Quarterly Commentary

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy…” – Carl Sagan

While it was not a simple matter of smooth sailing on calm seas throughout the last 12 months, the record books will show that 2024 was a historically solid year for global markets in aggregate with the MSCI World Index turning in its best…

“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.” – Warren Buffet

The US Federal Reserve joined the ranks of the Bank of Canada, European Central Bank, and Bank of England (and central banks for other Developed Markets and a host of Emerging Markets) in September in cutting its policy interest rate.

When you write reviews with a quarterly cadence, sometimes it’s hard to think of new things to say. Things go up, things go down, things go sideways, or some variant thereof.

After a lengthy upswing over 2023 and early 2024, the complexion of Developed Market (DM) equities during the second quarter was decidedly more mixed.

This quotation has turned out to be prophetic, at least over the past quarter. There wasn’t any point agonizing about geopolitics or how expensive markets were; it was futile worrying about the path of interest rates or infation.

Equity markets are off to a good start this year, with stocks globally continuing to ride the momentum that began in earnest at the end of 2023.

You can never erase your digital footprint. With that in mind, we thought it might be worth revisiting the prognostications of this review at the beginning of 2023.

With it all now said and done, the financial market performance of the last year will hardly garner much attention…

When you write a review with a quarterly cadence, the onus is on you to produce something new, even when the landscape hasn’t changed that much. What has happened, of course, is that time has passed and that we are, therefore, by definition, closer…

The truth is, the house always wins at the casino. In comparison, for financial markets, history shows that the odds favour investors.