Blog

Even as the Fed has kept interest rates flat, an unexpected surge in short-term interest rates triggered by an industry rule change is potentially doing some of the Fed's work for it.

Strategists continue to wonder what the Fed is thinking about the future of short term interest rates. Minutes from the July Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting showed that officials are split about the economic outlook and when to raise rates.

Among last week's major events was a surprisingly good July jobs report. Last month, the economy added 255,000 new jobs, beating expectations of 180,000 jobs. Even better, the gains were broad-based and the labor force participation rate (an area of concern because fewer people in our population were actively participating in the labor force) ticked upward.

Stocks were up for the third week in a row, posting record highs on better-than- expected earnings results and solid domestic economic data. Since the bottom of the post-British referendum selloff, the S&P 500 has gained 8.06%.  For the week, the S&P 500 gained 1.49%, the Dow grew 2.04%, Corporate Bonds fell 0.86%, and International Stocks grew 3.65%.

Stocks fell sharply last week in response to Britain's vote to leave the European Union (known as the Brexit), putting major indices in the red for 2016. Why did markets react so badly?

Before we begin our usual weekly commentary, we wanted to take a moment to honor the victims of Sunday's terrible attack in Orlando. Though details are still emerging, it is clearly the most devastating mass shooting in U.S. history. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and with the community that now must cope with the aftermath of the tragedy.

On Friday, we got a look at how the labor market did in May. Analysts looked to the report to see whether the labor market would give the Fed the ammunition it needed to move at the June meeting. Here are a few things we took away:

Job growth disappoints...but it has happened before

This past week marked the one-year anniversary of the most recent all time high levels in the U.S. stock market's major averages. It was around May 20th, 2015 when the records were hit and the equity markets seemed to be humming along en route to a nice return for the calendar year of 2015.

The month of May is here and with it comes the constant and predictable drumbeat from the financial media about the seasonal history of the stock market. Like many investing patterns trumpeted by the mass media, there is some validity behind it, but there is also much more to the story.

One of the most successful investors in history received the only A+ from Professor Benjamin Graham (of Graham and Dodd “Security Analysis” fame) at Columbia: the chairman and chief executive officer at Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., which traded as low as $38 per share in the early 1970s and now trades around $219,000 per share.