In the recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the level of openings increased by 346,000, while job hires feel 35,000. Openings remain at a high level but began to decline starting in December last year. The fact hiring level is lagging the growth in openings is a sign companies are having a difficult time finding qualified individuals to fill open positions. This hiring difficulty is show...

Year to date combined mutual fund and ETF fund flows show investor continue to be net redeemers of equity funds, both international and U.S. domestic equities in the amount of $30.5 billion. Conversely, investors have been net purchasers of bond or fixed income investments. The flow data shown below is reported by the Investment Company Institute with a one week lag with last week's report represe...

Consuelo Mack interviews Nancy Lazar on a recent episode of Wealthtrack. Nancy Lazar is Co Founder, Partner & Head of Economic Research at Cornerstone Macro. Nancy Lazar is consistently ranked as one of the top economist by Institutional Investor.As covered in the interview, Nancy remains bullish on the U.S. economy and sees improvement in productivity and improvement in the labor force participat...

With nearly a third of the year behind investors, following is an update on the performance of the Dogs of the Dow strategy. The Dogs of the Dow strategy is one where investors select the ten stocks that have the highest dividend yield from the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJIA) after the close of business on the last trading day of the year. Once the ten stocks are determined...

Earlier this week the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) reported the results from their weekly Sentiment Survey. The report noted the bullish sentiment level was 33.5% which certainly indicates individual investors are not overly bullish. Sentiment readings are contrarian in nature so a high bullishness reading would be one cautionary factor for investors to take into account reg...

With first quarter earnings season shifting into high gear (50 companies reporting the week of April 15), investors will contend with a slower pace of earnings growth in 2019 versus 2018. The difficulty is the fact 2018 earnings saw a significantly higher pace of growth due to the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that lowered the corporate tax rate; thus, providing an earnings tailwind ...

A little less than a month ago I wrote a post noting weekly flows into equity mutual funds and ETF's had turned decidedly positive, and in fact were the largest inflows looking back an entire year. I rhetorically pondered if the increase in equity flows was a sign equity markets were topping, especially after such a strong start to the year. From a contrarian perspective, had investors jumped into...

Stocks bounced back in the first quarter with the best quarterly start for the S&P 500 Index since 2009, up 13.5%, after a weak showing at the end of last year. We have said in the past that strength tends to beget more strength. LPL Research noted in a recent report that there have been ten other times since 1950 where the S&P 500 Index was up greater than 10% in the first quarter. In 9 out of 10...

The February Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed a drop in openings of 538,000. Commentary on the February report used terms like plunged and disaster. Admittedly, the decline in openings should not be dismissed out of hand; however, it has not been an unusual occurrence for openings to fall as seen in the below chart.Importantly, openings continue to exceed the number of unemployed by 8...

A potential downside for investors employing a strict longer term strategic investment allocation based on a specific benchmark or index is that the strategy fails to incorporate shorter term tactical changes. It certainly can go without saying but indexing strategies are popular ones for investors. In fact we utilize some index products in our investment approach with our clients. The downside fo...