The S&P 500 Index got off to a rocky start in June but ended up with a just over 4% gain for the month, pushing the index to a near 10% return so far in 2012. Bonds were basically flat even as investors stuffed tens of billions of new money into bond funds while taking money out of stocks. The Vanguard S&P 500 now yields significantly more than the bond index fund: 2.2% vs. 1.88%, both including fund fees.  ...read the rest of this article»

Apparently somebody jumped the gun on the whole stock market ‘sell in May and go away’ cliché. U.S. stocks have been going down since early April, but the selling picked up last month - resulting in a 6% S&P 500 slide and turning the 1-year return for the benchmark negative.  ...read the rest of this article»

Fund investors continue pulling money out of stock funds. We see around $10+ billion a month come out of ordinary mutual funds – an investment class that is in long term decline. If it wasn’t’ for 401k assets, there would be big problems in the mutual fund industrial complex. ETFs continue to bring in money to offset these losses in total fund assets. ...read the rest of this article»

Stocks remained strong in March. Investments considered safe havens did poorly, from bonds to precious metals. Even the market volatility measure, the VIX, slid as the stock market’s potential downside seemed to shrink. There will be no double-dip recession, and perhaps no collapse of Europe. Even though investors optimism on US stocks continued to grow, the underperformance in what typically would do well as investors embraced risk - emerging markets - continued. ...read the rest of this article»

Typically emerging market stocks rebound faster than the US stock market when the market heads back up (like we saw in January) but there seems to be some fears around that the emerging markets era of outperformance is waning and the US may be more insulated than faster growing markets from Europe’s ongoing troubles.  ...read the rest of this article»

The big gains in foreign markets doesn’t quite wipe out last year’s losses, but it’s a good start to the year. The bond market highlights this re-embracing of risk. Higher risk bonds topped the list in January with emerging market bond funds up around 5%, followed by high yield bonds up over 3%. The safest government bond funds were roughly flat to slightly up.  ...read the rest of this article»

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»