You can’t time the market. At least I can’t. Market timing is an investment hypothesis that has been tried for the 240 years of stock exchange history in the United States. The basic idea is to buy an investment when it is “low” or undervalued, and then sell that investment when it is “high” or overvalued. The problem is that I don’t know when the “low” or “high” has truly occurred. I know when investments are “lower” and “higher”, because those terms are always relative to some reference point in the past.

As a part of The Wealth Group’s systematic investing process we have developed and refined, we update and review your portfolio and the internal holdings on a regular basis. This is an update based on that process, and there is no action required on your end.

Stock market drawdowns are normal. They’re never fun, but they are a routine occurrence. As of market close on October 11, 2018, the S&P 500 Index was only 6.9% off its recent high from September 20.

Most of us have said or thought something like: “If only I had invested in __________, I would have so much money today.” Whether it’s the stock of Amazon, Google, Netflix, or Apple, the growth of these stocks over a long period of time is incredible. But when we examine the historical price movement of these stocks, we see that early investors have endured a bumpy ride.

Meir Statman is a Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University. He has gained increasing acclaim in the financial world for his work in the field of Behavioral Finance. What is behavioral finance? It studies the intersection of our behaviors (which are driven by our thoughts and feelings) and our money.

The danger of watching or listening to the news is that you might miss all the reasons to be optimistic. You may not hear the media tell you that small business owners are more optimistic than ever (at least dating back to the 1975 inception of this poll).

As I type this post, Bitcoin is trading at $6,279. We wrote about Bitcoin here on the blog on January 31 of this year. At that time, Bitcoin had traded down from a peak of nearly $19,200 down to about $11,000.

Truck tonnage has been sharply increasing since the November 2016 election.

It’s not uncommon for people to talk of getting “wiped out” in a past stock market crash. Is that even possible? And if it is possible, how?

Friday, March 9th marked 9 years since the US stock market bottomed during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. We have witnessed excellent stock market and economic growth since those dark times, leading many people to ask the question: “How long can this expansion/rally continue?” Before we answer that question, a short stock market history lesson is in order. While the US stock market has in fact rallied an incredible 380% since the stock market bottom (as measured by the total return of the S&P 500 Index), it has not been without significant drawdowns: From July 7, 2011 – October 3, 2011, the S&P 500 Index lost 18.4%. During that same time period, the global stock market (as measured by ticker ACWI) lost 22.5%. From May 19, 2015 – February 11, 2016, the S&P 500 Index lost 12.8%, while the global stock market was down 19.1%. So, there have been “breathers” (that’s a nice way of putting it) during this period of sustained economic and stock market growth. In other words, we have taken our lumps along the way.

Quiz question: when was the last time initial jobless claims were as low in the U.S. as they are today? Answer: 1969. Think of that: by this metric, it’s been nearly 50 years since the U.S. labor market was this strong. The headline unemployment rate has been steady for a few months at 4.1%. The initial jobless claims report is released weekly by the U.S. Department of Labor. “This report measures the number of jobless claims filed by individuals seeking to receive jobless benefits.” The latest reading came in at 210,000:

As I write this, it looks like the U.S. stock market (as measured by the S&P 500) will finally get something that happens, on average, about once a year: a 10+% percent drop—the definition of a market correction. The last time this happened was two years ago, ending in February of 2016. The drop that tends to stick in our minds was a whopper—the Great Recession drop that caused the S&P 500 to drop more than 50%--so many of us today probably think corrections are catastrophic. They aren’t. More typically, they last anywhere from 20 trading days (the 1997 correction, down 10.8%) to 104 days (the 2002-2003 correction, down 14.7%). Corrections are unnerving, but they can be a healthy part of the economy—for a couple of reasons.