Tag Archives: growth stocks

The headlines last Friday were ominous: Inflation Hits Highest Level in Nearly 40 Years Inflation is Painfully High… Groceries and Christmas Presents Are Going To Cost More Inflation is Soaring.. America’s Inflation Burst This morning on Face The Nation, Mohamed El-Erian, former Harvard endowment manager, former bond king apprentice, economist and the man who seems to have a permanent presence on CNBC, had this to say: The characterization of inflation as transitory...

A couple of weeks ago the 10 year Treasury note yield rose 16 basis points in the course of 5 trading days. That move was driven by near term inflation fears as I discussed last week. Long term inflation expectations were and are well behaved. I wrote nearly 2000 words last week about that change in inflation expectations and I’m so glad you took the time to read it. And now you can forget it because over the next four days all but 2 basis points of the move in the...

Bonds sold off again last week with the yield on the 10 year Treasury closing over 1.6% for the first time since early June. The yield is now down just 16 basis points from the high of 1.76% set on March 30. But this rise in rates is at least a little different than the fall that preceded it. When nominal rates fell from April through July, real rates fell right along with them. The nominal bond yield fell by 63 basis points and the 10 year TIPS yield fell by 57....

How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to take risk and experience higher returns. Investors who check their results frequently take less risk and perform worse. And that...

Until last week you hadn’t heard much about the bond market rally. I told you we were probably near a rally way back in early April when the 10 year was yielding around 1.7%. And I told you in mid-April that the 10 year yield could fall all the way back to the 1.2 to 1.3% range. The bond rally since April has been of the stealth variety, the financial press and market strategists dismissing every tick down in rates as nothing. It was a lonely trade to put on and yes...

The answer to the question, “What should I do to my portfolio today (this week, this month)? is almost always nothing. Humans, and especially portfolio managers, have a hard time believing that doing nothing is the right response….to anything…or nothing. We are programmed to believe that success comes from doing things, not not doing things. And so, often we look at markets on a day to day or week to week basis and think something of significance happened and we...

Last week was only four days due to the President’s day holiday but it was eventful. The big news of the week was the  spike in interest rates, which according to the press reports I read, “came out of nowhere”. In other words, the writers couldn’t find an obvious cause for a 14 basis point rise in the 10 year Treasury note yield so they just chalked it up to mystery. Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that rates have been rising for almost a year –...

There are numerous reasons to be optimistic about global equities in the coming year. Capital is plentiful; central banks in Europe, the United Kingdom, and some Asian economies have an easing bias; and the equity strategists on Credit Suisse’s Global Markets team believe the equity risk premium is higher than warranted. But there are risks, too, including heightened political risk, slowing Chinese growth, and threats to existing business models from technological disruption and Chinese...

The third quarter wasn’t kind to U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 fell 6.4 percent, with stocks battered by everything from fears over China’s growth slowdown and financial market collapse to uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In June, the consensus view on third-quarter earnings was a 1 percent decline. Heading into earnings season, that figure has been revised downward to a 5 percent decrease. With the fourth quarter underway, none of the issues that...