Market Updates

2020 is halfway over, and I hate to wish time away, but I think most folks are glad to see it over with. Remarkably, with all the turmoil, the S&P 500 closed out the first half with a loss of only about 3%, so if you had been backpacking through Europe with no access to…

  I’ve seen a lot in 27 years in the investment business, but I don’t recall anything like this. This was one of the fastest, if not THE fastest, bear market declines in history, followed by one of the fastest retracements ever. The pullback was not without reason, as earnings expectations for S&P 500 companies…

  Man, what a month! March came in like a bear, and went out like a bear. It was one of the most astounding and frustrating markets I have ever dealt with in 27 years as a financial advisor/investment officer. One of the more amazing things, from a markets standpoint, is how quickly everything moved.…

    As I write this, the stock market has triggered a trading halt due to the poor opening trades on Monday. This doesn’t happen often, but the idea is to stop the mass-selling that is, in my opinion, often induced by computer trading programs and not by people hitting the “sell button.” At any…

January reintroduced volatility to the stock market, as concerns of the coronavirus caused investors to rethink their positions. It is becoming more apparent that the disruption caused by the virus (factory shutdowns, travel bans, etc.) may cause a reduction of global growth in 2020. Growth was already projected to be tepid, so this certainly has…

Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were great! The investment team at Signature Wealth was busy working on your behalf, trying to close out a successful 2019. We did what we could to mitigate capital gains, but there were a lot of them, so you may see some higher numbers than you’re accustomed to…

  My November market update has been a little slow to develop because, well, I’ve been waiting for things to develop. I really feel like I could photocopy last month’s update and send it back out. We’re still talking about politics and trade wars, but it seems as though the general sentiment is a bit…

  As the fourth quarter of 2019 began, volatility in financial markets has ticked up a little bit as worries seemed to intensify, then dissipate, only to have intensify again over a number of factors. Manufacturing has slowed, oil prices bounced around after the attack in Saudi Arabia, and impeachment talks have heated up. However,…

  August lived up to its historic reputation as one of the worst-performing months of the year for the stock market, as the S&P 500 index fell by about 1.5% last month, basically erasing July’s gains. Interestingly, for as great as 2019 has been for the S&P 500, the index is only up about 3%…

We got a break from tariff talk recently, but it was replaced by talk of the yield curve, unfortunately. The 2 are probably related, as concerns about tariffs, and Hong Kong, and Russia, have caused some stock owners to sell and reposition to bonds. When bonds are bought, their yields go down, helping to create…