Quarterly Investment Newsletters

Second Quarter 2016 Key Takeaways – U.S. markets were initially range-bound for most of the quarter until June, when the relative calm in global stock markets came to an abrupt end. Upending most forecasts and taking world financial markets by surprise, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union on June 23. In the [...]

First Quarter 2016 Key Takeaways – It was a tale of two halves in the first quarter of the year for global financial markets. Stock markets plunged early on, falling 10% to 16%. Broadly speaking, the decline was due to ongoing fears of a hard landing in the Chinese economy, a continuing plunge in oil [...]

Key Takeaways – 2015 was a poor year for financial markets across the globe and across asset classes (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.). Among the major global stock markets, the United States was the best performer, but that’s faint praise. What’s more, it was a market in which a handful of large tech/Internet companies (e.g., Facebook, [...]

Key Takeaways – Increasing concern about China’s economy, accompanied by a surprise albeit modest devaluation of the yuan currency, helped trigger a sharp drop in global equity markets in late August with the S&P 500 falling 12% from its high reached just a month earlier. The S&P 500 then bounced briefly from its August 25 [...]

Key Takeaways – As the quarter ended, Greece was making headlines for its June 30th default on a debt payment to the International Monetary Fund amidst increasingly fraught negotiations with its Eurozone creditors, China was in the news for its very sharp short-term stock market decline and surprise interest rate cut, and Puerto Rico announced [...]

Key Takeaways – International stocks led in the first quarter with Europe, Japan, and China posting especially strong gains. U.S. stocks were also positive, with smaller caps outpacing larger caps, and growth beating value. Some of the quarter’s big-picture themes included global central bank policy, the strength (or lack thereof) in economic growth, U.S. dollar [...]

Key Takeaways – As the year came to an end, a handful of big-picture issues dominated the investment landscape: the plunging price of oil, positive economic indicators in the United States relative to most of the globe, and the ongoing influence of central banks (a key effect of which has been to bolster stocks and [...]

Key Takeaways – Global stock markets generally fell in the third quarter. While larger-company U.S. stocks actually finished the quarter with a modest gain of 1.1%, smaller-company stocks were down 7.4% and developed international and emerging markets also posted significant declines. However, we think the real news is what has happened in the last 4 weeks [...]

Second Quarter 2014 Key Takeaways – Asset classes across the board rose in the second quarter despite lackluster global economic growth, an uncertain outlook for global monetary policy, and geopolitical tensions in Ukraine and Iraq. Larger-cap stocks were up 5.2% for the quarter and 7.0% for the year to date. Smaller-cap stocks lagged their larger-cap [...]