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Stock Markets

U.S. Stocks – How Risky is This Party?

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The month of July has seen the broad U.S. stock indexes such as the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq achieve new highs – which of course is a good thing for those with meaningful exposure to them. On the surface it appears that the party is still in full swing. We don’t have to go back very far however for a reminder of how quickly things can go bad and how uncomfortable it can be when losses start to pile up quickly. The fourth quarter of last year saw stocks sink almost 20% while May of this…

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Losses Get No Respect

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When it comes to investing, everybody thinks about progress in terms of returns. This makes sense since without them financial goals are much harder to achieve, but very little time is spent thinking about losses and the role they play in achieving (or not achieving) those longer-term returns. Even when looking at most financial plans – whether simplistically crude or detailed – usually there’s some assumption for returns achieved based on a pre-determined risk tolerance. Aggressive investors usually assume higher returns while those with a more conservative predisposition will assume lower, safer returns. We’ll address the fatal flaw of assuming…

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Ask Cadence: How does today’s geopolitical environment influence markets?

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There’s no question that geopolitical headlines can affect markets on any given day. An escalation of tariff disputes with China, a change in tone coming from the European Central Bank (ECB), tension with our allies in the Middle East – all of these things have the potential to move markets. What’s incredibly difficult to ascertain however, is in what direction. A funny thing happens in markets sometimes – news that should be bad for markets can have the opposite effect. In a world of central bank intervention where interests are strongly aligned with higher asset prices, sometimes bad news can…

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Ask Cadence: If I haven’t participated in the stock market gains over the last couple of years, will my retirement be negatively affected as a result?

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Put simply – no, and here’s why. Think about it this way: Stocks at any point in time can be ranked on a scale of one to ten based on how expensive they are. The vast majority of the time, they’ll score somewhere between 3 and 7 where they’re neither cheap nor expensive. This is where one can have a traditional exposure to stocks based on the timeframe of their goals and risk tolerance. If stocks are scored below 3 and considered cheap, one might take a little more “risk” since over time prices stand a much better chance of…

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Thoughts from the Investment Team – This is Where Mistakes Are Made

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John Pierpont Morgan was known to have said, “Nothing so undermines your financial judgement as the sight of your neighbor getting rich.” Understanding the bigger picture can help us avoid unrealistic performance extrapolation (both up and down) and stay focused on those things that truly offer the most opportunity for lasting gain. There’s no more important time than now to look forward rather than backward. This year has been particularly dangerous, not because markets have imploded, but because the way they are moving exposes our psychological vulnerabilities as investors. After a strong 2017, U.S. stocks ran up very aggressively in…

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It Pays To Understand The Indexes

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There’s an old business axiom “You Are What You Measure” and when it comes to investing, there is no shortage of things to measure: returns, risk, alpha, beta, tracking error, and so on. Each has its purpose. Measuring investment performance is frequently a two-part process comprised of measuring returns over a designated time period, and then comparing that performance to something. The first part determines your absolute performance, and the second part determines your relative performance; the first part tells you what you did, the second part tells you if it’s good or bad relative to something else. That second…

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Ask Cadence: Where are the safe places to invest if I’m nervous about the stock market?

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As a reminder, there are no completely safe places to invest, as nearly all investments have the potential to lose value at times, but there are almost always some investments that are relatively safer than others. The first step in the process is to identify those places that are most expensive and therefore present the most risk of loss over longer holding periods. Currently those are the world’s stock markets, particularly the US stock market. The next step is to identify those places that offer more value from a risk/reward standpoint and that have a better chance of holding their…

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