The data for June was generally positive, with a rebound in job growth and a surprise increase in business confidence supported by continued high levels of consumer confidence.
Investing based on headlines and political promises is rarely beneficial to one’s portfolio. It’s dispassionately investing for fundamentals that continue to drive the markets.
Analysis of factors and interest rates, which highlights that there are no consistent relationships between Value, Size, Momentum and interest rates in the US. Applies to high and low and increasing and decreasing rate environments.
We update our geopolitical outlook for the remainder of the year. This report is less a series of predictions as it is a list of potential geopolitical issues that we believe will dominate the international landscape for the rest of the year.
Stocks turned in a strong performance in the front half of 2017 despite geopolitical and monetary policy risks. The question, of course, is whether this performance trend can continue in the second half. I believe these two risks will cast an even longer shadow over markets going forward — making concepts such as diversification and risk management even more important for investors’ portfolios.
Keeping portfolio construction simple improves performance no matter what type of investment process you use. Our industry is in love with complexity, but complexity is costly to clients.
Over 90 advisors responded to a survey I conducted earlier this year with Advisor Perspectives. Here are the important insights into which activities help find new business for RIAs and IBDs.
Russ discusses why momentum, which has thrashed value this year, could struggle in the second half.
Investor confidence in the global outlook for monetary policy, economic growth and inflation has kept volatility contained. Can it continue? We think the risk of a destabilizing policy error is low if central banks remain cognizant of global financial conditions.
The macro data from the past month continues to mostly point to positive growth. On balance, the evidence suggests the imminent onset of a recession is unlikely.
In my many conversations with investors and industry peers about factor investing, one topic seems to always come up: factor investing timing. I’ve had recent discussions on this topic with a central bank whose managers need to think about preserving capital and with a more nimble RIA team which explicitly wants to use timing to pursue incremental returns.
The second quarter of 2017 closely mirrored the first. Global markets continued positive returns for many strategic domestic and global equity investors.
As outflows hit U.S.-focused equity mutual funds, international and emerging market stock funds are seeing massive inflows, bolstering strong share price performance of overseas markets this year. Despite the investor rush abroad, plenty of upside could remain.
You may have heard about bitcoin. Spurred on by breathtaking price runups, some clients may even have asked you if they should invest in them, or if it’s safe to buy them and use them to make payments. Most likely you dismissed the whole thing as some sort of a tulip bubble. But it’s not as simple as that.
Valuations and regulations are among the trends that we’re watching in this industry.
The first half of 2017 is shaping up to be unequivocally brutal for value-oriented rebalancing strategies. Wired to avoid pain, we humans know it’s very tempting to ask whether a model or philosophy is broken, especially the moment it dashes expectations.
In August 2016, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) wrote a research note characterizing risk parity as one of the central causes of equity market losses in late 2015. The note had all the hallmarks of a compelling plot line, replete with weapons of mass destruction, billion-dollar bets, and evil villains.
As the father of two Millennials (ages 27 and 25), I pay a great deal of attention to articles and studies on this largest generation of 75.4 million Americans. Given the sheer size of this generation and its vast effect on the economy for decades to come, we should all be paying attention to trends within this massive group.
Bob Rodriguez, FPA’s now-retired portfolio manager, earned many awards and distinctions during his 33-year career. In this interview, he talks about the role of the Fed in the price-setting mechanism. “When the markets finally do break, as they always have historically, ETFs and index funds will be destabilizing influences,” he says. Please visit FPA Advisors at booth 123 at Schwab IMPACT.
The mood among investors in Europe is generally positive in spite of mixed cyclical and secular factors influencing the economies and the markets there. The cyclical forces are dominated by a better business tone across the continent.
Disruptive forces are wreaking havoc across the global business world. But not all disruption is fatal. Lots of companies are facing the threat—and thriving. We think they deserve more credit than investors are giving them.
MSCI has taken a cautious approach to A share inclusion that encourages China to increase foreign investor access and ultimately ability to redeem and repatriate funds in exchange for greater future index weightings. It’s a sensible plan.
This week, I’d like to draw to a conclusion my series of notes from Mauldin’s 2017 Strategic Investment Conference. The topics ranged from geopolitical to global macro to specific investment ideas. One of my all-time favorite economists is David Rosenberg. Today I offer my high-level bullet point notes from his presentation.
As we observe events in realms such as financial markets, politics, or weather, we tend to form beliefs — be they explicit or implicit beliefs — about cause and effect, or whether the events were positive or negative, good or bad. Science has formalized this process: testing a hypothesis with empirical data. One of the tradeoffs when evaluating beliefs in light of evidence, or a hypothesis in light of data, is the type of error we would prefer if our beliefs turn out to be wrong. In the investment realm, this bias can affect our beliefs and behaviors, such as our tolerance for risk and our allocation choices. Several examples will help illustrate this point.
Recently the word “they” has surfaced with the media; THEY are influencing elections, THEY colluded with the Russians, THEY are selling U.S. dollars, THEY are manipulating markets, THEY are buying bonds, and a week and a half ago THEY sold the tech stocks causing sort of a minicrash as whispers of a “bubble” careened down the canyons of Wall Street.
I work for a large organization that has very poor leadership. We lack direction, communication and motivation from the very top down to the level of my manager.
There is a small but growing community of advisors who are leaving behind the old ways of picking managers in an effort to give their clients something they can’t get on their own or from a robo-advisor.
Fed hikes rates again, even as inflation falls further from target and financial conditions continue to ease. Smooth sailing ahead? Beware the leverage risks building below the surface.
