Despite a U-turn in the Middle East peace process that saw both sides again engage in military escalation that led to a more than 4% rise in oil prices, the equity markets held up fairly well last week. True, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gave back some of its recent […]

It is difficult to complain about a spectacular first half of 2026 in which all the Bloomberg benchmarks in the table below turned in double-digit percentage returns, with the Bloomberg 3000 Value Index topping its Growth counterpart by a sizable margin. Interestingly, it was a broad-based advance for the Value […]

We always say it is a market of stocks and not simply a stock market, and the latest trading week vividly illustrates the point. Despite The Wall Street Journal pessimistically summing up the week that was by writing,… The S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite fell in every day of a […]

Stocks sank on Wednesday, with one market pundit proclaiming, “The Fed is at a point where it can’t ignore inflation. I’m not surprised the world has shifted to a higher interest rate mindset.” And stocks rallied on Thursday, with another market pundit asserting, “The fact that the 10-year yield is […]

While this writer confesses to making numerous appearances on the network over his 39-year career, it is always fascinating to hear the talking heads on CNBC TV explaining with remarkable precision why stocks were rising or falling on a particular day. No doubt, financial pundits desire to sound intelligent, and […]

While we are just one-to-three trading days removed from all-time highs on the major market averages, Friday’s equity-market retreat provided a stark reminder that while the long-term trend in stocks has been up, the sailing is seldom smooth, with a log-scale chart of the S&P 500 over the past century […]