2024-03-15 08:10:00 ET
Summary
- Matrix Asset Advisors is a registered investment advisor. The firm is 100% owned by its employees. Matrix is led by David A. Katz, CFA, a co-founder of Matrix, who created the firm’s investment valuation models.
- Looking back on our 2023 outlook, many areas of our forecast played out as we expected.
- We begin the new year optimistic that the economy will show another year of growth and that inflation will continue to decline towards the Fed’s 2% target.
- Our best guess is that the Fed has engineered a soft landing, though a mild, short-lived recession is still a possibility if they keep rates too high for too long.
- The biggest risks we see for financial markets in 2024 are the uncertainty related to a government shutdown, the Presidential election, and geopolitical risks.
Capital Markets Highlights
In Q4 2023, U.S. stock 1 and bond 2 markets rallied on improving inflation data, strong economic growth, and comments from Fed Chair Powell suggesting the Fed's interest rate hiking cycle is over and the prospects for a rare economic soft landing are improving.
The quarter started poorly with a decline in October amid fears of rising interest rates, a new war in the Middle East, and some disappointing earnings reports. Then the stock and bond markets abruptly changed course in the first week of November, jumping higher after surprisingly good labor productivity 3 and inflation data and the Fed's decision to leave interest rates unchanged for the second consecutive time 4 . From that turning point, the stock market never looked back and rose for the last nine weeks of the year, its longest winning streak since 2004 5 .
In Q4, the market, as measured by the S&P 500® ( SP500, SPX ) was up 11.69%. It was a broad-based rally with all sectors except Energy participating. The equally weighted S&P 500 Index® 6 was up 11.81% in the quarter, a sharp contrast to the dominance of a handful of growth stocks, the Magnificent Seven, in the first half of the year....
Read the full article on Seeking Alpha
For further details see:
Matrix Asset Advisors Q4 2023 Capital Markets Commentary And Quarterly Report