We have just completed the final quarter, not only of the year, but also the decade, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect back on the market behavior for the past year, and also for the past 10 years. The short version is that we have experienced a bull market for the entire ten-year period, with no -20% bear market periods and only a few 10% corrections since June 2009. People who record the history of the markets will remember that the investors of the 2010s participated in the longest bull market in American history–a totally improbably event considering that the decade came right after ..read more

The latest three month returns in the U.S. and international stock markets can be viewed with two very different attitudes.  The first is that many indices (though not all) produced a loss for the quarter, and where there were gains, they tended to be very small.  On the other hand, the losses, where they occurred, were too small to wipe out the gains of the previous two quarters, meaning that most investors have still made money so far this year. Whether that will continue is anyone’s guess, but in today’s uncertain political and economic environment, it’s easy to feel like we all managed to ..read more

How to make sense out of the recent market behavior?  We experienced a painful decline in the last month of 2018 before the markets took a sharp (and unexpected) about-face and delivered the biggest one-quarter gain since the third quarter of 2009.  The surprise upward trend has continued through the second quarter, albeit with more modest gains, despite what would normally be considered warning signs in the economy, the global trade markets and corporate earnings. If we could simply stop the year at this point, the gains would be unusually high for a typical 12-month period; for six months, t ..read more

The long, painful market decline in the last month of 2018 seemed to promise more of the same for the new year of 2019, but at the end of the first quarter, the results couldn’t have been more different.  The U.S. market, measured by a variety of indices, posted its biggest one-quarter gain since the third quarter of 2009.  This proves once again (as has been proven many, many times over) that you cannot extrapolate market returns from one month to the next, or expect that down or up trends will lead to more of the same. These are, by any measure, extraordinary returns for a short three-month ..read more