Welcome to spring!

Virtually.

I first knew that spring had arrived – despite the day’s sub-zero temps – when I noticed that my students weren’t blinking anymore. The cheerful banter and occasional sass of my January term class is a chapel-like silence. Sitting in orderly rows, they look neither right nor left but smile in bland detachment. Footwear begins to shift from winter’s stylish combat boots to sneakers and sandals. The Bold celebrate a 45-degree day by donning shorts and carrying a light jacket over their arms (while The Old stays sensibly zipped up and suspicious of youth and weather both).

I can’t verify that their “fancy lightly turns to Continue reading →

This past week has seen some significant market turmoil as the yield on 10-year treasuries climbed quickly to 1.5% while the S&P 500 dipped 2.5% on Thursday, February 25^th. I show the Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator below. The trends are short-term bearish. In this article, I focus on funds that lost less than a half percent on Thursday and were trending up over the past several months for clues on where to invest with the possibility of inflation rising.

This article is divided into four sections for those Continue reading →

ESG funds drew over $50 billion of net inflows in 2020, more than double their gains in 2019, according to Morningstar. On the whole, they performed splendidly.

A particularly surprising finding is that ESG-screened funds perform exceptionally well in sharp market corrections, both in market crashes between 2000-2011 and in the 2020 Covid crash. While such funds might marginally trail broader markets in good times, their down-market performance gives them an attractive long-term profile.

A panicked crowd immediately gathered and Continue reading →