This past weekend I watched a clip from Bloomberg with an interview of a fellow in Ireland who made his first investment ever. He took his entire $300 savings and bought two shares of GameStop. His rationale was that someone had given him a tip. I hope it works out for him. Now don’t get […] Read the full article…
Stock market uncertainty is as high as I can ever recall. The pandemic, economic shut-down and civil unrest have all hit at the same time. Still, the US stock market is within 5% of it’s all-time high from February. How can this be possible? Puzzling. Let’s break it down. Below I outline the top 3 […] Read the full article…
Dan Ivascyn is the Chief Investment Officer and co-manages the Pimco Income Fund with Alfred Murata. Mr. Ivascyn, along with Mr. Murata, was named fund manager of the year by Morningstar in 2013. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that it is time to ‘take a more cautious and defensive strategy’ with the $113B Pimco Income Fund. […] Read the full article…
Jeremy Siegel, Wharton finance professor, likes to use the analogy of a ‘tug of war’ when it comes to the impact earnings and interest rates have on stock prices. He tells his students that the numerator (earnings) and the denominator (interest rates) are in a ‘tug of war’. The analogy is playing out in a […] Read the full article…
According to the Morningstar Direct U.S. Asset Flow Update published June 15th, US taxable bond funds had a net inflow of $15.4 billion in May. The report indicates that flows for bond funds were mostly negative last year. Beginning in February this year, flows turned positive after the market volatility in January. The report also […] Read the full article…
In part one of this series we reviewed the basic composition of the Vanguard Health Care Mutual Fund (ticker VGHAX) using Morningstar’s website. In this article, we will look at details related to the fundamentals of the fund as well as performance of the fund relative to benchmarks. Before moving on, I wanted to highlight […] Read the full article…
Given recent market volatility, I had a number of questions come up in conversations with clients. For this Market Outlook, I decided that a Questions and Answers format might be useful. Why are the Equity Markets Volatile? The S&P500 stock index total return is down 2.9% year to date. I think for a lot of […] Read the full article…
Getting a good sense for risk and return and how it is measured is vital to understanding your investments. In this article, I will break down the key measures of risk and return that really matter. By the end, you should have a good sense for these without having ever to actually dig into the details of how the statistics work or do any calculations. […] Read the full article…
There is a good deal of talk about when and how aggressively the Fed will raise interest rates. This has caused many including, Eric Rosengren, President of the Boston regional branch of the US Central Bank, to go on record as saying of the current 2.15% 10 year rate as, “not a rate that is going to be sustainable in a completely normalized economy, which does imply the 10-year rate at some point in the normalization process will not be as low as it currently is.” (source: MarketWatch). Let’s unpack the issue here in a bit more detail. […] Read the full article…