There is an old Wall Street expression that “bulls make money, bears make money and pigs get slaughtered”. Indeed, there are many animal-based analogies that are used to describe markets, investors and even investment styles, including “whales”, “sheep”, “lemmings” and even “herd mentalities”, just as examples. For our part, we posit that the current domestic […]
There is an old expression that “keeping your money in cash guarantees your ability to grow poor safely”. That is not to suggest that people should not keep enough money in cash or cash-like alternatives, including bank savings accounts, mutual fund money markets, T-bills, and C.D.s, to pay for all short and many intermediate-term […]
Too much of a good thing… In the oftentimes-counterintuitive world of financial markets, the way that investors respond to fundamental data may sometimes seem nonsensical. Indeed, market history is filled with periods when “good” news is received by investors as “bad” (bearish) news and “bad” news is perceived by the markets as “good” (bullish) news. […]
Legendary Fidelity portfolio manager Peter Lynch famously said that “if you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.” We have always taken exception to that statement. However, if you were to replace the phrase “economic and market forecasts” with the words “politics and elections”, we would most enthusiastically […]
“History does not repeat itself, but it oftentimes rhymes”. -Mark Twain “When they were hot, they were very, very hot. But when they were not, they were losers. The story of the stock market … was of stocks that flew higher than at any time in the last decade. Enough of them soared that the […]
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as President at the depth of the Great Depression, he offered the very reassuring perspective in his Inaugural Address that “the only thing to fear is fear itself”. With the benefit of hindsight, that would also have been an extraordinarily insightful market commentary, if it had been offered at […]
piv·ot /ˈpivət/ “To completely change the way in which one does something.” We concluded last month’s Outlook commentary by expressing our opinion that “while there are still some reasons for caution in the intermediate term, the short and longer-term outlook for portfolio values is starting to look better than it has in years”. Our optimism […]
