By Eric Hough Wednesday’s morning alarm sounds and everything is up. Democrats cruised to a House and Senate victory. Republicans lost seats in places they had grown accustomed to coloring red….TEXAS really?!? Before breakfast, investors had a new political map and the same old question. “Should I do something?” Democrats’ sweep ushers in divided government, with President Trump facing an …
By Evan Coffey In May, Anthropic was privately valued at $965 billion. Next month, public markets may be asked to pay close to $2 trillion. On October 26th the company filed its S-1 to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading a deal reportedly slated for Thanksgiving week. At that valuation, …
By Eric Parnell “Look around, Leaves are brown, And the sky is a hazy shade of winter” –Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon & Garfunkel, 1966 Look around. It seems as though the market sun is shining bright at first glance. The U.S. stock market as measured by the S&P 500 is trading within a heady three days rally range of …
By Evan Coffey & Kate Templeton Consider an investor who did what the textbook asks and took diversification seriously. He or she owns large companies and small ones, American stocks and foreign stocks, and fixed income as a traditional ballast. The client’s portfolio has grown at a pace that would have satisfied them in almost any other period. Yet even …
In this week’s GVA Market Insights, our Asset Management team explores: AI Doomerism Hits Markets: Warnings from AI insiders and Dario Amodei’s call to slow frontier development rattled AI stocks and pushed the 10 year Treasury above 5%. Is it Time to Buy Treasuries? With the Shiller CAPE near its 1999 peak and long yields above 5%, bonds offer the …
By Eric Hough In 2008, Warren Buffett made his famous charitable wager against Ted Seides that hedge funds and active management would underperform Jack Bogle’s passive S&P 500 index. The ending is well known, the passive index won by roughly 500bps annualized. I still remember thinking in the early 2010s, what would happen if one day the market woke up, …
By Eric Parnell “Team by team reporters, baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped Look at that low playing, fine, then” –It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine), R.E.M., 1987 Coming in a hurry with the Furies breathing down your neck. Last week, I submitted an article discussing the potentially overlooked downside risks confronting investors as …
By Eric Parnell “Trouble, Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, Trouble been doggin’ my soul Since the day I was born Worry, Worry, worry, worry, worry, Worry just will not seem to leave, My mind alone” –Trouble, Ray LaMontagne, 2003 Trouble is building on the horizon for capital markets. Now I should preface everything that comes after with the following caveats. The …
By Evan Coffey It’s worth asking what a good quarter is actually worth right now when assessing the AI trade. Nvidia reported earnings that handily beat expectations, results strong enough to make technology the only S&P 500 sector to close higher that day, up 3.16%. By that measure, a good quarter still moves markets. But that strength hasn’t been showing …
By Evan Coffey & Kate Templeton When financial markets misbehave, policymakers tend to take action. That reflex has played out twice over the last month, once in currencies and once in fixed income. Both times the response looked decisive. Both times, too, markets rallied briefly on the news before giving much of it back within days, or in the bond market’s …
