Outside of last week’s look at the state of the economy, most of these Insights of late have been about trading, mostly thanks to the bizarre price action of GameStop and normally obscure parts of the market, like SPACs (click here, here, or here to see these articles). Two weeks ago, the focus was on getting good ‘execution,’ which means getting good prices when we trade. Execution, and some of… Read More
Vanguard has always provided balanced and thoughtful commentary about the economy and markets. In the last few years, they’ve done an even better job of producing it regularly and making it easy for advisors to access. Today, I’m sharing a client-approved document that they produced that is easy-to-read and sets a great baseline for thinking about 2021. The title says it all: Approaching the Dawn. Although I encourage you to… Read More
Last week, I wrote that that frenetic trading of a handful of stocks was affecting our portfolios, albeit moderately. I noted that GameStop was the largest holding in the S&P 600 small-cap index, which meant that we owned it through the index fund that tracks that index (and a few other places: for more, click here). Last week, GameStop stock fell -80 percent, but it didn’t hurt us too badly… Read More
Just one week ago, I wrote about SPACs as a potential indicator for a frothy market and referred in passing to ‘Robinhood traders’ as another sign of the times. Little did I know that these foes of the rich and friends of the poor would dominate the news and that everyone I encounter would bring up GameStop. I tried to make the case that the craziness in SPACs probably isn’t… Read More
