Markets.

We were fully invested in our US ETF strategies before the weekend French elections. We are still there and overweight financials (banks) and tech. In our volatility strategies we are also fully invested and have been for over a week. These VOL strategies are mathematically…

Is there a threat to the municipal bond interest deduction?

As clients know, we have liked and continue to like exposure to banks. We favor the big banks and have a position in the PowerShares KBW Bank Portfolio Fund, KBWB, an ETF that captures the big banks. We also hold KRE and KIE.  We are overweight the sector. We will get to why in a minute.

I am scheduled to discuss policy-driven interest rates and other market forces on Bloomberg TV at 8 AM on Tuesday morning. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the picture as we at Cumberland Advisors see it now.

The recovery of the global economy has continued thus far in 2017, and stock markets have generally registered healthy advances. In the US the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, SPY, gained 5.62 year-to-date April 11 on a total return basis; the iShares MSCI All Country ex-US ETF, ACWX , gained 8.12%; and in…

A history lesson may be helpful for those who are younger. Google “Hama.” It is a town (actually was a small city). The existing Syrian president’s father killed 20,000 of his own citizens there in 1982. What makes anyone think the present regime is any different? We must remember that the Assad…

I read the following excerpt in the morning edition of NightWatch for 4 April (This is a subscription service – for details see https://www.kforcegov.com/products/nightwatch/nightwatchdetails/).

Here at our Sarasota, FL headquarters, we are blessed not only with year-round sunshine but also with an arts and cultural ecosystem rivaling that of cities which are orders of magnitude larger, a cluster of academic institutions that attract students from every corner of the country and world,…

This is a BBC report about US-Canada trade and transit: bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39449515. Behaviors have consequences, and that is true even among the best of friends.

“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”  – George Orwell