I look at the markets every single day; that’s my job. Many of my clients don’t, which has been especially good this year. However, I know that many peeked at their September 30th statements a few weeks ago and felt gloomy due to the declines that we all saw. Because of that, I wanted to
The radio and television, filled with bad news: high inflation, war, social unrest over race, polarized politics, etc. I’m not talking about today, though: I’m talking about the year 1968. Americans were going through really bad times 54 years ago. In many cases, far worse than today. On this day in 1968, the Dow Jones
It’s that time again in the cycle of the stock market that I’m hearing more and more fearfulness from people due to the market volatility and the frenzied news coverage of it. I’ve been revisiting some other times when I’ve written commentaries about similar times, like this article from 2018, this one from 2016, and
This is a question I get asked a lot, especially whenever there is volatility like there is right now. While I don’t know what’s going to happen today, or next week, or even next year, I can tell you that investing in stocks has proven to be the best way to beat inflation and grow
In 2021, the US stock market (both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average) returned over 20% (28.7% and 20.1% respectively); these are solely made up of large capitalization US stocks. If you also had some mid-cap and small-cap stocks in your portfolio, you did a lot worse (the Russell 2000 was up
A question that I’m fielding more and more lately is “what do you think about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.?” I have a long answer for this question. I am all about diversification, so if you want to put some money into crypto, I think that’s fine. However, I don’t believe that crypto is a
What a crazy year we just went through! Now that it is behind us, we can take some truths forward for long-term investing: Bad times do end: the S&P 500 ended the year up over 16%, even though it dropped nearly 34% in the 23 trading days from February 19th to March 23rd. Time in
Happy (almost) Halloween! I’m so happy about the pleasant, cold weather we are having, which makes it so nice to be outside again. The markets have held up pretty well over this last quarter even after the latest modest pullback. Perhaps the uncertainties caused by the virus and its related economic toll have dwarfed any
Although they may appear to be disconnected on the surface, and near-term outcomes are impossible to predict, they’re likely no more disconnected than usual. One of the more important considerations to keep in mind about financial markets is that they’ve always been forward looking. Economic data, by its nature and difficulty in tabulation, always reflects
The stock market ended the quarter yesterday up 20%, which was the best quarterly return seen in decades. This despite the pervasive news of COVID-19 infections, murders, riots, and violence. How is this possible? We started the quarter only a week removed from the low that happened on 3/23, and since the stock market is