Recent Commentary

Corporate earnings season for Q1 is now about halfway completed. So far, modest expectations have been exceeded.  Coming in, investors expected a 6.3% drop in profits.  Now a 4.2% decline is expected.  Here are year-over-year earnings forecasts for the rest of 2023...

The S&P 500 had a solid month in March; up 3.5%.  But not everything rallied in March.  Small caps and mid-caps were down 3-5%.  Only 3 of 11 equity sectors are up March YTD.  And high quality stocks have been lagging all year as shown by the difference in performance...

THE WAR AGAINST INFLATION HITS A SPEED BUMP Six weeks ago we wrote in the January mid-month commentary that the Fed was winning the war against inflation.  If we look at their progress since last year’s peak inflation that is still true.  But January hit a snag. ...

An old adage on Wall Street is “don’t fight the Fed.”   Another one is “don’t fight the tape.”  The second rule seems to be a winning out in January.  Bulls and bears can argue about fundamentals (they always do) but both would agree that market technicals are turning...

  Equity investors do not have a lot to like, but that is always the case closer to market bottoms than tops. That doesn’t mean we have to rally in 2023, but just because positives are limited doesn’t mean we have to keep going lower either. The end of a bear market...

The stock market has been strong since early October.  The S&P 500 rallied 6.5% in October and is up 2.5% so far in November (through November 28th).  Although this is likely a bear market rally, something has changed in investors’ minds.  In the short term, investors...

After the market and sentiment hit a low on September 30, stocks had a fabulous October. The Dow surged 14.0% in October with the S&P 500 up 8.0%.  NASDAQ trailed but was up 3.9%.  It was the best month for the Dow since January 1976. The most impressive part of this...

  Here is our annual Q and A of questions most asked by clients: Q             When will the bear market in stocks end? A             It will be hard to know precisely when the bear market ends.  Unfortunately, they don’t ring a bell when the coast is clear. A...

In the second quarter, the decline in residential investment subtracted 0.7% from real GDP growth. The third quarter has started on a sour note:  July housing starts dropped nearly 20% from their cyclical peak in April. Home builder sentiment for August plunged to its...

More often than not, when the analysts expectations bar is set low for earnings season (like now), the S&P 500 rallies. Conversely, when the bar is set high heading into earnings season, the markets performance has been uneven. Coming into this earnings season,...