Market Perspective

Try Not to Think About Elephants

Recession. The “Big R” of economics. One of the more confounding aspects of the word is that just hearing it can cause people to behave ...
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A New Era?

Wall Street has no shortage of adages and catch phrases. When the equity market hits the skids, old saws such as “be fearful when others ...
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Insights from a Rare Trend in the VIX®

Pandemic. War. Record inflation. Tightening monetary policy. Broken supply chains. Bellwether company earnings misses. Investors have faced a frightening litany of risks in 2022, and ...
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Volatility and Fashion Trends: What Comes Around Goes Around

Flannel shirts. Ripped jeans. Vintage sneakers. Denim skirts. If you spend any time with teenagers, you know these fashion markers of the 1990s and 2000s ...
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Is the Bond Market Broken?

A once-reliable asset class for yield, low-volatility total return, diversification and risk reduction, bonds have struggled to deliver on any of these measures recently. Real yields on ...
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A Brief History of Rising Rates and Traditional Diversification

With the Federal Reserve (the Fed) gearing up to fight inflation with a dose of monetary tightening, what can long-term, diversified investors expect from their ...
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Too Much of a Good Thing?

After 2021’s strong equity market return, investors may want to pump the brakes. The 28.71% return of the S&P 500® Index for 2021 is the tenth-highest annual ...
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Has the Federal Reserve Taper Already Impacted Volatility Markets?

The term structure of S&P 500® Index option implied volatility (IV) changed dramatically at the end of November. The new COVID variant and surprisingly hawkish rhetoric ...
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License to Kill (Portfolio Returns)

License to Kill, released in 1989 and starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond, is regarded by some as the worst Bond film ever made. New York magazine’s ...
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What Will Taper Do to Implied Volatility?

Implied volatility, as measured by the Cboe® Volatility Index (the VIX®), rose in September as investors processed a laundry list of concerns including coronavirus variants, inflation ...
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