George Hosfield, CFA, discusses Ferguson Wellman's quarterly strategy titled, "Inflation's Flame Flickers," which addresses the narrow market leadership, the impact of higher interest rates on inflation and how assets are priced at this stage of the economic cycle.
George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the firm's quarterly strategy titled "Stalemate," which highlights the Fed's ongoing battle to tame inflation along with our views on the health of the banking industry and capital market expectations for the balance of the year.
Director and Chief Investment Officer George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the Fed raising interest rates, peaking inflation and our view on equities and volatility across all asset classes in our Investment Strategy titled, “Balancing Act.”
The video we shared at the beginning of our 2026 Outlook events took 26,297,280 minutes of history and streamlined it to around 3.5 minutes. We hope you enjoy this commemorative video as much as we did creating it.
Samantha Pahlow, CTFA, AWMA, discusses the proposed tax changes that could affect clients’ tax planning for 2021.
As the world’s battle against coronavirus rages on, we offer our best regards to those on the front lines battling the pandemic and express our sympathies to those whose health and welfare are being directly impacted.
One of the four takeaways in our 2018 Outlook was, “It’s the Economy,” meaning that over the long term, financial markets tend to do a good job shrugging off headline risk and political drama. Instead, markets focus on the health of the economy. This attribute was once again demonstrated this week with equity markets gaining more than 2 percent despite heightened geopolitical tension as the U.S. formally exited the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
This week we experienced something we haven’t in some time: a down week. Stocks struggled to a close, down 3.8 percent with no help from blue-chip names. Alphabet (GOOGL) and Apple reports weren’t favored by Wall Street, driving the stocks down 5.2 and 4.3 percent, respectively.
After eight consecutive days of positive returns, U.S. equities closed slightly lower Friday and finished the week up 1.10 percent. Emerging markets, up 2.75 percent, extended the lead as the best performing asset class of 2017 with a total return greater than 30 percent.
Fed Taper Brings Risk to Mortgage Bonds Unseen in Treasuries
For all the talk that Janet Yellen’s plan to shrink the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet will hurt Treasuries, U.S. mortgage bonds face a bigger test.
Headlines screaming, “fire and fury,” and “ballistic rockets are on constant standby,” could have surely warranted a multi-percentage sell-off. Fortunately, the market’s reaction was somewhat muted, falling just over 1 percent for the week. Historically, North Korean headlines have had minimal impact on the stock market. In 2006, when they detonated their first nuclear device, U.S. stocks were actually up.
Ferguson Wellman Capital Management recently promoted three professionals, Scott Christianson, CFP®, Josh Frankel, CFP®, and Peter Jones. Christianson has been promoted to senior vice president, Frankel, has been promoted to executive vice president and Peter Jones has been promoted to vice president.
The Friday job report was slightly on the light side with December payrolls coming in at 156,000, 19,000 below economist’s estimates. Positively, the previous two months showed 19,000 in upward revisions. However, wages grew at their highest rate since June 2009, coming in at 2.9 percent year-over-year growth.
A Nobel Prize for Bob Dylan couldn’t buoy the markets this week. Uncertainty in China and a rocky start to earnings season resulted in a down week for stocks. While equities rallied on Friday, the S&P 500 ended the week down close to 1 percent. Pre-announcements from Honeywell, Dover and Fastenal weren’t a positive way to start the week; however, [...]
Mixed economic data led to weaker stock markets around the world this week. U.S. equities were down around less than 1 percent, while international benchmarks were modestly negative as well. One would expect with negative equity markets that interest rates would have dropped as well, but
Originally appeared on Bloomberg.com on September 28, 2016
Stumpf’s Pay Cut Eclipsed by Fury as Yellen, State Join In
Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf gave up $41 million to buy a reprieve from the bank’s widening scandal.
After an unusually long spell of low volatility, stocks and bonds sold off in tandem to end a week that was previously on the quiet side following the Labor Day holiday. Coming into Friday, stocks had essentially earned out the high single-digit returns we foresaw for 2016. Low levels of economic growth globally should renew profit growth in future quarters, but neither stocks nor bonds are cheap at this point.
Financial markets were volatile this week, influenced by mixed messages from the Federal Reserve. The Fed minutes released on Wednesday were dovish, suggesting little chance of a Fed rate hike, while San Francisco Fed President Williams
The stock market was up for the week with the S&P 500 returning .20 percent. During the week, the S&P 500 climbed to an all-time high on Thursday. Bonds were higher in price and lower in yield with the 10-year Treasury moving from a
With the opening ceremonies of the Rio Olympics set to begin tonight and on the heels of a strong number in the month of July in which the U.S. added 255K jobs, stocks ended the week with a bang. This was meaningfully ahead of
We are pleased to present our firm's 40-Year Report. In addition to sharing some milestones Ferguson Wellman and West Bearing Investments reached in 2015, we have collected facts, history and imagery that reflect who we are as a company and how Ferguson Wellman has grown over four decades. To read the report, please click here.
Stocks finished the week off by only 0.80 percent, recovering some of the losses suffered Thursday after the Fed voted to keep interest rates unchanged. Similarly, the Bank of Japan and Bank of England are also maintaining their monetary
