The market is a discounting mechanism, it looks forward, always focused on some idea, sometimes several factors, that will determine the future of asset prices. Currently, that focus is on inflation. Since we started to re-open following the covid shut down, there has been a...
Over the last few months Value, as it is generally defined, has begun to outperform Growth, as it is generally defined. Now don’t get me started on all the ways terms like Value and Growth get mis-represented by the market. That is not my purpose...
The main US indices, the S&P 500 and the Dow, are up 6.5% year to date. The Nasdaq is flat. We are used to many years of tech stock performance, all the way back to 2009 in fact, so why are we lagging so badly...
It was a very mixed quarter overall for global markets. Returns were generally lacklustre across developed equity markets. US & Japanese equity markets had decent returns but for investors without a currency hedge, much of those returns evaporated via Euro strength vs both the Dollar...
BMA posted a gain of 8.97%, including all charges, in the Q2 2020. Currently as of today (Tuesday July 14), including all charges, BMA is down – 2.87% year to date (YTD). In comparing BMA to peers, the largest risk profile 4 investment product in Ireland, posted...
BMS posted a gain of 3.4%, including all charges, in Q2 2020 (based on an account size of roughly €500K, transaction costs can vary somewhat depending on the size of the account). We’ve seen a decent start to the third quarter; currently as of today (Monday July 13),...
This financial crisis is not solely due to Covid-19. Before it appeared, we were experiencing a slowdown in global growth and expectations were of a mild recession. That was due to Trump’s trade wars with China, the recovery running out of steam in Europe and...
We’ve seen an unprecedented panic in global equities in a short space of time. This crisis has been very different from other crises in that it is a health crisis and not a financially driven one as we saw in 2008. The big difference between this one and 2008 is that the banking system is more...
I’ve been in the business for 27 years now. Before the current crisis I thought I had seen it all, but this time is different compared to the Russian currency crisis, the Asian Contagion, the Tech Wreck or the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This...
US companies have by far been the most aggressive borrowers during the last decade. Low interest rates have allowed big US corporates to borrow cheaply (via corporate bond issuance). In a vast majority of cases they took the proceeds of that corporate bond issuance and...