It is starting to look as if the next Black Swan for the economy and stocks is the new coronavirus making its way around the world. ...read the rest of this article»

As our portfolios are fairly well positioned for an environment where investors expect an economic slowdown, we beat all the benchmarks in January. ...read the rest of this article»

What a difference a year makes! This time last year, a recession seemed imminent, and the stock market briefly saw a roughly 20% decline from the 2019 peak.  ...read the rest of this article»

This year is turning out to do much more for stocks than merely reversing the sharp declines of late 2018.  ...read the rest of this article»

Globally, stocks continued up, with only a slight drop in longer-term bonds. It is almost like the bond market is expecting a recession soon and "better safe than sorry" but the stock market wants to play musical chairs until the actual record stops on the economy. ...read the rest of this article»

Even with the weak month for bonds, we had a decent month relative to benchmarks ...read the rest of this article»

Stocks gave back some of the gains made in August as economic and trade fears kept bubbling up. In this environment the bond market remained red hot as interest rates plunged yet again. This boosted our portfolios relative to benchmarks as we have been taking more interest rate risk (but less stock risk) than most other portfolios for quite a few years now. ...read the rest of this article»

With rising trade tensions as the catalyst and a backdrop of suspiciously low interest rates, August is looking to wipe out much of the recent gains with a roughly 800-point one-day drop in the Dow and interest rates plunging to levels last seen right before the last presidential election. ...read the rest of this article»

The stock market continues to rebound from all the traumatic events of the past year or so. Strangely, this is not due to particularly strong expectations for growth globally; it appears to be mostly related to interest rates declining in anticipation of an economic slowdown.  ...read the rest of this article»

The sharp rebound in stocks in early 2019 ended just as rapidly in May, with a 6.36% drop in the Vanguard 500 index fund including dividends. In late April, just days after the U.S. stock market broke through the old highs from September 2018 and gained back all the losses from late last year, stocks started falling. At one point in early June, the Nasdaq was back down around 10% from the recent highs—a percentage drop considered a correction (a bear market is 20%). ...read the rest of this article»