May 5th Weekly Market Update At the beginning of the year, many investors believed analysts’ forecasts for a faster pace of earnings growth combined with lower valuations would lead to stocks in Europe and Japan outperforming U.S. stocks. Now those earnings forecasts...
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Run for the Roses
April 28th Weekly Market Update The Kentucky Derby is the longest running sports event in American history. Held the first Saturday in May, three-year-old thoroughbreds gather at Churchill Downs in Kentucky to compete over a blistering two minutes that ends with a...
The Big Bang Theory: Inflating the Stock Market
April 21st Weekly Market Update The Big Bang Theory, the most watched television comedy, is about a group of physicists and their aspiring actress friend from across the hall. The show often refers to theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper’s quest for a Nobel Prize in...
The Weakest Earnings Cycle in 55 Years
April 14th Weekly Market Update This has been the weakest earnings cycle in 55 years. Every earnings cycle over the past 55 years has generated about a 7% annualized earnings per share (EPS) growth rate, when measured from peak to peak or from trough to trough. The...
Surprise: Cyclicals May Soon Come Back
April 7th Weekly Market Update So far this year, "defensive" stocks, those that are less sensitive to economic growth, such as utilities and health care stocks, have led the markets higher. However, we may soon be nearing a meaningful and durable shift in the...
Is the Party Over?
March 31st Weekly Market Update Consumers are the most confident they have been in over six years, according to last week’s widely watched consumer confidence report from the Conference Board. Investors have been feeling confident too. The high valuations of stocks in...
What Is Priced In?
March 24th Weekly Market Update The S&P 500 seems to have absorbed the prospect for rate hikes by the Federal Reserve (Fed) beginning as soon as the middle of next year reasonably well. While stocks slid on Friday, March 21, early in the day they hit a new...
March Madness in the Markets
Week of March 17th Weekly Market Update With the exception of last year’s steady rise, March has been maddening for investors. In three of the past four years the S&P 500 raced higher in March only to reverse all of those gains in a pullback of about 10% that...
Europe’s Big Bet
March 10th's Weekly Market Update Bond yields have fallen this year, but they began to rebound in the United States in the latest week as the glass-half-empty bond market realized the all-time high stock market may have it right. But this was not the case in most of...
Stocks Go From Great to Good as the Bull Turns Five
March 3rd Weekly Market Update The end of this week will make it five years since the second most powerful bull market in post-WWII history began. After five years, only the bull market that began on August 12, 1982 was stronger. It is not over yet. In fact, the bull...