Category: Weekly Investment Update

A kid, coming out of the store you are walking into, announces she just bought a candy bar and a stick of gum for $1.10; the candy bar costs $1.00 more than the piece of gum. Question:  How much did the gum cost? We are called on to perform quick calculations and make snap decisions […]

The S&P 500 finished the week at 2,425 and has not traded outside a range bounded by one-percent on either side of that level for the past 6 weeks. The S&P 500 has not had a 5% correction since February 11, 2016, seventeen months ago. Historically, the index has averaged three corrections of 5% or […]

Stephen Auth, Federated Investors’ Chief Investment Officer, Equities, recently confirmed his positive outlook for stocks. The sources of his optimism are: the economic backdrop is solid; credit and liquidity conditions remain good; Washington and the Fed will address the country’s fiscal and monetary problems in the coming months in a manner sufficient to support corporate […]

Some financial service providers are struggling to comply with the Department of Labor’s new Fiduciary Rule. The rule requires any financial services professional who provides retirement planning advice to raise their standard of operation to one of a fiduciary. The introduction of the rule created a good deal of turmoil among many in the traditional […]

Owning shares of stock is being part owner of a business. As part owner of a publicly traded corporation, your share of the company may be a tiny fraction of the whole but you are nevertheless part owner of the assets, revenues and earnings of the company. You own a portion of everything the corporation […]

Stocks, as measured by the S&P 500, would have been higher again last week if it had not been for the large cap tech stocks, this year’s market rally leaders. After year-to-date gains of 20% to 30%, the group took a breather Friday finishing with one day declines of three to four percent. Rather than […]

Investment decisions require more than gut feeling responses to current news. Typically, after a long decline in stock prices, a good deal of risk has been removed from the market, yet investors perceive the risk has increased. Conversely, when stock prices are high and rising, investors perceive the risks of investing to be much lower […]

Financial planning is one half of the process. Estate planning, often neglected by the majority of financial service providers, is the other half of the process. The Trust Company of Kansas (TCK) has always stressed a holistic approach to wealth management.  Good investment results can be squandered if accounts are not appropriately titled and beneficiaries […]

As of May 10th, only ten companies of the five hundred which make up the S&P 500 Index are responsible for 46% of the gain in the index so far in 2017. The S&P 500 is a market capitalization weighted index and those same ten companies make up just 12% of the market cap of […]

Not this year, according to Stephen Auth, who oversees asset allocation at Federated Investors. Any corrections should be viewed as buying opportunities. He provides observations to support his view. News of the various political risks is mostly noise and both tax and healthcare reforms will begin to take shape in coming weeks. First quarter earnings […]