Cardinal Update – May 2020
Value Investing in a Covid-Driven Downturn – The S&P 500 and S&P TSX are now down just -11.6% and -14.5% respectively since the beginning of the year, an amazing recovery from March 23rd lows, down over -30%.
However, a big portion of the market’s gains have come from just a few companies, mostly technology. Consider that in the S&P 500, the median performance (meaning the point where half of stocks are below and half above) was -18.4%, almost 7% worse than the index performance. The median stock in Canada was similarly weak.
Click here to read more: Cardinal Update – May 2020
DM – Q1 Commentary 2020
It’s Different This Time – Sir John Templeton once called those the most dangerous words in investing. To be sure, we heard them when tech stocks seemed unstoppable in the late 1990’s, when house flipping was free money in the mid-2000s, and alongside virtually every other ill-fated bubble in investing history. They even applied in the opposite sense when fatigued investors convinced themselves that the financial system was irreparably broken in 2009 and fled stocks at the market’s nadir that spring.
As things presently stand, however, we’re fairly sure that even the late Mr. Templeton would have to admit that the otherwise treacherous phrase is for once wholly applicable. Try as we might, we can find no episode in modern times that compares to the scale and pervasiveness of the COVID-19 crisis has fallen upon all corners of the globe.
Click here to read more: DM-Portfolio-Commentary-Q1-20
DM Market Update II – Mar 2020
STOCKS FALL FURTHER AS COVID-19 REACTION LEAPS FROM CONCERN TO PANIC –Each comment on the state of the market we’ve published in recent weeks seems to have become obsolete in just a few trading sessions; nonetheless, in our desire to help clients and readers steer through this difficult period, we’ll give it another try. To put the current market debacle into proper context, and to ensure that a potential short term dislocation isn’t cemented into a long term portfolio mistake, it’s useful to break the in-vesting time horizon into interim phases:
Click here to read more: DM-Market-Update-II-Mar-20
Cardinal Update – March 2020
When Fear Goes Viral – Fear of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) has caused most markets around the globe to fall into correction territory, meaning a drop of 10% or more from highs.
As of this writing, the TSX has fallen by 10% from its high and the S&P 500 is down 12.5%. Markets have probably not bottomed out yet. New Covid-19 cases are spreading rapidly outside of China and we suspect that there will be clusters of new cases in certain cities of North America, similar to what has happened in Northern Italy and in Daegu, South Korea. China has proven that it is possible to control the
spread of the virus, but this has involved an almost complete quarantine in Hubei, where 90% of its infections are, as well as a fair amount of restrictions in the rest of the country.
Click here to read more: Cardinal Update – March 2020
