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Rapid Refund Forgive us for shamelessly borrowing a well-known income tax advertisement, but it is the season for taxes, and the stock markets gave us something of a Rapid Refund in the first quarter of 2019.  As shown in the chart above, virtually every asset class started the year strong, shaking off much of the […]

Reality Check The 4th quarter of 2018 was a brutal reminder of the inevitably uncertain nature of the equity markets.  2018 was shaping up to be another good year for US stocks.  We were poised for ten straight years of the S&P 500 Total Return Index recording positive annual gains, which had never happened before.  The

Historically Rare Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ended his remarks at the 60th Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics on October 2, 2018, with this statement. “This historically rare pairing of steady, low inflation and very low unemployment is testament to the fact that we remain in extraordinary times. Our ongoing policy

Bye, Buy Bonds? Rumor has it that the long bull bond market is over.  The Federal Reserve projects that it will continue to raise interest rates.  The nation is essentially fully employed.  Inflation is creeping op over 2%.  The stock market has been hot, even though it has taken a much-needed break recently.  As interest

Pause Before you Panic (or How to Cope With a Looney Tunes Market) If watching the market over the last few trading days has you feeling like Wile E Coyote right after he unknowingly runs off the cliff, you are not alone.  Way back on January 26, 2018 we were hitting record highs in the

‘Breaking News’ may not be news, or breaking As we have said before, we usually have Bloomberg television running in the background in our offices. Earlier today, they showed a Breaking News clip of President Trump signing a proclamation that Monday, January 15, 2018, will be Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and declaring it a

Swimming Naked Warren Buffet famously wrote in his 2001 Chairman’s letter to the Berkshire Hathaway investors that “you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”  This was right after many investors had gotten greedy and put too much of their portfolio into high flying growth stocks in the late 1990s,

Regarding the Equifax Data Breach Equifax has recently reported a data breach that could have affected up to 143 million American consumers.  While we do not use Equifax in our business, if you have a credit card, car loan or mortgage you may have still been affected.  There is a quick check site set up

What is (not) up with small cap stocks? We want to make a point, but we should provide a bit of background first… The most common benchmark used to measure the performance of small cap stocks is the Russell 2000 Index. It is comprised of the smallest 2000 stocks of the Russell 3000 index, which

The Inflation Debation Ok, ‘debation’ is not a real word. It is our attempt to combine ‘debate’ with ‘speculation’. It also rhymes with inflation, and brings into focus the current debate and speculation on inflation. If the internet were to get hold of this word, we would become sick of it very quickly. The Fed’s