KSCD News and Press, KFA Small Cap Quality Dividend Index ETF From 01/26/23

Summary After a 3.0% expansion in 2022, world real GDP is now projected to increase 1.9% in 2023, up from last month's forecast of 1.6% growth. Monetary tightening, cooling demand, and supply chain resilience are driving disinflation. Declines in industrial commodity prices are now movi...

Summary Tightening monetary policy drove rising 10-year Treasury bond yields and pressured equity valuations in 2022. Interest rates will drive the market environment, to some extent, according to our U.S. growth and core equity and U.S. value equity teams. Given the lagged impact, ...

Summary We have hit the debt limit; we have a problem. How can we put off the problem and make someone else deal with somewhere down the road? Both political parties, in my opinion, don't really want a solution to the "debt" problem; they just want to send it off once again into the...

Summary Reserve provisioning by banks against the likelihood of further deterioration in their consumer and small business loan portfolios. Analysts’ earnings estimates are finally catching up to the market, which decided already in 2022 that conditions were headed south. The...

Summary Looking at the most recent readings of many economic indicators, nowcasting gives a more up-to-date reading of the economy than gross domestic product. The weakest US sector is housing. Building permits have been on a downward trend for much of 2022 and dropped again in December...

Summary ClearBridge is a leading global asset manager committed to active management. Research-based stock selection guides our investment approach, with our strategies reflecting the highest-conviction ideas of our portfolio managers. The pro-cyclical tilt of our portfolio helped the S...

Summary Falling wages reduce the odds of a 1970s style outcome. The biggest lesson for me was the sheer uncertainty of the future. We keep threatening to default on ourselves over a self-imposed constraint that doesn’t actually constrain anything. Here are some thin...

Summary One of the big stories late last fall was the abrupt about-face turn by the Chinese government on its zero-Covid policy. There is a connection of sorts tying together the newfound fondness for Chinese and European assets. Small-cap domestic stocks do still seem to demonstrat...

Summary Since October 13, 2022, the S&P 500 Index is up 11.80% on a price only basis. For the start of 2023, the S&P 500 Index is up 4.16% through January 13, 2023. As we noted in our recently published Winter Investor Letter, maybe the negativity around the market/economy is ov...

Summary The Federal Government ran a deficit of -$85B in December. While this was much smaller than the deficit posted in November, it marks one of the largest December deficits ever. Zooming out and looking over the history of the budget back to 1980 shows a complete picture. It shows ...