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By Ted Rich

When I was growing up, baseball was important in my life. I loved playing the game and the camaraderie of the team effort. After playing throughout high school and college, I ended up in the minor leagues. But when my career came to an abrupt end, I knew it was time to find another profession.

A little over a year ago, the S&P 500 was trading down over 14% from its November highs. The primary price trend was clearly down, global recession discussions were happening daily due to the collapse of oil prices, and investor feelings were decidedly pessimistic. A year later, conditions could hardly be more different.

A new Presidential Era began last Friday with Donald Trump's inauguration, and the stock market reaction was far more restrained than its response to his election. For weeks after the presidential election, we saw equity markets defy expectations and post significant gains. In fact, the Dow grew by over 1,500 points between November 8 and December 12.

On Friday, December 9, all three major U.S. stock indexes ended at record highs. For the first time in five years, they each posted gains every day of the trading week. The S&P 500 was up 3.08%, the Dow added 3.06%, and NASDAQ increased 3.59%.

Of course, we never like to see the global markets go down. However, when you look beneath the surface, the U.S. economy is still doing far better than what this week's performance implies. Behind the losses and ongoing election exhaustion, there are a number of strong indicators that the economy is growing.

One of the questions on every investors' mind these days is the upcoming November elections and how they might move markets. We published a special video update on this topic last week for our clients, and in this blog post we will highlight the key points from that video.

Why did Deutsche Bank affect markets?

Last week, concerns about one of the world's largest banks caused investors to worry that a new "Lehman moment" might spark a new financial crisis.

The U.S. stock market is facing a dilemma based on mixed information and an uncertain political landscape. On the one hand, economic data is neither weak nor strong enough to make the choice to raise interest rates easy for policymakers. On the other hand, the unpredictable nature of the presidential race is contributing to market volatility.

The August jobs report showed that the economy gained 151,000 new jobs instead of the 180,000 jobs predicted by economists. Since investors are keenly watching the odds of a rate hike ahead of the mid-September Federal Open Market Committee meeting, they treated the jobs miss as a win since it might reduce the chance of a rate hike this month.