It’s been a wild opening to 2019 for investors. It’s always hard to know why markets make big moves, but it seems the big gains of this quarter are the result of Fed Chairman Powell softening his stance on interest rate hikes. The Fed’s support has likely buoyed the stock market since the financial crisis, and that could continue. But, at some point, a spate of bankruptcies or some other failure could take the Fed’s control away. Over the short-term, anything is possible, but, at current prices, investors shouldn’t expect too much in terms of long-term stock returns.
The
quarter ended with the S&P 500 Index up 13.65%. Because of the mathematics
of compounding, that doesn’t completely erase the 13.55% loss in the last
quarter of 2018, but it’s comes close. The index is within two