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As investment stewards, we at Manchester Capital seek to preserve, protect, and grow client assets given the prevailing market, economic, and political climates. We do not take political positions, believing that doing so could unduly influence our financial decision making. Instead, we focus solely on our mission of helping clients achieve their financial objectives. It is through this lens that we review the market’s response to the first 100 days of the second Trump Administration—beginning January 17th, the final market close before inauguration, and ending 100 days later with the market’s close April 30th. While the first 100 days is an arbitrary metric, it is instructive in understanding the market’s attitude toward the administration’s actions. Market Performance and Volatility During this 100 day period, there have been 78 trading days for the market. Using the S&P 500 as a market proxy, the market closed January 17th at 5,996.66, peaked February...
07.05.2023
For more than three years, the United States economy has been working through a massive set of disruptions related to the COVID pandemic, the subsequent policy responses, and the second-order effects of those responses including a spike in inflation, interest rate volatility, evolving living and working patterns, and accelerating technological innovation. These disruptions have touched nearly all aspects of our daily lives with significant reverberations throughout the real estate industry. Real estate is inherently cyclical and highly dependent on capital markets and debt for liquidity. Commercial real estate in particular has seen tremendous impacts from these recent disruptive forces. Transaction volume initially dropped and subsequently skyrocketed during the pandemic as stimulus and historically low interest rates drove investors into any assets offering positive yields. As a result, valuations increased as investors drove pricing higher in auction processes. Rents, particularly in the apartment and industrial sectors, increased substantially due to strong...
There are few concepts more central to achieving long-term investing success than portfolio diversification. This idea, which at its core is simply not having all your eggs in one basket, has taken on added complexity in recent years thanks to the widespread adoption of so-called alternative investments. The term has come to encompass an incredibly diverse range of strategies and approaches with a correspondingly wide range of potential outcomes for investors. Alternative investments can provide important benefits to investors if approached carefully and according to a sensible investment plan, especially at times with significant market uncertainty such as we’ve experienced in recent years. Alternative investments (also called alternatives, or alts), writ large, can be difficult to categorize. We consider them to be anything that is not a traditional stock or bond market investment. The range of alternative investment strategies includes: An important feature of each of these categories of investment...
