Commentary

The past four weeks have been surreal. The S&P500 lost nearly 30% of its value with extreme volatility day in and day out, and the busiest cities in the US and most of Europe are in lockdown. What happened in China is happening to a lot of us, and we didn’t expect that. No country can fully prepare for events like this, unless they have experienced something similar before. Singapore, Taiwan, Hongkong, and South Korea have done a commendable job responding to Covid-19, possibly because they had the painful experience dealing with SARS (2003) and learned from it. The US […more]

Christoph Gisiger:

The crash came out of nowhere: In just a few weeks, stocks have entered bear market territory, investors are facing the biggest setback since the financial crisis. However, Rafael Resendes doesn’t expect a similar scenario like the Great Recession of 2008/09. The Co-founder of the value investment firm Applied Finance warns against panic selling and thereby missing powerful rallies when the outlook brightens up. […more]

Applied Finance has aggregated recent performance over the last several weeks to help fully understand the recent market drop’s impact through various sector, style, factor, and industry lenses. We have also compiled updated percent to target median charts to better understand current valuation levels normalized against historic averages. We present this data today with limited commentary, as we will explore this in much more detail in next month’s quarterly write-up. In the meantime, a few main observations […more]

The US equity markets have fallen sharply the past week on concerns of the coronavirus disease 2019. This novel coronavirus affects the respiratory system, was first identified in Wuhan, China more than two months ago, […more]

Avoiding the Disrupted Overcomplicating things is seldom on the path to investment success. The stunning ascension of Tesla has confounded, in a manner no less than stupefying, the investment thesis of many. We don’t profess […more]

Pausing for a look down from Semiconductor Stocks

Technology stocks in general, and semiconductor stocks in particular had a stellar performance in 2019 with a particularly strong finish during the last quarter. What can one expect for 2020? While the old adage that forecasting is hard, particularly with respect to the future, seems true; we can say that standing here in the present there appears to be a lot of good fortune prices in a number of semiconductor stocks. […more]