TINA (There Is No Alternative to stocks) is dead. That’s a good thing. However, there is a lot of angst among investors about both stocks and bonds, so let’s look at how bad it is and how bad it’s not. HOW BAD IT IS So far this century, stocks have taken investors for...
What we have is normal and ABNORMAL. We have had both for awhile. Let’s review. Bond yields are back to normal levels after many years of far below normal rates that began in 2009. What started out as an enormous financial experiment in new Federal Reserve...
Has 2023 been a good year for stocks? How can you tell? Well, let’s set 10% as a threshold since that is the long-term average return for stocks. Let’s annualize the returns so far, 10 days from having the first nine months on record and see how we fare. What shall we...
For decades, professional money managers have used benchmarks for measuring performance. For stocks, the standard index has been the Standard & Poors 500 Index (S&P 500). However, this index has become so extremely concentrated that it is no longer...
Because large losses are so damaging to long-term returns, market timing to avoid them has a lot of appeal. It seems intuitively correct that when stock market indexes go to extremes they come back to normal and often swing the other direction before going back...
