Articles authored by Grant Engelbart

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” – Warren Buffett. An apt quote at this part of the year, as we head towards the Berkshire annual shareholder meeting to pay homage to one of the best active managers of all time. The first four months of this year have …

What a week it has been — days that feel like weeks, weeks that feel like months. The last two weeks have seen the largest intraday market moves we have experienced since the depths of the COVID pandemic in March of 2020 and 2008 before that, periods marked with enormous uncertainty. Even though we saw …

March Madness is a fantastic time of year to talk about playing offense and defense. As we wrote about in our 2025 outlook and have revisited a time or two since, in markets you can play offense with momentum and defense with low volatility. Combining these together in portfolios builds resiliency – something investors have …

There is never a dull moment in financial markets, which can be both the attraction to and distraction of our industry. The start to 2025 is, of course, no exception. A strong economic backdrop and calm start to the year has given way to headline risk and even more over-analysis of economic data, Fed speak, …

Digital assets had another great year in 2024, led by strength in Bitcoin and ETF inflows, catalyzed further by the new administration. However, as we enter more volatility in February of 2025, the prospect of higher prices now appears to be in question. Bitcoin hovers around 22% below its all-time high, but other major digital …

This time of year has no shortage of year-end reviews and year-ahead prognostications, with none other than our own 2025 outlook releasing in mere days. I want to take a look at the year that was through the lens of various Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), their asset growth, returns, and problems solved for investors along the …

Another strong year for stocks means a lot of happy investors, at least until their 1099s are distributed! Higher equity prices and continued outflows from traditional mutual funds spells trouble for impending capital gains payouts. This may be best illustrated by this figure: of the legacy mutual funds at Carson, there are 10 “tax managed” …

Factors The world of investment product has evolved in many ways over the years, and that evolution has seemingly accelerated more recently. There are nearly 4,000 U.S. exchange-traded products, each with their own index or objective (for better or worse), this is on top of tens of thousands of traditional mutual funds. It can be …

The third quarter was a very strong one for markets, but in a different way than we have seen in recent periods. Leadership changed, often catching some managers off guard, but showing the broadening strength of this bull market. The chart below shows this simplistically, with the returns from Q3 in light blue, compared with …

United States Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) assets just hit $10 Trillion for the first time. That is still around half of the assets in traditional open-end mutual funds but the gap is closing quickly. An increasingly larger part of this growth is coming from active ETFs, which have accounted for roughly a third of ETF inflows …