Just A Little Turbulence
April 4, 2024 Good morning, The equity market has experienced a little turbulence over the past few days, down ~ 1% from its highs since last week. It would appear that after two months of ignoring spiking yields in the bond market, (the UST-10yr, for example, has moved from 3.80% to 4.37%), equities may care […]
Grinding Higher
April 1, 2024 Good morning, Welcome to Q2. The overwhelming feeling this morning for investors, and particularly for professional market strategists, is one of surprise. Despite the unusually wide range of market expectations among the “Year Ahead” forecasts last December, I do not recall a single outlier that expected a gain of over 10% by the S&P […]
A Growing Concern For The Fed Chairperson
March 25, 2024 Good morning, As mentioned, the Fed certainly carried the week last week, by announcing Wednesday afternoon that it was leaving its dot-plot unchanged at 3 rate cuts before year-end, and surprising markets with its overall dovish tone. After two flat weeks in a row, the S&P 500 jumped up +2.29% last week. […]
The Contrarian’s Axiom
March 21, 2024 Good morning, We have been vividly reminded that “Markets will do what surprises the most” so far this week. It is the contrarian’s axiom. Recall, all the chatter through financial news channels that this week’s AI Conference would eclipse yesterday’s Fed Meeting in terms of market impact. Well, the AI Conference was […]
The Problem with Productivity
April 2, 2024 By Jeanette Garretty, Chief Economist Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. –Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994) Every five or six […]
Is Roth Conversion Right for You?
Roth IRAs can be a great way to turn your retirement assets into future tax-free income. Since the money inside the Roth has already been taxed, you don’t have to pay taxes on qualified distributions, and you don’t have to take Required Minimum Distributions. When markets experience a down or volatile year and your portfolio […]
Stocks Surge to New Highs to Start 2024
By John Lau April 1, 2024 – The rally in the first quarter of 2024 was a positive combination of stable economic growth, falling inflation, impending Fed rate cuts and ever-growing enthusiasm towards artificial intelligence (AI) propelling stocks higher, as the S&P 500 rose above 5,000 for the first time and hit new all-time highs. […]
Small Cap Q1 2024 Commentary
Q1 An Uneventful Quarter The first quarter was relatively uneventful in our portfolio. The Small Cap Composite finished the quarter flat, trailing the Russell 2000 Index. The stocks of our largest positions were mixed, some helping, some hurting, causing the rather pedestrian performance. Underneath the stock performance the fundamental picture is quite positive. We are […]
Raj Bhattacharyya on NASDAQ TradeTalks
April 1, 2024 – CEO Raj Bhattacharyya appeared on Nasdaq TradeTalks with host Jill Malandrino to discuss “Why M&A Will Play a Pivotal Role in the Wealth Management Industry” – a panel focused on the impact that M&A continues to have in the industry, what leaders are seeing in 2024, and how these trends in growth will continue to shape wealth […]
Building An Integrated Stack One Piece At A Time
March 22, 2024 – COO/CTO Vikram Chugh was featured in the Wealthmanagement series “What’s In My Wealthstack?” discussing the architecture of Robertson Stephens’ technology systems. “We’ve built an end-to-end technology stack from scratch, one piece at a time,” said Chugh. To read the full piece, click here.
Kinda Boring
March 18, 2024 Good morning, Stocks and bonds had a bumpy week following stronger CPI/PPI inflation data, and the corresponding expectation re-set by the bond market around inflation and future Fed decisions. For stocks, it was another week of inching higher. The S&P 500 Index closed the week up another whooping +0.13%. It was worse […]
Steady As She Goes
March 14, 2024 Good morning, I must admit that my description of recent market behavior as “sideways” and corrective looks a little specious when the market was setting marginal new highs just two days ago. Momentum has slowed, however. In fact, NDR’s Daily Momentum Model, a reliable short-term indicator (days), flashed a sell-signal this week. […]