Summary
- I operate on facts and data.
- On the bond side, investment grade bonds have been the best performers and on the equity side the NASDAQ has been shining the brightest.
- You now have some hard data upon which to make your determinations. Use it to your advantage.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words, when reading books. You will be reading meanings. -W. E. B. Du Bois
Each day, every day, we see some "legend," some "guru," some "pundit," quoted in the Press. We are either going straight to Heaven, or straight to Dante's Inferno. I look at it all and cross my eyes. I operate on facts and data and I have no interest in the constant "pimps" that are printed and orchestrated to guide the novice into the "Dark Side," where the loss of their money has been orchestrated.
There you have some real numbers. On the bond side, Investment Grade bonds have been the best performers and on the equity side the NASDAQ has been shining the brightest. You now have some hard data upon which to make your determinations. Use it to your advantage.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
- Lord Kelvin
If your concern is inflation, then I invite you to look at the U.S. TIPS, which are down 0.09% in the last month. As a matter of fact, according to Bloomberg data, there is not one area of the world that has experienced inflation, according to anyone's inflation-linked bonds, during the last month. It is a vast sea of red numbers, in this space.
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about some possible recession. It sure isn't apparent in the earnings to date. Whether you traffic in bonds or equities, here are how the earnings in various sectors of the S&P 500 have performed from 11/16/18 to 2/15/19:
- Energy +98.90%
- Materials -1.66%
- Industrials +18.91%
- Consumer Discretionary +12.97%
- Consumer Staples +5.28%
- Health Care +11.32%
- Financials -1.36%
- Information Technology +4.95%
- Communication Services +21.05%
- Utilities -2.19%
- Real Estate +6.96%
*Data according to Bloomberg
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
- Albert Einstein
So today I have provided the data. Now it is up to you to consider the numbers and come up with the "logical ideas." This is what investing is all about, you know.
