Articles authored by Sonu Varghese

The Majority of S&P 500 Returns This Year Driven by Positive Fundamentals The S&P 500 price index has a year-to-date return of 12.0% (through September 12, 2025), and a total return (including dividends) of 13.0%. As many investors have witnessed, this has come on the back of a 25% total return in 2024, and 26.3% …

Inflation’s running quite hot, but I believe the Federal Reserve (Fed) is going to cut interest rates next week for two reasons: 1) the labor market is weak; 2) they’ll argue that hot inflation is transitory. Let’s start with the inflation data. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for August showed that inflation is running hot. …

The August payroll report was expected to be soft, and it was worse. The bottom line is that the labor market is in trouble, but that cements expectations for a rate cut in September. The economy created just 22,000 jobs in August but take that with heaps of salt – the number is going to …

Perhaps more than stocks, the bond market usually tells a tale of what investors expect in terms of economic growth, Federal Reserve (Fed) policy, and inflation expectations. It doesn’t mean the bond market will be correct, but it’s useful to understand what the message of the bond market is. We’ve seen the yield curve steepen …

As I wrote earlier this week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell opened the door to a September interest rate cut at the Jackson Hole Symposium. Powell argued that risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to the labor market are tilted to the downside. But since policy rates are already in restrictive territory, …

Ryan Detrick and I just celebrated recording our 150th episode of Facts vs Feelings. It’s been three years since we got started and we want to thank you all wholeheartedly for the amazing support. Our listens and views have been growing, and we’ve had a lot of fun along the way, including having some amazing …

Federal Reserve (Fed) Chair Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole was the event of the week and with good reason, as investors expected it to signal the direction of monetary policy over the coming months, especially whether the Fed would hold or cut rates at their next meeting in September. And it does at least …

In my previous blog, I discussed our longer-term strategic outlook, the core of which is that we remain optimistic about globally diversified equities. But even beyond equities, our view is that: Inflation will be volatile going forward. This doesn’t mean average inflation will be much higher than 2%, but we’ll see more volatility. The Fed …

We’ve made no secret for our love for the shiny object over the last two and half years (and not just because my name is derived from the Hindi word “sona,” which means gold). I wrote about gold as a crisis hedge back in March 2023, amid the Silicon Valley Bank Crisis. We were amongst …

This chart from our friend, Neil Dutta, Head of Economics at Renaissance Macro, tells an absolutely incredible story if you ask me: it tells you that spending on artificial intelligence (both IT hardware equipment and software) contributed an average of 1.0%-point to GDP growth over the last two quarters. That’s more than the contribution of …