George Hosfield, CFA, discusses Ferguson Wellman's quarterly strategy titled, "Inflation's Flame Flickers," which addresses the narrow market leadership, the impact of higher interest rates on inflation and how assets are priced at this stage of the economic cycle.
George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the firm's quarterly strategy titled "Stalemate," which highlights the Fed's ongoing battle to tame inflation along with our views on the health of the banking industry and capital market expectations for the balance of the year.
Director and Chief Investment Officer George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the Fed raising interest rates, peaking inflation and our view on equities and volatility across all asset classes in our Investment Strategy titled, “Balancing Act.”
This week, the equity market had a “shoot first, ask questions later” response to news surrounding DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup company that claimed to achieve ChatGPT-level performance at a fraction of the cost. This news sent a shockwave through the technology sector, sparking a frenzy of speculation and questions about AI innovation.
When my family gathers around the holidays, we enjoy catching up on Jeopardy episodes with our two daughters. As they are both educators, it can be difficult for my wife and me to keep up, but it can also get pretty competitive. In one episode, I had the upper hand as the category was the “Magnificent Seven.” Luckily, this didn’t refer to the movies but to the seven stocks dominating the stock market. In investing circles, the term “Magnificent Seven,” or Mag-7, is well known, and I was surprised it had become recognizable enough to be a Jeopardy category. Unfortunately, while I was the first to “buzz in” and answer correctly in this category, I wasn’t as fortunate the rest of the game.
Nvidia has become a daily fixture in tech news, but amid the constant buzz is a remarkable phenomenon with its unprecedented revenue and earnings growth.
It was an action-packed week headlined by Wednesday’s economic “doubleheader.” The Federal Reserve’s June meeting took place the same day as the release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation report.
In an otherwise quiet week on Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 turned the page on one of its longest-running bear markets. Rebounding by over 20% from its October lows, the blue-chip index has officially surpassed the threshold marking a new bull market. What is notable about the advance from last fall’s lows is how few stocks have participated in the upturn.
This week, there was a plethora of economic and company-specific news for investors to digest. Specifically, the release of first quarter U.S. GDP, reported quarterly earnings by major technology companies and the unanimous vote by Twitter’s board to approve Elon Musk’s offer to take the company private. In response to this news, the market declined 4%, with all of the weekly losses occurring Friday afternoon.
Some while ago as I was preparing for my first solo overseas flight, I told a friend in the aviation industry that I disliked turbulence; the stomach-churning drops and swings were too sudden and unpredictable for my appetite.
This week, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell announced that later this month the Fed will begin “tapering” its asset purchase program now that the economy has moved past the need for extraordinary stimulus. As a reminder, to combat the recessionary effects of the pandemic and stimulate the economy, the Fed reduced interest rates to 0% and reintroduced an asset purchase program to the tune of $120 billion per month. By any measure, this is a remarkably large stimulus program.
A week that began with the sharpest pullback in equities since last fall concluded in remarkable fashion, as investor concerns about the economic repercussions of rising COVID-19 infections gave way to an increasingly constructive second quarter earnings season.
Last November, Pfizer announced a 95 percent efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine. Since that time, there has been a notable shift in leadership within the stock market.
For many, 2020 has been a year to forget. Headlined by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global response, stimulus from central banks and governments has helped limit the damage, as the U.S. economy has now experienced its shortest and steepest recession ever.
“The path of the economy will depend significantly on the course of the virus.” Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated this point emphatically in his comments following the two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). To most people this may seem like stating the obvious, but sometimes it bears repeating, especially considering the data released this week.
This week, Alphabet Inc., parent company to Google, became the fourth company to join the “trillion-dollar market value club,” that includes Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Besides the significance of their “trillion dollar” size, why do we care so much about the market value of these companies?
With some 90 percent of the S&P 500 having now reported third quarter earnings, investors have responded favorably to a plurality of companies delivering better than expected numbers.
The global search for yield has driven tremendous fund flows into all corners of the fixed income market. While our primary focus is on investment grade bonds, this trend has also driven yields lower on non-investment grade bonds which are sometimes referred to as “high-yield” or “junk” bonds.
This weekend, millions of college basketball fans will start filling out their NCAA tournament brackets. The period during this “distraction” can be economically meaningful to corporate America: it is estimated that, due to lost productivity, companies will lose a combined $6.3 billion.
Stocks put in a bottom on Christmas Eve of 2018 and have since rallied close to 10 percent. While December of last year was the worst since 1931, we believe that the worst is behind us.
News broke this week that the Trump administration would consider bypassing congressional legislation to change the capital gains taxes rules to index for inflation. The current strategy that is being floated is to use the Treasury department and IRS rather than traditional legislation to redefine capital gains to include only returns in excess of inflation.
Charles Dicken’s iconic tome illustrates aptly the interplay between earnings news and economic news of late. Every day it seems good earning news is complemented with slowing economic news and vice versa. Recent market volatility has pushed cautious investors to the sidelines and those that remain are riding the markets up and down with every recent news release.
