Despite the frenetic trading in the markets yesterday, I was heartened as I talked and emailed with clients who seemed largely unfazed by the steep selloff over the last week. Not only was no one panicking, a handful of clients (not just mine, but for the firm), sent in new money to capitalize on lower prices while a number simply wanted to rebalance their existing assets, which at this point… Read More
Part of what made last week’s market selloff particularly unsettling was the speed of the decline. So far this year, stocks had been relatively quiet. For example, the S&P 500 had stayed within a range of minus three percent back in January to plus four percent in July. Then, all of a sudden, stocks fell from the top of that range to the bottom over the course of four days… Read More
I’ve had the feeling recently that stocks were more volatile than usual. As funny as this may sound, I don’t trust my own gut at all. Despite its size, my gut is no better than anyone else’s at creating hunches that are worth a darn, so I turn to data frequently. To address my intuition, I did a quick check of the average volatility for the first quarter compared to… Read More
When it comes to reading the newspaper online, I was an early adopter. While I miss the physical paper sometimes, I don’t miss the massive recycling effort and I appreciate getting up to the minute news throughout the day. I don’t like some of the tricks that they play online, though. Yesterday, I was looking at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) online and saw the headline, ‘Small Cap Stocks Especially… Read More
