US stocks lost ground and are performing poorly YtD, especially compared to stocks in the UK, Europe and Japan, all of which closed at record highs on Friday. US Treasuries suddenly have a safe haven bid, with the yield on the 10y finally dropping below 4%. Gold remains strongly bid, Bitcoin remains largely without a bid.

I am going to start the update this week by focusing on markets, which is probably what most of my readers care most about.  The table below is a summary of the week. As far as equities, portfolio allocations so far this year have favoured value stocks over growth stocks in the U.S., and international stocks over US stocks on a macro global basis.    U.S. stock rotation: out of growth and into value :  As far as U.S. stocks, the culprit continues to be tech shares.  As the “l

The FOMC fell in line and served up an expected "hawkish rate cut". However, both Oracle and Broadcom – key players in the A.I. boom – saw their shares sink for different reasons, with the common denominator being A.I. valuation concerns. Yields were higher and gold rallied.

There are no shortage of investors which think stocks are well over-baked, especially stocks of companies that are directly or indirectly associated with the ongoing A.I. hype.  It has appeared for weeks that this was nothing more than scaremongering as stocks continued their stratospheric rise.  However, the past week saw scepticism start to set in as investor concerns regarding valuations broadened.  Tech stocks led the sell-off, although there were few places to hide as mo