The economic calendar is very light and interrupted by the mid-week holiday. We can always see volatility when volume is low, but many market participants will be on an extended holiday. This includes much of the A-team punditry, but someone will be left to fill the airtime.
While some cook with a dash of this and a dash of that, the best chefs follow a recipe to a T. Without abiding by a set of instructions, you’re at risk of inconsistent results or worse, omitting steps altogether. Sugarless baked goods rank right up there with eating cardboard. And too much of even basic spices can ruin any dish. Overcooked foods can be dry or burnt. Undercooked foods can cause illness. Clearly, following a recipe precisely is essential.
The Key to Avoiding Obvious Mistakes Understanding how to value a business is the key to avoiding making obvious mistakes when purchasing or selling common stocks. When you know what your investment is worth, the market cannot take advantage of your gullibility.
Global growth is decelerating. Policy-makers in developed economies are gearing up for yet more fiscal spending. While fiscal spending may support growth for a short time, and for longer if very carefully applied, it will not change the growth outlook fundamentally.
U.S. economic activity is expected to remain mixed in 2020, with moderate strength in consumer spending and general softness in business fixed investment and manufacturing.
In part 2 of this series I focused on how to value slow and moderately growing businesses. In this article, Part 3, I will shift my focus on how to value faster growing companies (growth stocks).
Fear among bond investors is focused on rising rates, but Jeffrey Gundlach says you should worry about something more sinister. In his webcast yesterday, he also offered his updated 2020 presidential election prediction.
One of the best ways to “supercharge” your gold position is with precious metal royalty and streaming companies. Think Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, Royal Gold and others.
The recent half-cycle has been admittedly difficult. My bearish response to historically-reliable “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes proved detrimental in the face of zero-interest rate policies that amplified speculation, and we’ve adapted our discipline to give priority to our measures of market internals – which we use to gauge that speculation.
The venerable investor Warren Buffett has a real knack of putting complex concepts and ideas into simple and easily understood terms. In my opinion, his quote, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get” is one of the more profound and important statements he has ever uttered.
As investors ponder the prospects for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Franklin Templeton Emerging Markets Equity’s Bassel Khatoun and Salah Shamma take stock of the investment landscape. They highlight some of the market developments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that have caught their attention.
To get the attention of smart beta investors in a crowded marketplace, some smart beta providers are laying claim to performance that appears implausible. So what is plausible? We look at historical live performance to answer this important question.
Market valuation is always a factor; but often misunderstood is the vastness of the spectrum of metrics, and the sentiment nature of valuation.
As a seasoned and grizzled veteran of the financial services industry for now going on 50 years, the most commonly asked questions I have received, and still do to this day, are: when to buy and when to sell a stock?
As Thanksgiving comes to an end, and the busy holiday shopping season begins, here are some need-to-know numbers you may have missed from this past week.
Flying in the face of negative economic news, U.S. factories picked up steam for the third straight month in November.
Although the PMI report is encouraging, there’s still reason to remain somewhat cautious long-term. The latest accounting of global debt levels was just released, and the news might be so bad that it’s good—for gold prices, at least.
Should just being “employed” make people/workers happy? On one level, any job is better than no job. But we also derive much of our identities and self-esteem from our work. If you aren’t happy with it, you’re probably not happy generally. Unhappy people can still vote and are often easy marks for shameless politicians to manipulate. Their spending patterns change, too. So it ends up affecting everyone, even those who are happy.
Let’s look here for a handful of unfair advantages to gain over the competition in 2020. These are things that are not hard to implement, which will help you become more efficient, gain new clients or stand out from your peers.
China’s economy is slowing by any measure, while Australia’s central bank takes rates to record lows.
The media’s inequality narrative completely ignores the fact that the global demonstrations are, at the end of the day, in response to government incompetence and failed socialist policies.
A correction is coming, just don't tell the bulls just yet. A technical look at the rapid reversion of sentiment from bearish back to bullish. With more extreme extensions of technical indicators, it suggests a correction is likely over the next few weeks in the stockmarket.
As China's economy continues its shift toward services and consumption, small and medium-sized businesses are accelerating this transformation.
