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Ducks on water If you ever watch ducks floating in a pond it looks like they are doing just that – floating.  In reality, their little webbed feet could be churning like crazy under the water.  You simply can’t tell from looking at them.  Similarly, the US economy seems to be gliding peacefully along this […]

Tariffs and Tumult We wanted to get the Quarterly Performance Reports out quickly this month.  We are only about ten days into April and the index numbers from this past quarter are already looking stale and dated.  Obviously, there is a lot of volatility in the markets, driven almost entirely by the tariffs and the

Trump 2.0 We usually try to think of a theme to frame our quarterly discussions about the markets and the economy.  This time around, nothing trumps Trump.  He won the election, and the Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate.  They have an opportunity to make sweeping changes, and the early signs are

Please, sir, I want some more. The Oliver Twist fans out there will probably recognize this line from the classic Charles Dickens novel.  Young Oliver requested some more gruel on his first day at the orphanage.  He didn’t get more; in fact, he got a nasty reprimand and was treated like an ingrate and a

The Three Rs Growing up, there was an expression that I heard often and never really paid close attention to.  The expression was that kids went to school to learn the three Rs – ‘reading, writing and rithmatic’.  I guess I never saw it written out, and for many years this just seemed like common

Hurry Up and Wait Towards the end of 2023, many economists and market watchers were expecting that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates 4-6 times in 2024.  The Fed itself even projected that 2-3 rate cuts were likely, but consistently maintained that any changes to interest rates would be data dependent.  Many expected that

A Matter of Timing – Fifteen Years and Counting People love a good adage.  “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”  “A penny saved is a penny earned.”  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  “Strike while the iron

Fed Fund Rates – A Historical Perspective It is probably not a shock to anyone that we are a little bit nerdy here at Bryant & Brannock.  We like math and numbers and statistics.  It is fascinating stuff.  Really.  So, it is no surprise then that we spent much of our day today poring over

A Year of Promise We are currently three weeks into 2023 and, so far, it seems to be carrying some of the positive momentum from the last quarter of 2022.  Last year as a whole was brutal, with losses in virtually every asset class, but we did start to see signs of life in the

Casting a Wide Net (and Coming Up Empty) At Bryant & Brannock, we are big believers in diversification.  We think it is the most effective and reliable tool we have to help mitigate the risks of investing.  We build our portfolios with a diverse set of asset classes and different sectors of the market specifically