Following the stunning first-quarter sell-off (see Figure 1 below), both the Federal Reserve and Congress took unprecedented actions to mitigate the economic impact of the Coronavirus. The Fed originally cut 50bps off their target rate in a March 3rd emergency meeting, but slashed another 100bps—all the way to zero—just twelve days later. They also tremendously … Read more

The so-called “size premium”, which says that the growth potential in small cap companies compensates for their increased risk, has a long-standing historical precedence. In Dr. Kenneth French’s research on factor investing, he showed that the bottom quintile of stocks in terms of market cap have returned 11.7% annually since July 1926, while the top … Read more

From tweets to trade wars to impeachment inquiries, 2019 has been anything but steady. The one thing that has weathered the storm? The U.S. equity market, which is up almost 25% YTD. Despite this strong performance, there is an increasing concern among investors that equity prices may be out of line with corporate fundamentals. Although … Read more

Almost two years ago, we wrote a piece on the decades-long trend of passive investing and its impacts on the market. The thoughts expressed in the article are still relevant today as Michael Burry, a prominent subject in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, recently labeled the trend in passive investing a bubble. In his interview … Read more

For the last three months, the treasury yield curve has been inverted. The curve is usually upward sloping to account for both the term-premium and additional interest rate/inflation risk that an investor takes on when they buy longer dated issuances. This anomaly is of particular interest because an inversion in the yield-curve has historically been … Read more

In the first 29 months of the Trump presidency, the S&P 500 has risen by about 11.3% annually through June 30th. On one hand, this beats the long-run (50-year) average of the market by 4.25%. On the other hand, this performance is not especially noteworthy considering the steepness of the recovery from the housing bubble; … Read more