Think interest rates are peaking? If so, agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) deserve a look. Think rates have further to climb? MBS may still earn a place in your fixed-income allocation, potentially offering more yield than Treasuries and essentially no credit risk. Here is the twist. In 2022 and 2023, MBS investors learned a painful lesson. […]
With the 10-year Treasury yield at its highest level since 2002, buying bonds at 5% is the first real alternative that stock investors have had in nearly two decades. The 10-year Treasury yield closed September north of 5.2%, the highest level in roughly 24 years. Most of the headlines treat that as a warning. I […]
A funny thing about bull markets is that investors develop a very short memory about the previous bear market. Such is why cycles repeat throughout history as lessons must be learned and relearned.
For nearly four years, economists have been predicting that consumers would fail the economy. To their point, sustained high inflation, the fastest Fed tightening cycle in decades, and more recently, surging gasoline prices and interest rates should be taking a toll on consumer spending. In some respects, those and other factors are weighing on the […]
The sequence of return risk is the quiet reason two retirees with identical average returns can end up in very different places. Let’s start with an easy example. Two people retire on the same day with the same million dollars. They have the same portfolio and the same 30-year average return. They should both live […]
For more than a decade following the Financial Crisis, one acronym embodied the investment landscape: TINA, “there is no alternative.” The logic behind TINA was that the Fed and most other developed nations’ central banks held interest rates near zero and even below zero in some cases. As a result, Treasury, corporate, municipal, and international […]
The headlines have never sounded scarier, and the market keeps setting records, which is exactly why investor optimism wins over a full cycle, and why your own behavior is the real risk. Hope is not an investment strategy. Every advisor has said some version of that line, and it holds up. You cannot pray for […]
A dollar today buys nearly twice as many Japanese yen as it did fifteen years ago. Crude oil, in yen terms, is up roughly 70% year to date. Food prices are similarly elevated. Japan imports most of the energy and much of the food it consumes, paying for it in dollars that keep getting more […]
Consensus earnings estimates now sit close to 50% above trend, and that gap is exactly where an earnings mean reversion tends to begin. This has been an incredible year in that Wall Street has spent all of it raising its earnings estimates, and the second-quarter season only accelerated the trend. Analysts began the year expecting […]