Clarus Blog

The headlines are ugly. “Late Rally Lifts Stocks After S&P 500 Skims Bear Market,” according to WSJ.com’s top story after Wall Street closed today.  “Markets End Down for 7th Straight Week, Despite Late Rally,” according to NYT.com. Stocks are at the edge of a bear market – defined as a loss of -20% from the last record-high closing price of the Standard & Poor’s  500 index (on Jan. 3). Not since 2001, The Wall Str..

Despite a gain of +2.4% on Friday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index declined for a sixth consecutive week – reportedly the longest losing streak since 2011. With stocks flirting with bear market territory – a loss of -20% from the last peak on January 3, 2022 – no one can say for certain when the financial and economic outlook will improve. Predicting the future is impossible. However, we do know how difficult times like these ha..

It’s been easy being a buy and hold investor. Until now. Stock market investments, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, approximately doubled in value in the past five years. It was up 26.9% in 2021, 18.4% in 2020 and 31.5% in 2019, and it is 59.3% higher than at the bottom of the Covid bear market in March 2020.  The stock market suffered another losing week and is in the throes of the longest weekly losing streak in over..

The U.S. economy shrunk -1.4% last quarter, but a +2.7% average growth rate is expected for the next four quarters.  In the first quarter of 2022, Covid 19 disruptions to the supply chain stunted growth.  “A slower pace of inventory investment by business in the first quarter -- compared with a rapid buildup in inventories at the end of last year -- also pushed growth down,” according to a front-page story in Friday’s Wall Street ..

The stock market had another bad week, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 dropped 2.8% Friday and lost -2.8% from last week’s closing price. The stock index is 11% lower than the all-time high of Jan. 3, back into correction territory.  About 80% of public companies that have reported earnings for the first quarter of 2022 are beating analyst expectations, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal referencing FactSet, a financial da..

Retail sales rose one-half of 1% in March, the Commerce Department reported on Thursday, climbing for the third consecutive month as prices continued to increase, and the consumer price index measure of inflation soared in March to a 12-month rate of 8.5% -- the highest inflation rate in 40 years.  However, there are signs that inflation is probably peaking. While gasoline continues to fuel the worst round of inflation in decades, price hike..

Socially responsible investing, otherwise known as impact or Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) investing, has been a hot topic in the news and a rapidly growing area of focus, especially among millennialswho are about to receive the largest intergenerationaltransferofwealthinhistory.Overthe next few years approximately 30 trillion dollars in inheritance money will move from baby boomers to millennialsandGenX’ers.Atatimewhenenvironmentalsu..

Although Russia’s atrocious war on Ukraine overshadows all other news, the genocide of Ukrainians is not the main risk to financial economic conditions. Unlike Europe, the terrible events in Ukraine impacts the U.S. economy only marginally. The main risk to the U.S. economy and stock market is not what happens in Kyiv. The main risk to the U.S. is inflation, which is running at its highest one-year rate in 40 years.   Runaway inflatio..

The American economy added 431,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.6% from 3.8% in February. Here’s an update on the major happenings in the economy and stock market this past week.  With an increase of 431,000 employees in March, the nation now employs nearly as many people full-time as it did before the pandemic struck in February 2020. Employment is down by 1.6 million from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020...