Quarterly Investor Memos
CORNELL CAPITAL GROUP
The S&P 500 ended the year 2023 at 4,769. During December, several leading financial firms were asked for their forecasts for the year-end 2024. The results are shown below. The most optimistic forecasts were by Fundstrat (a well-known bullish firm), Oppenheimer, and Yardeni. Considering the strong returns during 2023, four major firms, including Morgan Stanley
A market crash is nothing more than a low risk premium meeting risk aversion. —– John P. Hussman, Ph.D., November 8, 2021, When Bubble Meets Trouble Risk Premiums and Stock Prices In our third quarter memo, we stressed the importance of the equity risk premium (ERP) for understanding the level of stock prices and their relation to expected future
Discount rate variation (equivalently expected returns, risk premiums) is now at the center of asset pricing questions, from bubbles to the nature of the crash.—– John Cochrane, Presidential address to the American Finance Association.As John Cochrane notes, it is hard to understand stock price movements and related risks without taking account of variation in discount
Download Memo as PDF Stock Market Review for the First Half Year The market performance in the first half of 2023 was a surprise, to say the least. Whereas the year began with concerns about an impending recession, the market shrugged off those fears and moved dramatically upward as shown in chart below. The first half
Download Memo as PDF During the first quarter the story of both the fixed income and stock market revolved around the ongoing evolution of the yield curve. To review, the yield curve plots the yield on Treasury securities as a function of their maturity. The graph below plots the yield curves at the start of
Download Memo as PDF Retrospective As 2021 came to an end, the stock market party was going strong. The S&P 500 index closed at 4766.18 up 1,010 points or 26.9% for year to within a hair’s breadth of its all-time high. The Dow Jones (36,338) and the NASDAQ (15,645) indexes also closed near record highs. Most