August 28, 2021 The S&P 500 rallied 1.5% this week as investors celebrated a continuation of the Fed's ultra dovish monetary policy . The mainstream news cycle was focused almost exclusively on Afghanistan this week. Geopolitical flare-ups like this can easily play tricks on investors' brains, tempting us to conflate the chaos overseas—and our feelings about it—to the potential for...
August 14, 2021 The S&P 500 nudged 0.7% higher this week, capping the sixth weekly gain in the past eight. Since the end of December, U.S. stocks have notched 48 all-time high closes, marking the best start to a year since 1995. Amid the bullish market melt up, the inflation issue persists. Consumer prices (CPI) rose 5.4% year-over-year in July...
August 7, 2021 The S&P 500 went up 1% this week while bond yields rose after a strong jobs report. The Labor Department’s monthly jobs report hit the tape Friday, and all signs point to continued improvement in hiring and wages. Employers added 943,000 jobs in July, pulling the unemployment rate down to 5.4% and marking the fastest pace of...
July 24, 2021 A sharp selloff on Monday proved short-lived as the S&P 500 rallied 2% this week. Day-traders reportedly swarmed-in to “buy the dip,” picking up stocks at the fastest pace ever. DataTrek estimates retail investors still have $400 billion in cash on the sidelines. Median U.S. home prices just hit a new record. The buying frenzy is being...
July 17, 2021 The S&P 500 dipped 1% this week as investors parsed higher than expected inflation and retail sales. US Treasuries continue to rally, confounding more than a few bond traders. The big news this week was June’s consumer price index (CPI) print, which accelerated the most in 13 years. The Labor Department reported a 5.4% (4.5% core CPI)...
June 12, 2021 We open this week with some exciting news – Silverlight Asset Management is pleased to welcome Louis Sutton as the newest member of our team. Louis recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in Applied Mathematics. This summer, Louis will be interning as a Quantitative Analyst. We are leaving the door open for...
If it were a horror movie, they might call it: “Return of the Killer Meme Stocks.” Reddit favorites GameStop and AMC Entertainment are soaring again. In May, GameStop rallied 28%, while AMC jumped 160%. Similar to earlier this year, big returns in meme stocks have brought scary P&L pain to the hedge fund community. Didn’t they learn their lesson in...
May 29, 2021 The great inflation trade paused, bond yields dipped, and the S&P 500 added 1.2% this week. With over 50% of U.S. adults vaccinated and pandemic risk receding, consumers are now ready to re-engage with society. In what the Wall Street Journal dubbed “The Great American Cleanup,” demand is surging for things like deodorant, teeth whitener, haircuts, swimsuits...
March 22, 2021 U.S. stocks finished the week about where they started with the S&P 500 dipping 0.4%. Supply chain issues continue to create supply and demand imbalances. In ‘normal’ years, cargo ships arrive on schedule about 70% of the time. In March of 2021, that number plummeted to 40%. Delays around the world are being driven by a rush...
May 15, 2021 We are pleased to be back this week with a new edition of 5 Things. From the start, 5 Things has been a collaborative effort between Michael Cannivet and Ed Flores. Ed is a former colleague from Fisher Investments who now runs his own company, Hyde & Union Content. Ed has had a lot going on lately...
Buy low, sell high. It sounds so simple, right? Selling “high” (whatever that means exactly) is tricky to execute, though. Recently, the stock market has been on a tear. The S&P 500 index rose 5% in April with record-setting breadth. Over the course of 18 trading sessions this month, 95% or more of the S&P 500’s members traded above their...
When he passed away last week, Bernie Madoff still had 139 years left on his prison sentence. Anyone over the age of 30 remembers the story—Madoff swindled thousands of investors for billions of dollars, running one of the most elaborate Ponzi schemes in history. In an ideal world, Madoff’s conviction would have been the ultimate deterrent for fraudsters, purging the...