Insights

Of Pianos, Mattresses, and Light Switches - Why it is Especially Challenging to Manage Assets in this Environment

In negotiations, it can be valuable to create the impression that you are willing to take bigger risks than your adversary.  Oftentimes,...

Market thoughts March 4, 2025 by Mark Carlton, CFA®

Trademark Blog Post – December 11, 2024: The U.S. stock market surged after the November election.  Investors remembered that in the...

Summary The S&P 500 gained 4.3% last quarter, and 15.3% in the first half of the year[1].  That is the good news.  The bad news was that...

Global stock markets, almost every single one, have been hitting on all cylinders lately.  In fact, some of the best recent performance...

A “Blue Wave” trade developed over the past two weeks in which investors bought stocks that would theoretically benefit from a potential...

Thoughts ahead of this week’s Federal Reserve meeting: Investors expect that the Federal Reserve will ease 25 basis points. This time...

Investors expect that the Federal Reserve will ease 25 basis points and that stocks will rally as a result. My feeling is that since this...

I'm headed to New York for a CFA conference as well as a few manager meetings. Before I go I wanted to share a few observations: A stock...

I am not concerned about the stock market's rough start to the year because January 2014 also got off to a bad start and yet finished the...

Market  Update What a difference a month makes!  We had the sharpest stock market decline since the summer of 2011 (the S&P 500 was down...

Yesterday, April 2nd, was a bad day from a bull’s perspective.  Despite an 89 point gain on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and an 8...

The conference was opened on Sunday May 6th by James Montier of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo (GMO) who came into Chicago (where the...

In the 4Q12 Quarterly Perspective I wrote that benchmarks can be misleading.  I referred to the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial...