Recent Commentary

1.  What happened in September? Is this a textbook correction or the start of something worse?  The pullback in stocks in September is due to a number of reasons: -              Tech stocks (including the FANG+ names) had powerful gains in the summer and had to come...

S&P 500 performance this year has been dominated by the index’s largest components, and the disparity by cap size is great. So far this year, the 50 largest stocks in the S&P 500 are up an average 11.3% YTD through August 28th.  The 50 smallest stocks are down an...

The five largest stocks in the S&P 500 (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Facebook) have collectively added $1.66 trillion in market cap this year.  The other 495 stocks in the index have lost $1.61 trillion in market cap!  The average share price increase for...

In our last commentary, we noted the rebound in economic output was giving investors hope and largely accounted for the rally in stocks off the March low.  We also wrote of the risk of a resurgence of the virus which is now happening in a handful of states.  The...

Once again, investor sentiment proved to be a good contrary indicator.  At the depths of the market crash (late March), sentiment was overwhelmingly bearish.  Since then, the market has had an amazing run (see main section).  As people turned more positive on stocks,...

“Unprecedented” feels like an overused word these days, but it is no overstatement when it comes to the oil market.  In the March mid-month commentary, we wrote that the oil supply glut could throw another gut punch to our economy on top of the coronavirus.  Our worst...

  Equities are trying to find a floor even though the news flow on the spread of the coronavirus outside of China hasn’t shown any signs of improvement.  A number of market indicators would suggest forward returns from current oversold levels should be pretty good,...

Can investors look back at SARS in 2003 and use that market behavior to analyze how today’s markets might be impacted by the coronavirus?  Probably not.  Both the economic and market conditions were much different in 2003 than they are now.  In 2003 we were coming out...

  Last week investors were reminded of risk – geopolitical risk to be specific.  Stocks quickly sold off after tension between the U.S. and Iran escalated.  But we don’t remember when there wasn’t ‘tension’ in the Mideast.  Individual risks such as this tend not to be...