Financial Floyd Blogspot

Good Morning, The new year is in full swing, and it is already a doozy. The US and Iran issues escalated into military actions on both sides, which resulted in innocent people being harmed. The stock markets have been volatile but have continued their 2019 trends by moving to all-time highs. There are tons of short term uncertainties baked within expectations, so maybe we should keep our eyes on the prize. Last week, PBS published an article by Vikram Manshamari about 20 investment themes to think about over the next 5 years. Since investing is more about a long term perspective, this article was timely. The points that I found interesting were: Passive Investing Bubble Bust (#4) The emergence of a hypersonic weapon (#6) Global supply chains shift dramatically (#7) Medical insurance companies and educators begin to jointly lobby against teenage use of social media (#17) Throughout this article, Vikram focuses on deglobalization, the shifting dynamics of global leaders...

Good Afternoon, This week marked the start of the New Year, and along with that comes 2020 predictions on how the market will do. Some people try to hammer in a certain number while others try to assess the risk within the markets to develop a range of expectations of what could happen. Both approaches require some combination of art and science, and everyone has an opinion on which way is right. MarketWatch recently published an article about expectations for next year based on previous years when the various US stock market indices posted 20% returns in the previous years. The key takeaway from the article was that most of the time (more than 75%) the major US indices posted positive double-digit returns. While this article leaves any reader feeling optimistic, the context behind the returns matters most along with how volatile the market was throughout the year. There are a host of things going on within the world today which could have either a negative or positive impact on ou...