Insights Investments

So much for the “AI is killing jobs” narrative, let alone “the Fed should keep rates low to protect the labor market”. We’ve been in the camp since the start of the year that the labor market looks better than a lot of economists, market bears, and even the good folks at the Federal Reserve …

Many people, when they start paying attention to investing, run into the same problem: the vocabulary is enormous, and nobody explains how the pieces fit together. Stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, CDs, money markets, private equity, venture capital… it sounds like a different language, and the financial world tends to assume you already know it. …

With the upcoming SpaceX IPO and Anthropic also filing a confidential draft S-1, IPOs are in the news, to say the least. I thought it would be interesting to look at some historical stats on IPOs, and conveniently, Professor Jay Ritter at the University of Florida maintains a comprehensive IPO data hub covering IPOs from …

In Episode 190 of Facts vs Feelings, Ryan Detrick, Chief Market Strategist at Carson Group, and Sonu Varghese, Chief Macro Strategist at Carson Group, take on the SpaceX IPO and what it could mean for indexes, mega-cap weights, and the next phase of the AI trade. They’re joined by Blake Anderson, Director of Portfolio Management …

How this works (a quick one-time intro): Each week during earnings season we will begin to publish a short read on how S&P 500 companies are doing. It’s built from FactSet’s Earnings Insight report (John Butters), with index and market-cap data from YCharts, aggregated in-house. Every figure ties back to FactSet’s published numbers; we simply …

You might have heard this before, but the S&P 500 gained again last week, with many more new highs across the board. Sparking the rally was hope for progress on an agreement with Iran, but we’ve been here before. Still, oil fell 10% last week as traders remained optimistic we would see some movement toward …

Earlier this spring, I authored ‘Software’s Selloff’ detailing the price deterioration across stocks within the software industry. Analyzing data from past software selloffs hinted at some key takeaways: the selloff was ‘young’ in February (and could have taken longer to bottom), and it was deep enough that investors could have expected significant earnings deterioration. With …

Thanks for reading this week’s Charts of the Week This week’s charts talk about our new earnings dashboard, why consumers feel so terrible right now, consumption, and why a new Fed chair isn’t that worrisome. We’ll keep publishing Charts of the Week every Monday. To view this week’s Charts of the Week, click here: Charts of …

Inflation has been a big story recently, especially after the U.S.-Iran war started. We’ve pointed out that inflation was a growing problem even prior to the war and isn’t limited to an energy shock. Yet, the energy shock and higher pump prices are how inflation has been most salient for households. There was a school …

“Are we in a bubble?” The question echoed over the sounds of Memorial Day weekend. As markets continue to make new highs – in some ways in extraordinary fashion – many investors are likely asking this same question. How long do you ride a wave until it crashes ashore? The short answer is there is …

You would be surprised how often I’m asked how many positions there should be in a portfolio or simply hear concerns that there are too many (or too few). A variant on this is concern about position sizes—more often that they’re too small, but occasionally that they’re too big. The mushy but true answer is …