Investment Guru Stock Tips and Expert Advice

The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities offer a fitting coda to 2020: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.We’re left to contemplate the jaw-dropping list of extremes compiled during this turbulent year:

Just about a year ago, I noted here that corporate insiders were betting heavily on a reversal in the relative downtrend in value versus growth. At the time, executives at companies outside of the most popular sectors in the market were buying shares of their own stock in the open market in size. Since then, value has staged a dramatic comeback. In fact, this quarter marks the greatest period of outperformance for value over growth in two decades. Furthermore, rising interest rates would appear to suggest this trend still has room to run.

Confidence is high in the US thanks to strong vaccination rates. What will the new normal look like though? Offices could re-open by summer, but how much will we continue to work from home? And how much will we travel for business? Supply chains are still bottlenecked, leading to inflation pressure. The blockage of the Suez Canal won’t help that.

Big economic storms are rare and usually end quickly, but they tend to have long-lasting effects. Today I want to talk about a storm 50 years ago that still affects us now.