The Fed does not have to make guesses about exactly what is required to normalize its balance sheet, except to the extent that it ignores a century of evidence.
Ttoday we’ll have a little Minsky refresher and look at some recent danger signs. And I predict that we will soon see Minsky mentions popping up everywhere.
All of a sudden the Fed got a little tougher. Perhaps the success of the hit movie Wonder Woman has inspired Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen to discard her prior timidity to show us how much monetary muscle she can flex when the time comes for action.
When investors rely on any particular model all the time—and CAPE is often that model—fatigue inevitably sets in. We believe that a better approach for meeting future spending needs is to blend portfolios based on different models of return expectations.
Last week's General Election in the United Kingdom was a disaster for the new conservative government of Prime Minster Theresa May. Having called the unnecessary "snap" elections in order to strengthen her political hand, the result actually reduced the number of seats held by the conservatives and delivered large gains to the opposition Labour party, which had seemed in disarray just a few months ago.
Healthcare continues to generate political controversy. So should investors stay away? Absolutely not. What’s important is to target companies that are positioned to deliver long-term growth no matter what happens to the US healthcare system.
Munis sold off in the wake of Trump’s election victory, but have been clawing their way back up as investors glean the difficult paths ahead for tax reform and infrastructure spending.
Many investors seem to be stuck in the middle of the false dichotomy between active and passive investing. At RBA, we argue it’s much more important for investors to ascertain which active or passive portfolio to buy and when to own it.
Each year Americans spend huge sums preparing to transition their assets to their heirs, engaging high-powered estate and tax planners who set up complex vehicles like family limited partnerships, life insurance, charitable remainder, charitable lead and various other kinds of trusts. Yet, despite the best efforts of top-notch professionals, the majority of plans fail. Why?
You could say I’m hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. I advise investors to do the same. No one can say what the future holds, and it’s prudent to have a portion of your portfolio in gold, gold stocks and short-term, tax-free municipal bonds, all of which have a history of performing well in volatile times.
We think there are ample catalysts for ongoing corporate earnings growth. Growth appears to be broadening to more cyclical parts of the economy, such as manufacturing, as well as outside the U.S. The political climate – including the outcome of the remaining elections across Europe and President Donald Trump’s political agenda – is evolving. We think it will be difficult to predict Trump’s next move, but think tax reform is likely to remain on the agenda this year.
The financial markets continued to absorb major news events with surprising ease last week. Be it the tragedies in the U.K., the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, or the weakness in Friday's employment data, the stock and bond markets both continued to edge higher. Investors seem to have become conditioned toward individual isolated disappointments all while the bigger picture is toward one of global economic growth and relative stability.
My firm, AthenaInvest, has conducted extensive research on the use of behavioral factors to estimate expected returns and, in turn, to make market-rotation and beta-exposure investment decisions. The following article outlines our behavioral approach and compares the results to a passive benchmark.
Who is better at value investing: robots or people? How have robots – the quantitatively-driven passive funds that hold, for example, low price-to-book stocks – fared against actively managed value mutual funds?
Overall, my impression remains that the market is in the process of tracing out the blowoff finale of the third speculative financial bubble since 2000. Still, as is true for the market cycle as a whole, the broad outline of this top formation is likely to be shaped by three factors: 1) valuations, which primarily affect total market returns over a 10-12 year horizon, as well as the magnitude of potential losses over the completion of the market cycle; 2) the uniformity or divergence of market internals across a broad range of stocks and security-types, which remains the most reliable measure we’ve identified of the psychological preference of investors toward speculation or risk-aversion (when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it); and 3) overextended market action highlighting extremes of speculation or fear - in the advancing portion of the market cycle, these are best identified by syndromes of overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions.
The macro data from the past month continues to mostly point to positive growth. On balance, the evidence suggests the imminent onset of a recession is unlikely. That said, housing starts grew only 1% in the past year. Permits are up only 2%. Moreover, employment growth has been decelerating, from over 2% last year to 1.6% now. It's not alarming but it is noteworthy that expansions weaken before they end, and slowing employment growth is a sign of some weakening. Finally, real retail sales excluding gas is in a decelerating trend. In April, growth was just 1.6% after having grown at more than 4% in 2015. Personal consumption accounts for about 70% of GDP so weakening retail sales bears watching closely.
There is no question that Asians are following the political developments in the United States closely, because America is a critical factor in the economies of the region. I was asked almost everywhere whether Trump would be impeached and I told questioners it was unlikely.
Seniors and their families approach this milestone with a mix of pride and trepidation. Pride arises from the achievement of heightened status within the community of educated women and men. But there is trepidation about what lies ahead at the next level.
In the era after the Financial Crisis, pundits, investment commentators, and the media falsely maintained a constant proclamation that interest rates were just about to rise and that the collapse of the bond market was imminent. When the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) first lowered interest rates to 0%, the pundits proclaimed irresponsibility and that inflation would skyrocket.
Although frontier markets are a small subset of the emerging market universe, we think they represent an important constituency that offer some compelling potential opportunities. Here, I've invited my colleague Carlos Hardenberg, senior vice president and director of frontier markets strategies at Templeton Emerging Markets Group, to outline some of the opportunities he sees in these dynamic markets and debunk some of the urban myths..
Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050.
Adam Butler introduces a simple but novel innovation for modeling equity market valuations. There are reasons to believe average valuations should rise through time in response to changes in market structure. We discuss the conditions that might lead to higher valuations through time, and present a model to account for it.
