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...
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...