Monthly Archives: December 2014

2014 Was Full Of Surprises For Bonds

The Year in Bond Funds by Morningstar Investment Research    “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” –- Niels Bohr.  Coming into 2014, prognosticators had the fixed-income markets all figured out. Many posited that it would be a rough year for U.S. Treasuries and other rate-sensitive bonds as the Fed unwound its bond-buying program. Meanwhile,…

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Since 2010, the best scoring names in our weekly mid cap report have outpaced the S&P 400 by a median 371 bps in the following year. The best performers from our list from 1 year ago are TQNT up 236%, SWKS up 174%, and ILMN up 71%. The top mid cap sector is utilities. The…

Wednesday Wind Up – Closing Out 2014

Happy New Year!   What a year it’s been, too. We added 2.7M jobs this year and that’s good because we also added 2.7M people to our population so, essentially, we didn’t lose any ground. As more and more people left the labor force (retired, discouraged)however, official unemployment fell from 7% to 5.8%.   We still have…

Cool Video: Greece Revisited

This Cool Video was posted by Euronews.  It is about 2.5 minutes long. The basic premise is that the Syriza coalition in Greece is acting like a good opposition party, not too different than the current Prime Minister Samaras who was critical of the previous Socialist government and the austerity agreement negotiated with the official creditors, when he…