2021

“The stock market is not the economy.”  Maybe you’ve heard this before, as any time the economy seems to be struggling but the stock market isn’t we are reminded that these two things are not synonymous.  However, they are related to enough of an extent where when one is doing well or poorly, we generally expect the other to follow suit.  It’s practically guaranteed that the stock market will rebound before the economy does during recessions, but how long can company stocks outperform the economies in which they exist, and what could the consequences look like? To understand why the…

Saturday Night Live fans may remember the skit where Bruce Dickinson (played by Christopher Walken) helps Blue Oyster Cult nail the recording of their hit “The Reaper”. It’s a great cast of actors in this bit, but Gene, played by Will Farrell, has the leading role in his struggle to inject just the right amount of cowbell into the song. After a number of abrupt breaks in recording initiated by the lead singer, who grows increasingly agitated by the incessant banging behind him, Christopher Walken (in the character of Bruce Dickinson) in his one-of-a-kind delivery first proclaims “I gotta have…

Everyone knows the expression “playing with fire” is a way to say someone is engaging in risky behavior, and it is frequently implied the consequences of that behavior could be particularly painful.  Yet, we couldn’t live without fire, be it a furnace, or an oven, or even a nice fire in the fireplace on a chilly winter night that makes the season’s weather tolerable, if not downright cheerful.  We couldn’t live without fire, yet playing with it is how we describe overly risky behavior. Volatility in an investment portfolio can be useful like the properly controlled fires we use on…

Before getting into a fairly high-level overview of markets as we see them, we thought it worth commenting on a few more socio-macro themes. Not only do these things matter because they affect our day-to-day lives more directly than markets, but they ultimately create the landscape in which markets function. First, and we’ve commented on this quite a bit, the rift between the haves and have-nots is increasing at an accelerating rate. Regardless of one’s politics, it should be clear as day that people seem more uneasy, stressed, and in some cases just plain angry than was the case 1,…