Average Retail Investors Down Over 35% in 2022

Executive Summary

  1. Retail investors were down over 35% on average in 2022 as they chased into overvalued and speculative assets that did well in prior periods.
  2. 2022 was generally difficult for even conservative and balanced portfolios.
  3. Wall Street insists on performing the fool’s errand of making12-month return forecasts and got it very wrong in 2022.
  4. 12-year outlook for stocks and bonds.

Continue reading “Average Retail Investors Down Over 35% in 2022”

Quick Follow-Up to “Bonds Haven’t Been Here…”

Last week I mentioned yields on Treasuries hitting (or even exceeding) 4% now. So, let’s bring this full circle.

Two weeks ago I wrote a note titled, “No, Stocks Are Not Cheap Yet.” And in that note I provided a range of returns for the U.S. stock market over the next twelve years under a variety of good, average, and bad conditions (see below).

 

The range of returns from this analysis was -5.4% to +3.5% annualized. That means even an optimistic case for U.S. stocks (at least for the conditions in the matrix above) is about a 3.5% annualized return over the next 12-years with an average expected return of about 0%. Continue reading “Quick Follow-Up to “Bonds Haven’t Been Here…””

No, Stocks Are Not Cheap Yet

With the stock market down about 20%, I’ve been getting asked if stocks are now cheap. I’ve also heard some folks state, rather matter-of-factly, that stocks are now reasonably priced.

However, stocks are neither cheap nor even fairly-priced…yet.

To illustrate why I believe stocks are not yet cheap, it helps to contrast current conditions to those of a period when stocks were actually objectively fairly-priced in the past. Continue reading “No, Stocks Are Not Cheap Yet”