Market Updates

The first quarter has wrapped up, with the S&P 500 finishing higher by nearly 6%, making it the fourth consecutive quarter of positive returns for the index. The underlying stocks remain very strong with almost all of S&P 500 stocks above their 200-day moving average, indicating a general uptrend for most stocks.  Underneath this strength…

After a pretty lethargic January (the S&P 500 was down about 1%), stock indices have rocketed upward so far in February.  The big news over the past few weeks has been the wild ride of some heavily-shorted stocks, although a lot of that activity seems to have settled down, for now. While the S&P 500…

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2021! I hope that this year brings to all of us less upheaval than the last. We were busy at the end of 2020, trying to reduce capital gains tax exposure for our clients.  There were a lot of gains last year, and surprisingly few losses, so you may…

November stock market returns were for the record books, as the S&P 500 rose nearly 12%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its best month since 1987, and the Russell 2000 was up 18% for its best month ever.  The announcements of 3 vaccines spurred a rotation into the most economically-sensitive areas of the market,…

Election Day has come and gone (my house is pleasantly quiet now that the political calls have stopped coming in!) and, although the results aren’t completely in, we have a much better feel for what government will probably look like for the next couple of years.  My first observation, while not directly stock market related,…

There is a lot of buzz around IPOs recently, the initial public offering of privately held companies that are becoming publicly owned.  It reminds me a lot of the IPO heyday of the late 1990s, which proved to be the end (for a few years, at least) of the tech boom.  The great companies survived,…

  Around my house, we’re starting to get ready–although very slowly–for the return to school for our kids.  We love summer, so it’s a bit sad that it’s coming to a close.  But, autumn is becoming my favorite season, since we’ll get a break from the heat and humidity and, with any luck, I’ll get…

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…