most in a single year since 1954. Small caps finished the year quietly, edging up 0.34%, while the Nasdaq gained 0.56%. The...
The market was able to overcome the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, rising inflation expectations, labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks during the final quarter of 2021. Despite those headwinds, corporate earnings...
How the Grinch Almost Stole the Stock Market On Monday the stock market Grinches smelled the Omicron wave of Covid-19, and declared “Stink, Stank, Stunk” – by Thursday the Santa Claus rally had cleared the air leading to the S&P 500 closing at a record high for...
Grizzly Declines Shortly after we posted last week’s “Where Are the Bears?” commentary, our ursine friends awoke from their slumber Monday morning, mauling investors who had celebrated another record close on the S&P 500 the previous Friday. The twin terrors of...
Cheer Over Fear With the holiday season approaching, the market produced one of its best weekly returns since Valentine’s Day, as buyers saw silver linings in all the otherwise cloudy news. Showing cheer rather than fear, investors shrugged off the consumer price...
Transitioning from Transitory to Tactical In our commentary from the week of June 21, 2021, we offered the following thoughts concerning Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s description of inflation as being “transitory”: Poor Jerome Powell probably listens to the opening of...
Sale! Sale! Sale! All was quiet on the Wall Street front prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, with a modest rally triggered Monday morning after President Biden renominated Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for a second term. The economic data was in-line with...
All Eyes on Inflation Investors were concerned by COVID-19 related developments in Europe, where Austria announced a full national lockdown due to a spike in cases, and Germany mandated new restrictions for unvaccinated people. In the U.S. the number of daily new...
On the Up and Up Inflation looks like it is running, as the lyrics from AC/DC go, “hot” and demanding we “pay the price” for this “problem child.” The stock market finished lower for the week with those escalating inflation fears and related slumping consumer...
531,000 Jobs In 1929, just prior to the Great Crash of the New York Stock Market, Milton Ager, and Jack Yellen recorded, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Happy days are here again The skies above are clear again So let's sing a song of cheer again Happy days are here...
October is Over October finished on a high note, with the stock market having recouped all of September’s losses and reached record highs on Friday. Strong earnings reports from most companies overshadowed near-term weak economic data and disappointing quarterly...
Shifting Sentiment Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, a favorite pastime game was tug-of-war. Two teams pull on different ends of a rope until one group can get the flag in the middle past whatever obstacle separated the two groups – the game was particularly...
This Market Does Not Spook Easily October 2021 is shaping up to have more treats than tricks, following a scary September. After a rough start to the week, the market mounted a powerful rally on Thursday and Friday, with the S&P 500 posting a 1.82% gain to reach...
Objective? Reach the "Winner" Square The stock market over the last few months parallels Hasbro’s Chutes and Ladders: “an exciting up and down game for little children.” On Monday the market slid down with energy prices spiking, festering fears of a U.S. default, and...
Panic or Pivot? In the 1995 classic animated film “Toy Story” in a time of crisis Buzz Lightyear proclaims “Sheriff, this is no time to panic…” to which Sheriff Woody replies “This is the perfect time to panic!” Sheriff Woody would probably be experiencing incredible...
The S&P 500 Total Return Index gained 0.6% for the quarter and is up 15.9% for the year. The Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index was basically unchanged during this period and remains down 0.8% for the year. The virus remains in focus and the success of our...
Stocks Move with the News It was a rollercoaster week on Wall Street, as investors dumped stocks on Monday as concerns over the possible collapse of China property company Evergrande and overall worries about China’s crackdown on indebted firms unnerved traders....
Friend, Foe, or Fiction? The 50-Day Moving Average. Stocks touched their lowest levels in four weeks Friday, with the S&P 500 closing slightly below its 50-day moving average. Some chart-reading traders have expressed concerns that a key support area has been...
New Vaccine Mandates The definitions of “transitory” found on the internet range from “of brief duration” to “not permanent.” We believe that the two major economic challenges of inflation and COVID-19 will not be brief or permanent, so perhaps somewhere in the middle...
Gloomy or Growth-y? The stock market continues to chug along to new record highs despite the extraordinary challenges presented by the pandemic during the last 18 months, as well as the stiffening headwinds still to be confronted with new variants, a bloated national...
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