Since November 2nd, the day before the Federal Reserve officially unveiled QE2 (consisting of $600 billion in new purchases of Treasury securities), the 10-year Treasury yield has climbed by 36 basis points, from 2.59% to 2.95%. Higher yields run counter to the Fed’s intentions, since they’ve specifically cited lower interest rates as one of the…
The “Chinese Commodity Demand” theme, or the “Liquidity Driven Weak Dollar” theme, has been the investment theme driving the broad markets since the recent leg of the bull market took off in early July. We have written at length about this theme and it is amply expressed in Pinnacle’s current asset allocation. About 50% of…
Last week, the investment team met to discuss whether the events of the past few weeks, namely an important election, an announcement of additional quantitative easing by the Fed, and the recent close of the S&P 500 Index above its April high, means that we should change our investment stance. There has clearly been a…
Last week brought the mid-term elections, the highly anticipated and greatly hyped Federal Reserve QE2 meeting, and the latest look at employment. Has anything changed in our view? The answer is yes. At this point we feel that leading indicators of the economy are flashing signals that would imply a much smaller probability of a…
Most people view tax season as the time leading up to the April 15th tax date (well, April 18th for 2011). But here at Pinnacle, our tax season begins much earlier as we prepare portfolios for the end of the year. The Wealth Managers and I have been working for the past few weeks, and…
The broad stock market indexes took out their April highs last week meaning that the bull market that began in March of 2009 is back in business. It has been more than 6 months since the S&P 500 Index hit its April high price of 1217 and then declined on fears that the problems in…
In honor of our eighth anniversary of posting GIPS compliant numbers for our investment strategies (GIPS compliance meets the highest industry standards for investment performance reporting), I asked our investment analysts to think about the three biggest lessons they have learned about investing over the past eight years. I am eagerly awaiting their answers. While…
We spend a considerable amount of time evaluating past trading decisions. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, market moves seem obvious, but we try to keep things in context and remember what the events and circumstances that led us to execute a certain transaction were at the time. With that as a backdrop, I…
October marked the eight year anniversary of Pinnacle’s official GIPS compliant investment track record. It has been quite a journey. Eight years ago we were recovering from a traumatic bear market. Having “dodged a bullet” during the market decline because asset class correlations remained low and diversification did its work in limiting losses, we began…
Friday brought a number of data points including third quarter GDP, the Chicago Purchasing Manager’s Index, and a few other odds and ends. And while those are worth dissecting as well, perhaps the most important piece of news came out of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) on Thursday. We have been closely following the…
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