Past Monthly Notes

February’s overarching market message: There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is not Reggie Hammond or Jerome Powell – it is Nvidia. “New” may be arguable to some, after all, NVDA was one of the Magnificent 7 that accounted for all the equity

Following the everything-rally that was the last two months of last year, performance across asset classes was mixed in January. Stronger than expected economic growth data and strong pushback from central bankers against the market’s overly

All years have surprises for the financial markets, in addition to what I’m hoping for you, I also hope that there are fewer surprises for markets this year than last.  2023 surprises were harder than usual on investment

Nines across the board! November delivered in spades this year and saved almost every money manager’s skin in the process. The November column below is a stack of 9’s for equity indexes – an unusually high correlation. And +4.5% for the bond

While normally placed at the end of the monthly letters, let’s flip the script this month and start out staring at the performance chart below. We’ll stare not in any contemplative way but rather to absorb the unadulterated message that 2023 has been

The month of September lived up to its dark reputation as the historically worst month of the year.  As you can see on the performance chart below, it was the worst month so far this year by more than double. And when combined with August,

Welcome back! Wherever you traveled to or even stayed home, I hope you had the opportunity to mentally get away and re-charge for the second (shorter) half of the year. Personally, I find re-entry after vacations to be challenging. The market

Investors’ feelings toward stocks (market sentiment) remained positive in July. A drop in inflation and resilient GDP data buoyed those feelings – maybe overly so. Stocks did well across styles and around the world. The 3.21% gain in the S&P 500

Since this is your June report, let’s depart from the usual monthly view and look back and ahead by halves of the year. The year began with almost record pessimism and consensus expectations for a late year recession, a decline in corporate earnings,

Except for 5 U.S. companies, May would have looked just like February in the chart below – a column of red. Except for what is now called the AI complex: the five companies with leading edge artificial intelligence software and hardware (Apple,