Valuentum’s June Best Ideas Newsletter

Image: Page 49, June edition of American Library Association Booklist.   By Brian Nelson, CFA — Welcome new members!   Roughly 90% of active management is underperforming their benchmarks, after fees, over the trailing 15-year period ending 2018. It’s a sad story out there. Most active investors are performing backward-looking analysis, others are using short-cut multiple analysis to make decisions; still, others may be continuing down the path of thinking that may have gotten active management in trouble in the first place: theoretical quantitative finance.   The bedrock of finance, for example, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and its beta have been shown to explain little about stock market returns, yet it is still in finance textbooks and still on key … Read more

US Congress Is Getting Ready to Pass a Massive ~$2.2 Trillion Fiscal Stimulus Bill

Image Shown: US equities have started to recover some of their lost ground as the likelihood that the US Congress will pass a massive ~$2.2 trillion fiscal stimulus and emergency spending package, dubbed the CARES Act, has increased significantly over the past week as seen through the bounce in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). President Trump has clearly indicated that he intends to sign such a bill into law as soon as possible, with the US House of Representatives expected to take up the legislation this upcoming Friday morning on March 27. By Callum Turcan On March 25, the US Senate worked late into the night to secure a bipartisan compromise on a massive ~$2.2 trillion fiscal stimulus … Read more

Stock Market Outlook for 2021

By Valuentum Analysts February 8, 2021 2020 was one for the history books. We covered our thoughts and reflections on the past year in our “2020 Won’t Soon Be Forgotten” article (link here), and now we are looking towards the future. Global health authorities should be able to bring an end to the ongoing coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic sooner than many had expected as several vaccines have already been improved for emergency use and several others appear increasingly likely to get approved. Global vaccine distribution activities are currently underway, and this should allow the world to slowly return to pre-pandemic activities. Before then, immense stimulus measures launched primarily in developed nations should support global economic activities until the public health crisis … Read more