Market Commentary

Last year provided lots of surprises and opportunities. If I had to give 2025 a name, I would call it “the year diversification returned”. A diversified portfolio had a good year driven by strong returns in international equities and precious metals. While the U.S. market had lots of volatility and ended up having a good […]

This quarter was a great quarter to be invested. Most asset classes were up for the quarter, led by Gold up over 17%. The asset that most people own is U.S. large cap and it was up over 8%. The tech heavy Nasdaq was up over 11%. Not to be forgotten about, international markets were […]

This ends another quarter, and it has been an eventful one. 2025 is living up to the saying, “May you live in interesting times.”  And a lot of the trends that I have been writing about this year remind me of the Ernest Hemmingway quote “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”  […]

Another quarter down and another good one for market returns. If we look back at this quarter, we had quite the scare that got a lot of people out of the market. Can we all remember the Yen carry trade unwind that started at the beginning of the quarter? I know that it had a lot […]

Dear Fellow Investors, What a finish to 2023!  With a fourth quarter like that, I had to start with a quote from the late Charlie Munger. This year ended up being a fantastic year if you just stayed invested, or at least didn’t interrupt the compounding.  Like so many times in history, when everyone is expecting […]

This quarter I want to do a little self-reflecting and evaluation. I am going to start with the bad. I have trailed our benchmarks year-to-date. I wrote about the reason why recently and you can read that by clicking here. I trailed the first two quarters this year and this quarter is somewhat mixed with […]

It’s hard to believe that I took over as Chief Investment Officer two years ago. I am glad we have had calm markets to let me get my sea legs under me. But in all seriousness, thank you for allowing me to work with each of you. I reread my market commentary from two years […]

I don’t like to talk about investment performance over short periods of time, but the first quarter of 2023 has given us some interesting data.  I will try not to “geek out” on numbers too badly.  Over the first quarter we had a reversal of 2022 themes and an echo of the previous big cycle […]

As I look back on the last year, I would like to start with saying thank you. Thank you for trusting us to help you along your financial journey. We count it as a blessing to be able to serve you. This year was very eventful, with many trials and tribulations. I would be remised […]

As I sit down to write this letter a few days after the federal reserve increased rates to 3.25%, I think it’s important to remind ourselves of why we save and invest. While this tightening policy continues, we will increasingly see companies, countries, debt, and currencies showing stress and strain. By the time you read […]