Quite often I say that I don’t like the Dow Jones Industrial Average as an indicator of large capitalization stocks in the United States, instead preferring the S&P 500. Here’s something that happened last week that will give you a little more insight to that opinion: Last week there was a change in the composition
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a commentary that touched on bitcoins. However, today an acquaintance of mine, Ryan Long, CFA and Director of Investments for FocusPoint Solutions, wrote this great piece: What to make of the rise in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Bitcoin has been in the news again, with exponential gains in
Happy December! I wanted to write about one thing, but instead I’m using alliteration to talk about the three things I’ve been questioned about multiple times over the last week: 1) Bubbles: are we in one? 2) Bills: what is the effect of the pending tax bill that Congress is trying to pass? 3) Bitcoins:
When the market does bad, questions of “are we doomed” are prevalent. When it does well, comments of “we’re too high” are heard repeatedly. Now that we’re been on a long upwards trend, the question of “Where are we in the business cycle and are we any closer to recession?” is the talk. The answer
It seems like only yesterday that I wrote an article about how you should ignore the media hype about the record number down days in a row (nine), and here we are with 9 up days in a row. On top of that, we have seen a steady climb in the market for months now. Since
As I write this, the headline on CNBC is “S&P posts longest losing streak in nearly 36 years“. This is true, and here is the chart of the last 9 days: Down 3% in 9 days. Bad, but not terrible. How so? For some perspective, let’s take a look at some other time frames
As the market swings up and down wildly this year, and because we’re in a presidential election year, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about where the market and the economy are going. So, I thought I’d write a quick piece to give my opinion about where we are in the big picture. The
It has not been a fun start to 2016. In the last 5 weeks, the stock market is down 9.25% as of this afternoon. We are almost back to where we were last August when the market fell about 1800 points in ten days. This isn’t good, but it’s also not the full picture as
The last few weeks have been rough, especially the last few days, for the stock market. Several things have caused the recent unrest: a major slowdown in China, unconfirmed rumors about a hydrogen bomb in Korea, and the Saudi/Iran conflict are at the forefront. Regarding China, it’s important to note that 12% of our economy
As the year draws to a close, I wanted to go over some of the high (and low) points. The bottom line is that 2015 was a tough year to be a diversified investor: Commodities and the energy sector are down sharply due to oil dropping by about 32% year to date International emerging markets