The venture capital industry has created a robust pipeline of new public companies, but in our view discipline is the key to finding the best opportunities.
A number of factors spurred improved investor sentiment in emerging markets over the past month, including an interest-rate cut from the US Federal Reserve. Franklin Templeton Emerging Markets Equity outlines the news and events shaping market moves during October, and the reasons why the team is optimistic about the coming year.
One of the pitfalls of identifying market conditions using labels like “bull market” and “bear market” is that the accuracy of those labels can only be verified in hindsight.
This is an absolute monarchy we’re talking about, after all, and so global investors should not expect to have any shareholder rights. Aramco’s board of directors will have a fiduciary duty to MBS and any future monarch, not to investors. This has some serious implications.
Wealth taxes are politically resonant but difficult to enact. Oil prices are steady despite disruptions, while the EU’s food exports face tariffs.
It’s been a largely solid run for U.S. stocks in 2019. With the year now in its final quarter, Tony DeSpirito addresses three questions on investors’ minds.
Read Harold Evensky's latest Newsletter.
Global equity markets continued to face uncertainties during the third quarter of this year, but by and large, they remained resilient.
In October the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lowered its 2019 GDP forecast to 3.0% from 3.2% in July. This represents a marked slowing from global growth of 3.8% in 2017. The primary driver of the slowdown has been a retrenchment in global trade and business investment in response to the ratcheting up of trade tariffs since early 2018.
The pitfalls and opportunities we see in high yield markets highlight the importance of active portfolio management, rigorous credit analysis, and taking a cautious and selective approach.
The economic calendar is a light one in sharp contrast to last week’s. That was a good time to observe the market reaction to a wide range of news. Now is the time for investors to use the information.
This week’s Fed meeting started a pause in overnight rate cuts. But what will happen if yields on the long end move up?
Investors may assume they have adequate exposure to gold because they’re invested in a commodities fund. But many of these funds have a relatively small weighting in gold, and so their gold exposure is much smaller than they realized.
Welcome to Emerging Markets! A huge array of economies all at various stages of development and maturity with different capital market structures. Add in as many different currencies, political frameworks and policy stances and the result is a complex, diverse, evolving and inefficient market universe.
This is one of those weeks when there is seemingly a lot of news, but much of it – like the ongoing effort to impeach President Trump – is just simply “noise” that is not worthy of discussion herein. As a result, we’ll hopscotch through several topics of interest today that I think are worth talking about.
We focus on fundamentals such as moving averages and standard deviation. We follow leading indicators such as the purchasing manager’s index (PMI) and consumer confidence index. These factors are many times more effective than the headline news at shining a light on the right path.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.
Are equity managers reconsidering their exposure to more expensive growth stocks? Check out the latest insights from our manager research team.
For bond allocations, think twice before reflexively allocating to index ETFs.
The U.S. economy is in a “good place” and the baseline outlook is “favorable,” according to Richard Clarida. To further allay fears, he called the much-discussed September 17 action by the Fed in the repo market a “technical, central bank 101 operation, not to be conflated with large-scale QE operations.”
I have always loved Boston. My first recollection of the city was when my parents and I used to fly into it spend a night, or two, and then head for our house in Nantucket. Boy, I wish I still had that house. In later life we use to visit the city to see portfolio managers with Fidelity of particular interest.
I remain bullish going forward despite signs that the world could be facing its worst economic slowdown since the financial crisis. The reason for my bullishness is simple: Bad news is good news.
Chinese equities were flat in September. A-shares posted slight gains while small caps posted slight losses.
Brian Smedley is head of macroeconomic and investment research at Guggenheim Partners. In this interview, he explains why his team is forecasting a recession in mid-2020 and how advisors should position portfolios in response.
The Treasury Department is expected to report that the federal budget deficit for FY19 (which ended in September) fell short of $1 trillion. That’s a lot of money, especially with an economy running full tilt. However, the government currently doesn’t have any problem borrowing.
Psychology is the reason most investors fail to keep up with the markets, and why contrarian strategies have turned in consistently superior performance over time. This same inability to understand psychology is often why academics don’t incorporate its use and instead stay with what may be flawed modern portfolio theory.
