Category: Business Cycle
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Investment management can take many years of cycles and regimes to understand an edge.
It takes at minimum a full market cycle including both bull/bear markets to declare an edge in an investment management track record. But we also have different regimes. For example, each bull market can be different as… Read More
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Is this the Inflection Point for Stocks?
As if the election result wasn’t enough, the U.S. stock market has surprised most people by trending up since last November. But, it has been stalling since March. The S&P 500 drifted down about -3% into… Read More
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Asymmetry in the Business Cycle
The current U.S. economic expansion is now 90 months old. It is the fourth longest of the 23 expansions since 1900. The history of the U.S. business cycle is one of long summers and short… Read More
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Uncharted Territory from the Fed Buying Stocks
I remember sometime after 2013 I told someone “The Fed is buying stocks and that’s partly why stocks have risen so surprisingly for so long”. He looked puzzled and didn’t seem to agree, or understand.… Read More
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What You Need to Know About Long Term Bond Trends
There is a lot of talk about interest rates and bonds these days – for good reason. You see, interest rates have been in a downtrend for decades (as you’ll see later). When interest rates… Read More
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Stage and Valuation of the U.S. Stock Market
In The REAL Length of the Average Bull Market last year I pointed out different measures used to determine the average length of a bull market. Based on that, whether you believe the average bull market… Read More
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My 2 Cents on the Dollar
The U.S. Dollar ($USD) has gained about 20% in less than a year. We observe it first in the weekly below. The U.S. Dollar is a significant driver of returns of other markets. For example,… Read More
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Conflicted News
This is a great example of conflicted news. Which news headline is driving down stock prices today? Below is a snapshot from Google Finance:: Trying to make decisions based on news seems a very conflicted… Read More
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Asymmetric Returns of World Markets YTD
As of today, global stock, bond, commodity markets are generating asymmetric returns year to date. The graph below illustrates the asymmetry is negative for those who need these markets to go “up”. source: http://finviz.com Read More
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A Tale of Two Conditions for U.S. and International Stocks: Before and After 2008
In recent conversations with investment advisors, I notice their sentiment has shifted from “cautious and concerned” about world equity markets to “why have they underperformed”. Prior to 2013, most investors and investment advisors were concerned… Read More