January 28, 2015
Yesterday's largish market pullback has caused many to wonder whether more trouble lies ahead.
As always, let's start with some context: At the end of the day yesterday, the market was down about 3 percent from its all-time high, which is nothing to worry about.
January 22, 2015
I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about 2014 portfolio performance. Investors are reviewing their results, comparing them with the performance of U.S. stocks, and asking the question in the headline: Why did my investments do badly last year?
January 20, 2015
Today, we’ll continue the “outside view” series on international investing with a look at the eurozone.
January 16, 2015
Ever since Christmas, the stock market has been trending downward, with the slide getting worse over the past week or so.
As I’ve mentioned multiple times, I generally don’t start to pay attention until we hit the 200-day moving average (which is now at around 1,966 for the S&P 500). But a couple of things have caught my notice lately.
January 2, 2015
This post was a popular read in October, so I’m rerunning it as a reminder that what’s good for Americans’ wallets in the short term can also be good for our economy in the long term.
Some time ago, I wrote that the changing supply-and-demand picture for oil would lead to further price declines. Well, I was right in terms of direction but wrong on timing—it’s happened much faster than I expected.
December 30, 2014
This post originally appeared about a year ago, in response to turbulence in emerging markets and a corresponding decline in U.S. markets.
Portfolio managers have several standby risk-reduction strategies they rely on—diversified asset allocation, regular rebalancing, and the occasional market timing tactic—to guard against large drawdowns. But do they really work? What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of these strategies?
December 16, 2014
On the heels of our premortem of the stock market in 2015, let's take a look at the market turbulence we experienced last week and yesterday.
The short version? There’s nothing to worry about yet.
December 15, 2014
Following up on last week’s post about the value of premortems, I thought I’d do one on the stock market for the coming year. We’ll imagine that a decline has happened and try to figure out how and why, with the goal of strengthening our positioning today.
November 14, 2014
Along with being aware of external problems, investors need to acknowledge one of the pending headwinds for the U.S. stock market: the potential for corporate profit margins to decline.
Today, I want to summarize a great analysis by Baijnath Ramraika and Prashant Trivedi, which suggests that margins can’t continue to climb.
