Commentary

To Infinity… And Beyond!! (Again?) As we write this, equity markets are ripping higher, with the SPX up nearly 5.5% on the day. The general consensus seems to be that the worst is well in the rearview mirror and the horizon has only sunshine and rainbows. The near unanimous view on this is, well… worrisome. Everyone expects and assumes that as soon as the “peak infection rate” has been achieved, things in the market will

Well That Escalated Quickly… It’s difficult to come up with something to say, other than “wow”. The S&P closed down 135 points or -4.4% for the largest point decline in history (Figure 1). First and foremost our timing of “neutral” stance could not have been worse (it happens). So take the “do as we allocate, not as we say approach” since we have weathered the market’s recent slide very well. In fact, our YTD returns

To Infinity… And Beyond!! The S&P 500 keeps chugging higher and higher, seemingly with no end in sight. It’s been more than 72 trading days without a 1% pullback and the basket of stocks recently traded at a ratio of 2.42 price/sales which surpassed the ultimate valuation peak of the S&P 500 during the market top in 2000 (see chart below). Now, that said, these valuations, extremes, and speculative manias (see Bitcoin) can extend for

3 Months Will Define 5 Years Today the S&P 500 closed down 45 points or -1.56% after a rather wild day with many interspersed attempts at getting back to unchanged. The last two weeks have been incredibly pivotal in markets since a bout of bad manufacturing data caused the market to sell off last week (where bad data is actually interpreted negatively), followed by a technical bounce, and a lackluster jobs report which sent stocks

The Slowing Housing Sector The reason we chose to look at this sector of the economy is threefold: 1). It was the catalyst[1] for the previous recession and financial crisis 2). The sector is not nominally impacted by the China trade war 3). It tends to show aging/topping before other sectors because of interest rate sensitivity We would like to emphasize the second point. There has been a lot of speculation and optimistic chatter about