risk

Will Kim Jong Un blow up the bull market?

Yesterday the rhetoric between the US and North Korea escalated further with President Trump saying the US would “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies. He said that while the US “has strength and patience,” its options would soon run out. This follows the president's comments from August 9th when he said “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen … he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.” So far the markets have shrugged it all off, but can Kim Jong-un sink this long running bull market?

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Are stocks expensive? Is this a bubble?

Yesterday the S&P 500 closed at a record high so it is unsurprising that you see headlines asking if the market is overvalued or is this a bubble? Many pundits are calling this stock market a bubble and predicting doom. In Bank of America Merrill Lynch's August fund manager survey of global investors, a record 46 percent of fund managers said that U.S. stocks are overvalued. In July, Goldman Sachs research highlighted “elevated valuation on almost every metric” in its weekly report on markets.

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Global earnings will hit record levels

Since last summer, I have written several blog posts on positive earnings from the S&P 500 constituents. We view accelerating earnings growth as a key driver of stock prices moving forward. Schwab's Chief Global Investment Strategist Jeffrey Kleintop just wrote a very compelling post called “Earnings may be about to do something they've never done before.” Thanks to global growth picking up across virtually all regions, global earnings (measured by the MSCI All Country World Index) are expected to reach new heights in the near future. This is also bullish for the S&P 500 which generates roughly 44% of its revenues from outside the US.

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The shift to passive investing and the coming “perfect storm”

I just read an interview with retired fund manager Bob Rodriguez who managed award winning FPA mutual funds in stocks and bonds. Like us, Rodriguez believes in owning cash when there is a storm on the horizon and he held significant amounts of cash (30-40%) in 2000 and 2008 in his actively managed stock mutual fund. He is now retired but he is seeing a perfect storm developing thanks to the huge shift into passive management where there are NO cash holdings. When the next downturn hits, many of those invested strictly in passive instruments will likely be hit extremely hard and their timing will be poor to hit the sell button. Here are his insights on the coming storm:

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Are your investments with a shady broker?

You have saved your nickels and dimes over your career and have a good-sized nest egg to retire. Then you hand it over to a shady broker with tons of violations? I hope not but it definitely happens and more often than you think. Would you go to a firm where 30% of their brokers have FINRA violations? How about a firm where 70% have violations? Where there is smoke there is fire and personally I'd run from these institutions ASAP. It is hard to imagine that they are still in business.

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