Since July 2016 the yield on the 10-year US Treasury Note has increased from 1.32% to nearly 3% today. This doubling of longer term interest rates is creating a headwind for dividend paying stocks resulting in their underperformance versus their non-dividend paying counterparts as well as the broader S&P 500 Index.The maroon line in the below chart represents the total return for the S&P 500 Index...

A colleague and I just returned from a week long trip in south Florida visiting some of our clients on both the east and west coast of the state. One notable factor was the very high level of activity everywhere we visited. Restaurants were all packed, road traffic was unbelievably jam packed and the number of semis on the road seemed higher than usual, and usually those trucks do not drive around...

With the passage of tax reform, one market segment one might believe experiences an outsized benefit to earnings is U.S small cap stocks. This certainly seems plausible due to the fact smaller companies tend to have less direct exposure to foreign revenue; therefore, likely generating most of their profits in the U.S.Our firm exited completely the U.S. small cap space in late 2013 based on a numbe...

Tuesday's report by NFIB on small business optimism for the month of January places the reading in the top five highest coming in at 106.9. According to NFIB the response to "Now Is A Good Time To Expand" was 32% and is the highest level for this category in the Indexes 45-year history. Today's strong NFIB report comes on the heals of a record level of optimism in 2017. NFIB President and CEO, Jua...

In a recent article, Strong Hands - Bridging the Behavior Gap, by Pim van Vliet, PhD, a Managing Director at Robeco Institutional Asset Management, it was noted that,"the average mutual fund investor lags a buy-and-hold strategy by -1.9%. This finding is persistent across different styles, varying from -1.3% for value investors to -3.2% for growth investors. Also 'passive' investors in market fund...

The Dogs of the Dow of 2018 include two newcomers, General Electric (GE) and Procter & Gamble (PG). These two stocks made the list of top 10 dividend yielding stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index for 2018 and replaced Boeing (BA) and Caterpillar (CAT). Unfortunately the new additions are weighing down the performance of the Dow Dogs so far this year as they are the worst performing sto...

Some are saying last week's market movement is one for the record books. I have seen descriptions noting the market decline was unprecedented or the market is in turmoil. S&P Dow Jones Indices Indexology Blog titled a post, I'm Exhausted, but outlines data that places the market decline in perspective. One data point in S&P's post,"Keeping perspective, as repeatedly noted, while 1000 point decline...

I have often written that sentiment measures are most valuable at their extremes. Also, they tend to be most representative of potential market turning points when the extreme is at the bearish end of the spectrum. However, in hindsight, it appears recent excessive bullishness for individual investors and institutional investors indicated a cautionary equity market outlook would have been profitab...

Unwelcome, Unpleasant, Inevitable. The recent spike in volatility has certainly caught the attention of investors over the past several days and as corrections go, the market drop has been quick and sharp. Many market observers have commented that the sell-off has been reasonably orderly but exacerbated by quantitative trading programs and the deleveraging of institutions. As you know, we have be...

During the Fed's move to increase short term interest rates, some have expressed concerns due to the yield curve's increased flattening, i.e., short rates moving higher versus long term interest rates. This increased flattening move can be seen in the below chart and the concern centers around the fact that every recession since 1960 has been preceded by an inverted yield curve, i.e., short term r...