Currently, the public is quite focused on volatility. This is otherwise known as Market Risk—referring to the possibility that an investment will lose value because of a general decline in financial markets, due to one or more economic, political or other of a myriad of risk factors. Recently, you may have heard me describe that […]
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6 Ways to Fight Fear of Volatility with Facts
You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t fear loss. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated this with his loss-aversion theory, showing that people feel the pain of losing money more than they enjoy gains. As such, investors’ natural instinct is to flee the market when it starts to plummet, just as greed prompts us to […]
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When will the Bull Market End?… When Did it Actually Start?
• S&P 500 average length of a bull market is 97 months • S&P 500 average length of a bear market is 18 months Consider what are alleged to be the two longest running bull markets in modern financial history—one is the current one, purportedly starting back in March 2009, and the other one going from […]
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Dividends in a Portfolio
WHY CONSIDER DIVIDENDS? Dividend income has represented roughly one-third of the total return on the Standard and Poor’s 500 since 1926. According to S&P, the portion of total return attributable to dividends has ranged from a high of 53% during the 1940s — in other words, more than half that decade’s return resulted from dividends […]
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Interest Rates Rising… What About the Stock Market?
• What is the relationship between interest rates and the stock market? • Can stocks rise in a rising interest rate environment? • Do interest rates impact all stocks the same? Logic, and recent stock market volatility, would seem to suggest an inverse relationship between interest rates and stock valuations. Interest rates have been low […]