Category: markets
Notes from the Investment Team
2017 was another banner year for investors. The total return (inclusive of dividends) for the S&P 500 was a gain of 22%. There were not any meaningful hiccups along the way; as shown in the chart below, the index posted positive returns in every single month of 2017. International stocks fared even...
How Investing Transformed Over the Century
I recently read a book on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The author thoroughly details the lives of some of the affluent passengers who were aboard the luxury liner’s final voyage. As I was learning about these “high net worth” people who lived one hundred years ago, I kept wondering about...
Where We Are in the Cycle
In the fourth-quarter newsletter, we discussed how we think about long-term equity return expectations. The purpose of the article was to explain how fundamental returns (driven by earnings growth) and speculative returns (driven by changes in valuation) collectively impact market prices. While...
Have we seen the beginning of the Great Rotation?
Over the past 35 years, interest rates on bonds have been in a gradual decline. The decline in interest rates has gone hand-in-hand with rising bond valuations since bond values move inversely to interest rates. Bond investors have thus enjoyed a long period of rising returns due to market...
Expectations for Future Equity Returns
The S&P 500 reported its eighth consecutive year of positive returns in 2016, a feat last achieved in the 1990’s. That winning streak appeared in question in early November, with the S&P 500 up roughly 2% for the year. As the U.S. Presidential election approached, the consensus among market...
The Reemergence of the Blue Chip Nifty Fifty
“A blue-chip stock is the stock of a large, well-established and financially sound company that has operated for many years. A blue-chip stock typically has a market capitalization in the billions, is generally the market leader or among the top three companies in its sector, and is more often than...
Navigating Macro Choppiness
At the 2016 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were asked about the impact of negative interest rates when valuing a business. Warren’s answer touched on the peculiarity of the current environment and how it impacts decision-making at Berkshire Hathaway....
Long-Term Thinking
The sideways market of 2015 became even more indecisive in the first quarter of 2016. The S&P 500 Index stumbled out of the gates, and was down more than 10% by early February. In the ensuing weeks, the Index made a strong turn higher, ending the first quarter up marginally. At quarter end, the...
The Silver Lining
Two thousand and fifteen was a challenging year for investors. Outside of some very large companies with high growth rates (Amazon and Facebook, among a few others), the majority of stocks in the S&P 500 ended the year with negative returns.
Search For Yield Continues
As with most investors, our goal is to maximize the total return that we receive from an investment (within a risk-adjusted framework). Total return is comprised of two components: 1)the income received (interest from fixed-income investments and dividends received on equity investments), and 2)...