The professor who influenced me most at Towson University was Richard E. Vatz, Ph.D., who teaches classes in Persuasion and Advanced Public Speaking. Vatz is a short, wiry guy with a bushy mustache and a wicked sense of humor. Thirty-five years ago, he began his Persuasion class by telling us a story about his best…
Tuesday served as quite a jolt to investors. The S&P 500 lost -1.5%, its biggest drop since last December. It seems that everyone had gotten quite used to the gentle drift higher that characterized the stock market so far this year, since there hadn’t been so much as a 1% correction in the S&P since…
This column is called, Echoes from the Pit, not Conversations from the Pit, but I thought you would be enlightened by an actual email string from last week regarding Fed intervention in financial markets. This kind of conversation happens daily as Pinnacle analysts try to reach consensus on how to tactically allocate our strategies. I…
Pinnacle has various defenses built into to how we manage our portfolios. We live by the two unbreakable rules of keeping diversified and avoiding overvalued assets. In addition, we also look to keep various hedges in our portfolio to defend against adverse conditions that have the potential to rattle financial markets. Over the last few…
Oil, and more specifically gasoline, has been in the news recently. Will $4 or $5 gasoline kill the consumer one more time? For the moment it seems the improving jobs picture is helping to insulate the consumer, but at some point there will come a choking point. With that said the price chart for oil…
Consumers of investment management might consider three different methods to analyze investment returns. The first method is to look at absolute returns in the context of your financial plan. If the portfolio return was 7% annualized for ten years, was that return high enough for you to achieve your financial goals? What about 3% annualized…
* Could this year’s market be a repeat of the last? * Why isn’t valuation a significant factor in portfolio positioning during this current cycle? * Is government stimulus distorting the market? * Will bonds repeat the performance they had in 2011? * Which sectors and industries will prosper most in the current environment? *…
On October 7, 2011, I wrote a blog post describing a bullish divergence forming in the Financial Sector SPDR. I used the Relative Strength Indicator to measure momentum and the price of the XLF to show that although the XLF made a new price low, the indicator did not confirm the drop. I could have…
We have been patiently waiting for markets to correct and give us a chance to purchase positions that edge our portfolios closer to a neutral stance. But so far this year, the volatility tap has been shut as we continue to watch a slow drift up in the markets. This has tested our patience as…
The duration of a bond portfolio tells you how much the price of your bonds will change for each percentage change in interest rates. A high duration means more sensitivity or price volatility as interest rates change. Duration tells you virtually everything you want to know about the price sensitivity of U.S. government bonds, which…
