The bank stocks are at it again as they make another new 52-week relative performance low compared to the broad market. It’s a perennial issue. Over the last year the KBW Bank Index, an index of 24 of the largest US banks, has underperformed the…
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We believe the risks of an intermediate decline are higher than average and would advocate a more cautious stance toward equities right now. The S&P 500 just turned positive for the year after a wild ride that saw the index plunge 34.07% in 23 trading…
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Over the last few weeks there has been quite a bit of chatter among strategists about whether the market is undergoing a sustainable rotation into “value” stocks from “growth” stocks. It’s a bit surprising to us to see the outpouring of commentary on the issue,…
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Over the weekend the world learned of the Senate Republican’s “opening bid” for the next round of fiscal stimulus in the United States. That number came in at a nice, round $1tn. Now, as large as that number is, it still pales in comparison to…
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Here we are in the dog days of summer, and the hot weather is not the only thing making us a little queasy. The darling stock market group since 2011, the Nasdaq 100 stock index, has soared a cool 20% this year and well into…
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With the US dollar index recently having completed a so called “death cross”, we thought it would be a good opportunity to review the investment implications of a potential trend change in the USD. The “death cross” is a technical chart formation in which the…
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Regular readers of our content know that we have been building the case for several years now on why gold deserves a place in diversified portfolios. Sure, we see significant upside in gold (unlimited upside, in fact), aided as I will show by the unprecedented…
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Even as the stock market chugs up the wall of worry, we were reminded today that the economic fundamentals remain mired in simply unprecedented territory. As you can see in the first chart below, April saw both the largest increase ever in personal income (blue…
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As I write this note on a dreary Friday afternoon from Boulder, CO I am reminded of my town’s origin. Its first non-native settlers established the town 1858 as a base camp for gold and silver miners. Nestled literally at the foot of the Rockies,…
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Back in the good ole’ days of mid-January, asset allocators could look to long-duration US government bonds as a refuge for stormy weather. Those days are no longer. In recent weeks investors have panic bought into this supposed safety asset to a degree never before…
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Watching while the largest equity market in the world falls by a whopping 8% in four trading days brings us back to the 2008-2009 meltdown period of the financial crisis. Normally an 8% drop in such a short time frame would present an interesting intermediate-term…
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Sell-offs can start for any number of endogenous or exogenous events. A mentor used to tell me, “There are a million reasons to sell a stock, but one reason to buy.” What he meant was that there are always personal reasons to sell: tuition is…
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As hopes for a trade deal fade, similar to May and August, the CNY is devaluing against the USD again. In our work there are a handful of fairly mechanical relationships that should follow if the CNY continues to devalue. First, in the US, stocks…
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I wrote a week ago about how international equities may be finally getting the help they need to break the back of a long-term underperformance trend. It’s a trend that has caused international stocks to underperform US stocks in eight of the last eleven years….
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At some point the global economy will get a dose of reflation. Whether that comes from the current central bank easing cycle, fiscal policy response, coordinated fiscal-monetary action, or a détente in the US-Sino trade dispute is not yet known. However, when it happens a…
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