Gold has certainly been a good portfolio diversifier so far into 2020: It is doing better than global equities YTD, up 3.8% through today. Gold’s price correlation to the S&P 500 over the last 30 days is -0.48, zigging when equities zag. The...
Until this past week, the S&P 500 had not had a 1% move in 70 days. That’s how we gauge volatility: by tracking how many trading sessions the S&P rises or falls by 1% or more because it’s a large enough swing that it starts to...
Today we’ll get a jump-start on the usual end-of-month performance analysis and recap how capital markets fared in January. #1: Returns across broad asset classes year-to-date (best/worst return by subclass bolded): Equities S&P 500: +1.6%...
The five companies that spent the most on Washington DC lobbying in 2019 were: Amazon: $16.79 million Facebook: $16.71 million Boeing: $13.81 million Northrop Grumman: $13.62 million Comcast Corp: $13.36 million That Amazon and Facebook spent nearly...
Whenever global equity market volatility hits, we like to look at the “Min Vol” investment strategy to see how it fares. The opportunities for such an analysis have been rare over the last few months, but we have an opening now so let’s...
Three “Data” items to discuss today, all related to the Wuhan coronavirus: #1: Amazon’s US sellers are charging a bundle for overnight delivery of 3M “N95” face masks – the sort one might purchase to avoid contracting the virus –...
