Blog

With 2013 year-end celebrations disappearing quickly in the rearview mirror, the New Year has been more grumpy than cheery for most global stock markets. While most of the selloffs have occurred in foreign stocks, the U.S. stock market has started to feel some pressure in the last week. We have discussed several times that 2014 could very well bring the first meaningful drawdown in the U.S.

An interesting chart showed up in our research this week that we wanted to share with you. The first graphic below shows the net amount of money flowing into and out of stock funds (on the left) and bond and income oriented funds (on the right) The red circles in the bottom right corner show first a trend over many months of investors adding significant money to bond funds.

It’s over! As we wrote to you in September, no U.S. Government ‘shutdown’ in recent history has lasted more than 21 days, and this one fell right in line, ending at day 16. We also shared with you that most shutdowns tend to be minor events in the investment markets, and this one was even weaker than most.

While we would rather just ignore the ongoing shenanigans of our 535 ‘leaders’ in Washington, D.C., the non-stop media coverage this week will be impossible to get away from, so we wanted to offer one additional piece of perspective now that a budget compromise has not been reached (yet).