Is Washington, D.C. broken? The global rating agency, Fitch, certainly believes so. On Aug. 1, the company downgraded the credit of the United States one notch, from AAA to AA+. It is only the second time in history that our nation’s credit has been downgraded, the first in August 2011 by S&P. In its explanation, […]
Read More
One of the more nuanced dynamics in the stock market this year is the wide range of performance among various indices. The technology-led Nasdaq has been the clear winner for the first six months of 2023, up 32%, far outpacing both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the much broader S&P 500, which are up […]
Read More
The first quarter of 2023 ended with most major stock market averages in positive territory. The tech-heavy NASDAQ led the way with a whopping 16.8% return, which means growth investing has roared back after a miserable 2022 in which the NASDAQ posted a -33% return. The disparity between performance in market averages for the first […]
Read More
Analysis by Jeff Liguori for BusinessWest.com Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a California-based lender, was taken over by the FDIC due to fears of insolvency. The process was one of the swiftest in history. Silicon Valley Bank was a niche banking franchise founded in 1983 to fill a growing need in the financial-services marketplace. The primary customers […]
Read More
How challenging was 2022 for investors in the US? Stocks and bonds have not produced negative returns of this magnitude, in the same calendar year, for more than fifty years. The closest parallel to the previous twelve months is the late 1960s/early 1970s, because the volatility is almost entirely due to inflation. That was a […]
Read More
It is the ideal term for the current market environment. It seems as though each time markets attempt an advance, the bottom falls out. Maybe it really is difficult to time these things… Since our last note in the third week of June, where we highlighted extreme bearishness among investors, stocks rallied almost 18% into […]
Read More