THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU DO TODAY
- Mahatma Gandhi
First Affirmative – Schwab clients: we will move you from FAFN-Schwab to SAA-Schwab the last week of February. I will not have access to your account from Tuesday the 23rd through Thursday the 25th: if you anticipate needing funds during that time let me know ASAP. Your Schwab account numbers, log-ons and passwords will not change, and you will be able to transfer funds during that time. For clients now at Skye-Schwab, we will be moving into SAA-Schwab in the next few weeks. We will need you to sign our Sustainable Advisors Alliance Engagement Agreement….so look for an email from me soon. 😊 Why does this matter to you? Phase 1 will be completed by the end of February and we will then turn our focus to assessing your risk tolerance and drafting your Investment Policy Statement.
Partner Profile | the face of financial advice just got brighter.
Julie Skye | Julie launched Skye Advisors in December 2017 when she combined her experience with her passion for Sustainable – Impact Investing. Building and managing investment portfolios using the Triple Bottom Line, Skye Advisors…and now Sustainable Advisors Alliance turns money into change agents that enable investors to tackle the issues of our day. Reach Julie at: julie@sustainableadvisorsalliance.com
Krista Strohoffer | Krista has specialized in Sustainable and Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) since 1999 and is a founding partner in Sustainable Advisors Alliance. She looks beyond the financials to include the environmental, social and governance (ESG) records of a company. How a company treats its employees, its community, the environment and the consumers of its products sheds light on how well that company is managed and how well that company is likely to compete in the long term. Reach Krista at: 303.413.6025 & krista@sustainableadvisorsalliance.com
It has been one wild week with approximately a bajillion stories running, many focused-on GameStop, a small and struggling videogame retailer that has become the most talked-about stock (ticker: GME). If you have been living under a rock, you may be wondering “what happened to the market this week?” It all started in early January when followers of an investing blog on the social media platform Reddit furiously began buying GameStop shares, pushing up the stock price. At year end, GME was $19 a share and by January 14th it had doubled. By the 22nd, it had doubled AGAIN and by this Wednesday—I bet you see where this is going—the stock opened at $354, a gain of more than 1,600%. Amid trading halts, promises of investigations, and several busted hedge funds, the shares fluctuated Thursday between $112 and $483. Today’s range before noon was $291 to $413. No doubt about it: this headline can be seen as a mania:
😲Why does this matter to you? Last fall I wrote about Robin Hood the no-commission-on-line trading ap and this week they were under fire for halting trading on many stocks, once again proving, when you set up a company and sell it as “too good to be true” you find usually find out…it was.
At the end of the day, nothing matters more to the markets than the state of the pandemic. So discouraging news about the effectiveness of new vaccines--especially against the more virulent mutations that have emerged in places such as England and South Africa--will flow through to stock prices. What explains the drops in both U.S. and Global indices today? The S&P 500 was down 1.9% and the Russell 2000 small-cap index was down 1.6% with the biggest losers of the day being pandemic-sensitive stocks such as Norwegian Cruise Lines, United Airlines, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Kimco Realty, Carnival, and Delta Air Lines. All of those stocks were down at least 5% on Friday and the bad news was not confined to the U.S.: Europe’s STOXX 600 and Japan’s Nikkei 225 were also down 1.9%; the Hong Kong Hang Seng was down 1%; Canada’s TSX and the FTSE 100 were down 1.8%, and Korea’s KOSPI Composite was down 3%. Balancing this out, though, was good news from Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which was shown to be 85% effective at preventing severe disease and completely eliminating hospitalization and death, 28 days post-vaccination. 😲😲 Why does this matter to you? Stock markets are leading indicators, and they will turn higher when some of our days are darkest. If you wait invest some of your cash until the pandemic is officially behind us, markets could have begun to recover.
4th Quarter 2020 year-end earnings are coming out and while earnings have been fantastic…beating expected earnings handily…that does not seem to matter much to the stock market. By Wednesday, 25% of the S & P 500 had reported earnings, with 85% of companies beating estimates, only to see many companies perform poorly after releasing earnings. As of Tuesday, 57% of companies had seen their share prices fall 1% or more and there does not seem to be any excitement over 2021 forecasts.
😲 Why does this matter to you? As the Pandemic worries deepen, we could see a reverse of the last 6 months of improving economic data. The most positive news is that the billions of Covid-19 vaccine doses to be distributed over the course of 2021 will eventually help us reopen the economy economic and activity could finally recover. It is not that earnings do not matter. It is just that management teams cannot tell anybody whether vaccines are coming out on schedule and how effective they are against new Covid-19 variants. When they can, good earnings will start to be a positive catalyst again.
Constancy noun con·stan·cy | \ ˈkän(t)-stən(t)-sē
Steadfastness of mind under duress: fortitude, fidelity, loyalty. A state of being constant or unchanging: dedication and devotion.
In short supply. Synonym – Sustainable Advisors Alliance
Phone | 918.408.7981