It seems like it was only yesterday that I was pouring over US News & World Report magazines and the Princeton Review book ‘best colleges.’ Of course, it’s obvious that it was a while ago because I’m referring to magazines and books. Today, everything you need is online. In fact, the volume and quality of the data just got a little better in my opinion thanks to the new College… Read More
Yellen’s comments yesterday definitely had an impact on the markets view of what could happen to interest rates in December. The chart below shows what markets think are the odds of a rate hike at the December meeting since the beginning of the year. You can see that at the beginning of the year, markets thought that the odds of a hike were not particularly high, ranging from 20 to… Read More
I haven’t seen or read much about it, but this is a very tough time for value investors. In fact, to my surprise, it hasn’t been this bad for value investors since the late 1990s tech bubble. Although you can find the same thing if you look at commercial indexes from companies like S&P, Russell and MSCI, the following data from academic Ken French tells the whole story. While useful,… Read More
The teacher from The Simpsons would have you believe that there is no such month as Rocktober, but looking at the returns from last month, I have to disagree! Stocks have recovered all of their losses from the August/September correction, are now positive for the year and within a few percent of the all time highs set in May. You can see that the nervousness that struck markets sharply in… Read More
