The Broadleaf Growth Equity Portfolio gained a solid 2.6% during the fourth quarter, bringing its full year return to 11.8%. While lagging the overall market’s return for the year, our results on a one, three and five year basis remain in the top half of our peer group and are in solidly positive territory. Our […]
It’s been a good year. The U.S. stock market has done well, gas prices are down at the pump, and the job market continues to improve. CEO confidence has returned, with merger and acquisition related activity finally joining stock buybacks and dividend increases as worthy uses of shareholder capital. The local builder is putting the […]
The U.S. markets enjoyed a strong open today but have experienced a slow bleed off the early morning highs. News of rate cuts in China and more serious discussion of quantitative easing (QE) as a policy tool in Europe have given a market leading bid to energy, materials, and industrial stocks today, leadership these sectors […]
For those that may not have noticed, stock market volatility has been on the rise in October, with more up and down 1-2% days and powerful intraday moves than we’ve seen since the Great Recession. Weak overseas economies, fears over what rapid declines in energy prices could mean, and Ebola are just a few of […]
Like clockwork, earnings season has drawn to a close, creating an information vacuum for the stock market, one in which the media spends more time “making” the news than perhaps reporting it. The marginal dollar at trade – or the price maker in a high frequency dominated trading world – is one more likely to […]
I hate to blow up everyone’s inbox with a second Economic Update in just over a week, but I guess I just did. Usually, I don’t have anything intelligent to say more than once every month or so and since I’m not a journalist, I’m never forced to make stuff up just to sell papers. […]
Our last piece, Quick Thoughts, generated one of the highest open rates of any Economic Update we’ve sent, so we’ll take that as a clue and stick with the format. Before we get started, we would like to make a short comment on Robin Williams life and death. While he, quite sadly, was not the […]
I am not a particularly good salesman. From the time I first meet a prospect to when they become a full-fledged client, it can often take two years even when they initiate the first meeting. Fortunately, growing the firm isn’t one of my primary roles, a responsibility that does fall to Bill Hoover, my business […]
In the past three months, the behavior of the stock market has been a lot like Forrest Gump practicing ping pong – blazingly fast and completely mesmerizing. After zoning out for a while, I had to ask myself, did that really just happen? (View a printable version of this Economic Update: Gump Pong) I’ve experienced many […]