Blog

Banks must be profitable, but society requires them to be safe and boring enterprises. The middle ground is hard to find. The core activity of a bank is converting short-term customer deposits into long-term investments....

We have devoted most of this edition to a discussion of the state of Washington estate tax. While most PIM clients may never pay federal estate tax, given the very high exclusion amount, we estimate that most could be subject to state...

From December 13th to December 28th, the S&P 500 declined in value by 5.88%. From December 29th to the end of January, the S&P 500 appreciated 8.8%. This short-term rally was driven by improving inflation data and a number of economic...

In This Edition: 1) New RMD age and other annual updates, 2) Tax Loss Harvesting, 3) The Year Ahead...

This is the time of year when Wall Street strategists begin rolling out their 2023 forecasts. In general, they will be wildly wrong....we will discuss the key factors that we think will drive returns in the coming year.

In our last newsletter, we discussed the impact of increasing interest rates and quantitative tightening on the U.S. bond market.  Below, we discuss why the Fed believes that raising interest rates will bring inflation down to its...

In this edition of PIM’s Quarterly News Release, we discuss: 1) Relative Investment Return, 2) Valuations, 3) The Bond Market. The Bond Market narrative is a much longer, more detailed presentation than we have ever...

It is common for stocks to rally in the midst of a bear market.  While this type of rally provides relief from the grind of daily volatility, it is generally based upon modest and possibly fleeting good news rather than enduring...

The Energy Sector

Brian C. Fahey, CFA, M.ECON.

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Many factors influence inflation; the cost of energy is one of the most impactful, visible and fast-moving. Energy prices need to be in a sustained downtrend if inflation is going to fall as quickly as the market bulls now hope.

We begin this edition of our quarterly News Release with a brief discussion on one important element of estate planning and conclude with a detailed market commentary.

And which path the market will take is unknown....The present situation is especially challenging because the path the market takes will be less driven by the health of the economy, which normally it is, and more driven by the actions of...

Not since March of 2020, during the early panic associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, has the stock market suffered such a bad month. The natural question to ask is when absolute performance will be positive. The answer follows....

The economic and geopolitical environment is more complex than normal and thus, requires a greater understanding of the factors that influence the short and intermediate-term possible outcomes. We start with a discussion of market valuation

For the second time in two years, global capital markets have become unsettled by world events. And for the second time in two years, we were already in the process of reducing portfolio risk when these destabilizing events occurred.

It was certainly our hope that we could spend a few months without talking about inflation and the Federal Reserve, but the events of the past month demand otherwise. Both inflation readings and Fed policy changes had a heavy impact on...

Welcome to 2022. In this edition: 1) Company Announcements, 2) Timely and useful information, as we have presented in Januarys past, 3) A deep dive into our own 2021 capital markets forecasts and our views on 2022.

Greetings and welcome to December. This edition of our monthly communication is a bit longer than normal. We present general announcements, a brief discussion on market volatility and close with a longer discussion about cryptocurrency.

One of the prominent themes of our newsletters this year has been inflation. Inflation rates for countries globally have hit decade, and in some cases, multi-decade highs. Even the Federal Reserve, long champion of the “inflation...

4th Quarter 2021

For most of the post-war era, the prevailing academic models that seek to explain capital market prices have been based upon the assumption that the market is completely efficient. The traditional economic...

A primary residence is often a person’s largest single asset. In this part of the country, price appreciation has surprised proud homeowners and real estate professionals alike. A general concern may be emerging that the housing market...

Read the News Release here.

Much like the weather in the Puget Sound during spring, the economic data points released in May were wildly inconsistent. Labor market and inflation data both missed analysts’ forecasts by huge margins, but in opposite directions...

In the recent PIM Quarterly News Release, we proposed that the equity market had overreacted to inflation concerns. We suggested that bond yields would fall and that as a result, value equity outperformance would give way to...

Read the News Release here.

The S&P 500 is up approximately 3% for the year through the last trading day of February. March is coming in with a bang, but we will ignore that for the moment. Even the month of February saw the S&P 500 gain around 1%....

“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct...

Irvin Fisher was a prominent US economist who made many significant contributions to his field in the early 1900’s. Nobel-winning economists Milton Friedman and James Tobin have called Mr. Fisher “the greatest economist the...

Read the news release here.

Election results and vaccine announcements from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca have made this the best November for the S&P 500 since 1928, with the index (SPY) gaining 10.93% through Monday, November 30th. The Russell 2000 (IWM), the...

Introduction This communication contains two completely unrelated sections: Market Commentary, and Why a Roth Conversion Now? We have chosen to present these in the same document because the section on Roth IRA conversions is quite...

Read the news release here.

In the monthly communication we released on Tuesday, we discussed that U.S. large cap market returns are concentrated within a handful of technology stocks and suggested that this was cause for concern. The market confirmed this...

Month in Review: August 2020 Global equity markets continued higher this past month on a mix of vaccine optimism and better than expected earnings. The S&P 500 and the MSCI All-Cap World Index (a measure of all equity markets globally)...

Greetings valued clients. We hope this finds you well and enjoying the summer sun to the extent possible. In earlier communications we mentioned our intention to provide commentary monthly through the end of the year. This is the first...

Please read news release here.

For the past approximately two months, we have produced a communication each Friday. Our hope was to provide clear information and analysis, as well as consistent support and guidance through what has been a most unusual economic and...

Introduction: We have suggested in recent weeks that the market and economic recovery will take time, that there will be volatility along the way. The volatility of an investment is commonly expressed using a measure called...

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill: November 10, 1942 We present this Churchill quote for two reasons. First, we understand...

Jobs, Oil, Markets and Portfolios Jobs: Unemployment claims increased by 4.4 million in the past week, though the trend is sharply down since spiking during the last week of March. Around 26 million jobs have now been lost due to the...

The S&P500 gained another 3 ½ percent this week, with plenty of volatility along the way and a strong finish on Friday. Continued volatility is to be expected and is likely to continue through September. Market behavior is about...

It has been a positive week for equity markets, with the S&P500 advancing approximately 9.4% in the last five trading sessions. Speculation abounds, ranging from expectations of a shorter than expected recession and bear market to what...

Seeking Inspiration: Quite a while ago, we shared with you what is considered to be the actual history of the phrase “May you live in interesting times.” As a reminder, it likely did not originate in China, and it was not...

Please read news release here.

Read the news release here.

Read News Release here.

Read News Release here.

Read News Release here.

Read News Release here.