Recent Commentary

  FOOLS RUSH IN?  OR A MARKET BOTTOM? There is no way to know yet if the recent rally in stocks marks a turning point for the market.  Was it “smart money” buying or a “fools rush in” kind of rally?  We will not let a market bounce blind us to the underlying...

The stock market is off to an awful start this year.  With a YTD decline of over 13% through April, the S&P 500 is off to its third worst start since WWII, and the NASDAQ has never had a weaker start over four months.  So one would expect investor sentiment to be...

Despite year-to-date losses for stocks, the estimated earnings of the S&P 500 companies for the next 12 months have continued to climb as shown below:   NO LETUP IN FORWARD EPS ESTIMATES Source:  Bespoke Investment Group This divergence between the trend in forward...

  Even though the market rebound last week was coincident with the Russian invasion (possibly signaling the bad news was fully discounted), we don’t think the coast is clear, and more volatility may be with us in the short term. Investors have at least three major...

  We are almost halfway through earnings season.  Earnings announcements are always important but maybe more so this quarter due to investors’ eagerness to see how inflation, including wage growth, is affecting companies’ bottom lines and outlooks for 2022.    So far,...

  There were a record number of new issues in 2021, but only 22% of IPOs were profitable. Yet people still pour money into them.  Investors hope to find the next Apple, Microsoft, or Tesla, but the odds are stacked against them.  Especially since few investors can buy...

It is still very early to say much definitive about the Omicron variant of COVID. We do know that it has spread beyond the origin, it has a significant number of mutations on the spike protein of the virus, and has relatively high transmissibility.  Testing by vaccine...

Earnings results are deteriorating as earnings season rolls on. Beat rates are less than the last two quarters but still remain above average.  Both revenue and EPS misses are being punished.  Individual stocks have been down 3.2% on average for a miss on earnings...

Q.  If the government shuts down on October 1st, are stocks in for a rough patch? Goldman Sachs recently concluded that U.S. government shutdowns generally have not meaningfully impacted equity returns. In the 14 government shutdowns since 1980, the S&P 500 posted...

Fed Chair Powell's speech last Friday at the Jackson Hole economic policy symposium is key for investors to gauge short and intermediate-term monetary policy.  The bottom line is that easy monetary policy will remain for some time to come. The large number of hawks on...