HYGV News and Press, FlexShares High Yield Value-Scored Bond Index Fund From 02/18/23

Summary Why the U.S. economy continues to display polyurethane-like flexibility and resilience, despite encountering extraordinary shocks. How portfolios can also be built with flexibility and resilience in mind. Why high-quality fixed income assets are today a critical component of...

Summary One of the phrases making the rounds among the financial media chatterboxes this week has been “no landing”. The macro news has indeed given some cause for cheer relative to some of the more dour scenarios we’ve been looking at in the past few months. Wh...

Summary Following the US Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) series of aggressive interest-rate hikes, inflationary pressures have shown signs of easing. We believe this may pave the way for a “pivot to a pause” in monetary policy. The impact of tightening financial co...

Summary Changes in the bond market reflect changes in interest rates, inflation expectations, and overall economic conditions, all of which have a significant impact on the stock market. This week, we saw a bit of a dislocation in the bond/stock market relationship. Corporate bonds and ...

Summary Over the past year, banks have reported tighter lending standards on commercial loans to small, large, and middle-market firms. Large corporate bankruptcies have spiked the most since the 2008 financial crisis. Stock valuations typically tumble during recessions as the unemp...

Summary Investor obsession with peaks—peak inflation, peak hawkishness, peak bearishness—has shifted to pivots, in particular, a possible Federal Reserve (Fed) pivot away from its aggressive rate hikes over the last year. Financial markets seem to be placing a higher proba...

Summary The JNK ETF did not make another leg higher when the S&P attacked the 4100 level last week, which in my book is an indication that the stock market is a little ahead of itself. As we come up to the FOMC meeting tomorrow, the Fed needs to be reminded that the bigger part of t...

Summary If 2022 was an unsettling year for equities, as I noted in my second data post, it was an even more tumultuous year for the bond market. If the question is why interest rates rose a lot in 2022, and if your answer to that question is the Fed, you have, in my view, lost the scrip...

Summary Investing can seem like an endless cycle of booms and busts. The correlations among European, Japanese, and emerging market equities as well as US high-yield bonds increased consistently since 1989. According to monthly return data, the average S&P 500 correlations to th...

Summary When the height of the entire Yield Curve is the 6-month Treasury Bill, you know that you are living in some very strange place. There are those that suggest that some kind of “pivot,” by the Fed is on the horizon. I am not in this camp, and do not expect to see th...