I think we’ve seen this play before. It is at the same time partially fictitious and partly self-fulfilling. If we didn’t know the 3rd Quarter results, we’d likely feel that the political drama was crushing the economy and markets. It hasn’t and this is not inconsistent with the prior 17 times the government “shut down” or experienced “funding gaps” since 1976. The… Read More

With Fourth of July celebrations fresh in our memory, we’ve chosen to utilize one of our nation’s most popular patriotic hymns as the title and theme for our latest quarterly commentary. Originally published as a poem by Katharine Lee Bates in 1895, these descriptive words of a traveling English professor eventually evolved into lyrics. The accompanying tune, composed by church organist and choirmaster… Read More

We concluded our last quarterly summary by noting “there will be plenty of good that can be done in 2013”. Although this statement related primarily to the perceived benefits of comprehensive wealth management, the market’s continued strength surely provided some incremental support. By the end of March, most U.S. headline stock indices (S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrials, and the Russell 2000) had eclipsed the previous… Read More

To journey through the fourth quarter of 2012 without knowing the score, one might have reasonably thought that markets were losing ground. After all, the polarizing emotion of our national elections followed by Washington’s clumsy grappling with the “fiscal cliff” surely couldn’t have gone unnoticed. Well, that’s what we all get for thinking; or at least for choosing to fixate on the… Read More

More than forty months into a bull market run, it turns out that most investors still aren’t grasping the magnitude of the global market recovery. For example, when a recent industry survey asked 1,000 investors whether they thought the S&P 500 was up or down during each of the past three years, 66% thought it was down in 2009, 48% thought… Read More