Well, that was an exciting week in the markets! All three major US indexes started down on Monday following renewed global trade concerns and overnight protests in Hong Kong. The slide worsened mid-afternoon as treasury yields continued their tumble. However, Tuesday was a much different story after the U.S. delayed several Chinese tariffs through December. The announcement sent indexes ripping higher across the board.
If someone were to dive deep into the Evergreen Virtual Advisor (EVA) archives, they would stumble upon a publication from two years ago titled, “America is Great, Home Country Bias Ain’t.” The bulk of the article was written by GMO’s Rick Friedman and its main premise is that investors skew their equity exposure towards their home country. Americans who have invested in line with this idea over the past decade have unquestionably been beneficiaries as benchmark indexes including the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow Jones have all been on epic bull runs.
In his popular book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler suggests that, “Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, ‘Don’t buy that stuff’.” In fact, it can be downright unpopular to be the adult in the room when easy money seems to be falling from the skies like raindrops in Seattle in January.
