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Showing posts with the label reality checks

Market's Inflationary Expectations

Investors in the spring of 2016 could have gotten ahead of events by aligning their portfolios to “a world of lower expected capital market returns and higher forward volatility.” That, at any rate, was the upshot of a thoughtful analysis by Eric J. Wiegel of Global Focus Capital, a Boston based asset allocation advisor. Why does Wiegel think so? Because the market’s inflationary expectations are/were too low. With the benefit of a year of hindsight ... was Wiegel right? So far as I can tell ... no. In particular, the market's inflationary expectations as of the spring of 2016 for the following year were accurate, and following Wiegel's effort to outguess the market would nought have availed. There was no upsurge in inflation numbers in the months after Wiegel wrote, and in fact investors have since then benefitted by higher than expected capital market returns. In the five months before and contemporaneous with Wiegel's article, the inflation rate (annualized, th...