What a crazy twelve months we have had!  Almost unbelievable, from the pandemic lows to new market highs.  In fact, after the March 2020 lows, it has been a straight uphill climb for the markets.  We now find euphoria replacing the rampant fear of the pandemic. Markets tend to be as emotional as they are […]

New year, new President, new Congress. What will 2021 hold for us after such a tumultuous 2020? Given so much uncertainty in our world today, we understand the allure of making market predictions. The problem with predictions over the short-term though is that reality is illogical and random. No one, that we are aware of, […]

It can be a struggle poring over charts and data, trying to find something poignant, timely and with some punch at each quarters end. Sometimes new substantive material can be hard to come by, especially when the deafening roar of “news” from so many multi-channel sources saturates people with daily narratives, some true, and some […]

So it seems the most persistent myth of the stock market, and most common intellectual mistake in trying to understand the stock market, is to look at the real economy and project it upon the market. In fact, it would seem that the financial press makes a full-time job of maintaining the myth of that […]

It’s hard not to reminisce about the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 – 09, while sitting at our desks reading headlines and trying to make sense of news flows. All the while, considering the very real implications to businesses who we have exposure to in both the debt and equity markets. Much like those crisis […]

Many years ago, when learning the craft, I heard an old, experienced portfolio manager say that the best trades you would make were the ones that made you the queasiest when you hit the buy button. Nothing could more accurately sum up what I think is our reality today. It is hard to get excited […]

At almost every market juncture it seems a seismic shift occurs. This decade long bull market has been defined by the outperformance of growth stocks1 and passive strategies.2 We think the cracks are beginning to show as the market shifts, marked by the cry of sick and dying unicorns. The recent poster child for this […]

As a young portfolio manager my world was filled with the heroes in Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal. One of the oft-quoted was Marty Zweig, truly a legend on the Street, leaving a legacy of admirers and young strategists he trained. As I recall, his most famously quoted words were in fact, “Don’t fight […]

After the worst December since the throes of the Great Depression, we followed with an almost equally strong first quarter, the strongest since the 1980s. Toward the end of the fourth quarter and into the beginning of the first quarter, we were buyers of equities, where appropriate. Our convictions were rewarded with several companies announcing […]

The worst December since 1931. As an active market participant, it is hard to remember much else about 2018. Not even the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 produced as big of a sell-off in December as we experienced last year.