NEWS a life well planned is a life well lived
The Captain’s Log Winter 2019
Economic Naughty & Nice List The roughly 30 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas provide stock market participants a seasonally unique opportunity to reflectively evaluate their previous year’s successes and failures and to proactively prepare for the coming year’s challenges and opportunities. In the investment management business, the seasoned veterans have learned to take this annual opportunity to cautiously lean back while optimistically looking forward into the coming year. We have learned to leverage the previous year’s experiences to help us remain both convicted and humble about our past successes. By reviewing the previous year’s top news stories and market making activity we now move more knowledgeably into 2020, and to keep it seasonal I would like to critique 2019’s big market moving stories using Santa’s timeless grading scale - Naughty or Nice.
Total U.S. Employment: At the very top of the 2019 storyline sits our domestic employment market resting comfortably on Santa’s Nice list. Our overall employment condition continues to radiate economically like the North Star on Christmas Eve, and we today continue to benefit economically by enjoying the trickle-down benefits of the highest total employment figure ever and the lowest total unemployment rate since World War II. Not even Mr. Potter could find fault in these numbers and 2019 proved to be a fantastic time to be gainfully employed in the U.S, leading us convincingly optimistic into 2020. The Federal Reserve: Like building a snowman in July, I need to place the Federal Reserve and their corresponding federal funds policy on the Naughty list. In retrospect, (continued on page 3)