Latest Investments & Planning Insights

As we pass the halfway point of the second quarter U.S. equity earnings season, this week we are providing our assessment of the current earnings environment, evaluating the expectations for earnings in 2024, and examining if more fundamentally driven equity performance is possible, which we believe will be key if markets are to build on gains generated in the first half of the year.

Try as they might, the Federal Reserve has done little to slow the beat of U.S. economic growth.

It has been just under a year since Chairman Powell gave his curt “pain” speech at Jackson Hole, warning of the economic costs that would need to be endured in order to get inflation under control.

A year on, there is little evidence of that pain.

As we look into the back half of 2023, we can foresee a scenario where the market behaves like a duck. On the surface, the market may appear to be making little movement, plodding sideways, while under the surface we could see dynamic churning and rotations of market leadership.

As we highlighted in our mid-year outlook, one of the most surprising dynamics we have seen in 2023 is the surge in valuations back to pandemic-era levels, especially given the backdrop of elevated interest rates and hawkish Fed policy.