Viewpoints

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Making Sense of Our Changing Tariff and Trade Policy

The recent swoon in the market could be attributed to confusion and uncertainty around the United States’ new tariff and trade policy. The Trump administration has announced a flurry of current and potential future tariffs, that are changing and evolving almost daily, making it difficult for investors to adequately understand the goals, the economic impacts, and the potential unintended consequences. As such, the market has traded down on general uncertainty about our overall trade policy. Tariffs were a campaign promise to rectify certain inequities among our trading partners. As expected, shortly after the inauguration, the new administration announced tariffs on three of our largest trading partners. These tariffs were presented as a way to pressure Canada, Mexico, and China to assist with curtailing our immigration and fentanyl problems. Some tariffs were imposed, some changed, some delayed, and some are still being negotiated. The lack of clarity has caused confusion as...

06.07.2023
Assessing the Role of Alternative Investments in a Volatile Market

Assessing the Role of Alternative Investments in a Volatile Market

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...