For 2011 our Conservative Portfolio was up a respectable 3.5% while our Aggressive Portfolio’s winners couldn’t overtake the drag of foreign markets and financials, giving us a 0.41% loss for the year. A drop of less than one-half of one percent may compare favorably to most global portfolios (the Morningstar Global Allocation category was down about 4% for 2011), but we consider it a disappointing result. ...read the rest of this article»

October’s sharp rebound fizzled in November, and a late month rebound wasn’t enough to push the S&P 500 back into positive territory. The market’s slight dip for the month was similar to the bond market’s slip, resulting in a down November for most investment mixes.  It doesn’t seem it but the S&P 500 is up just under 1% (with dividends) for the year. Once again, foreign stocks underperformed US stocks last month. ...read the rest of this article»

One oddity of the new market environment is everything that is somewhat risky to very risky has been moving in near perfect sync - so wild swings tend to hit everything the same way, making well diversified portfolios appear quite risky. Longer term government bonds –which have limited long term appeal at current low rates, remain the best offset to sliding everything, almost always going up significantly when fears drive riskier global assets down. ...read the rest of this article»

This is how America’s fascination with foreign stock investing ends. It is also not far off from when we add some emerging market stock funds back into the Powerfund Portfolios. While the 10 year return for non-emerging foreign stock funds still beats the S&P 500, all the huge inflows into foreign funds were in the last five years, and for the last five years US stocks have been ahead. ...read the rest of this article»

Another negative month. With August’s 5.45% drop, the stock market is now down four months in a row and about 10% in total since the end of April, enough to push the market into slightly negative territory for the year (talk about the old Wall Street adage ‘sell in May and go away’). But  considering we were down about 20% top to bottom from July 22nd to the lows in August, being down ‘only’ 10% feels sort of fortunate. ...read the rest of this article»

The big news remains the government debt drama, which as of this writing appears to be over, if by over you mean pushing the bulk of the problem ahead a few months. At least government bond holders will get their money. Of course, this was never really in question. As proof look at one of the highest performing fund category last month: long term government bonds, up 4.4%. So basically when there is panic in the air, people flood to treasuries - even when the panic is OVER treasuries. ...read the rest of this article»

June was worse than May in the stock market, but a big rebound during the last few days of the month trimmed the losses to just 1.67%. Before the recent rebound investors started pulling money out of stock funds. The pattern this year has been almost inversely perfect: investors started to put money into US stock funds right before the slide started.  ...read the rest of this article»

April’s upward move in stocks fizzled in May with a 1.15% drop in US stocks. Foreign stocks slipped 2.83% after rising sharply in April. In recent days the market took another dive with a sharp pullback on June 1st. The main fear seems to be a newly slowing economy, but we’re sticking to our take that newly sliding home prices are the real trouble spot. Stocks can’t go in a different direction from home prices forever. ...read the rest of this article»

The market shook off the troubles of March and headed to higher ground, up just shy of 3% in April. Considering the economy is showing some signs of running out of gas (perhaps because gas prices keep going up) and home prices are heading back down, investor optimism is surprisingly high. Too bad. Investors tend to do better long run getting in during periods of pessimism. Bonds were good after a period of rising interest rates early this year that was pushing mortgages into dangerous territory given the continued weakness in housing.  ...read the rest of this article»

With an almost perfectly flat S&P 500 in March, you’d almost think the month was a dull one on Wall Street. Hardly. By the middle of the month the S&P 500 was down about 8% from the close in February, largely due to a massive natural and manmade disaster in Japan (a market that itself was down almost 20% from the levels in February). Though Japan only partially rebounded, the S&P 500 ended the month back where it started. ...read the rest of this article»