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Both stocks and bonds enjoyed positive returns in the Third Quarter 2019, adding to already-impressive performance from the first half of the year. Declining interest rates again deserve much of the credit for these attractive investment returns. Pessimism regarding global economic growth along with central bank accommodation compressed interest rates to historically low levels.

There is a risk, in a time of prolonged economic uncertainty, that you become blinded to the pitfalls ahead. U.S./China trade tensions have now been ramping up for over a year, and other geopolitical tensions for even longer (Brexit for over three). But while we have suffered bouts of volatility, markets have not fallen into a more prolonged period of gloom.

Substantial inflows into passive funds over the last decade have led to speculatioon that a bubble is forming. Key concerns center around the lack of price discovery inherent with passive funds as well as liquidity during market dislocations. While conerns may be valid, empirical data does not seem to support the case for a bubble.

Consumer confidence measures have been mixed amid heightened geopolitical noise. The global manufacturing slowdown has pulled that sub-set of the U.S. economy into contraction territory and threatens business investment. Key service-based readings have maintained resilient growth in the U.S. Currencies around the world have fallen versus the U.S. Dollar, with the "safe-haven" Japanese Yen being the notable exception. The U.S.-China relations induced periodic bouts of volatility, and the matter goes beyond unresolved trade/tariff issues.

More and more investors are considering an allocation to commodities, typically motivated by a desire to tap the inflation-fighting and diversifying properties of this asset class. While the most natural way to get commodity exposure is by investing in a portfolio of commodity futures, many investors (and consultants) believe owning a portfolio of natural resource stocks is an easier method.

Prices of commodities and the US dollar are strongly linked. But is this also true at the individual commodity level?

Passive doesn't mean indifferent. Often people lose sight of the fact that while passive, or index, investors have made a choice to diversify and trust the market to reward them for their investments in the long run, they still want positive performance. And influencing corporate behavior for the better is a key way for them to achieve that. As assets continue to flow from active management to index investing, passive shareholders will still hold companies to account.

What are the tax benefits of investing in Qualified Opportunity Funds? A closer look assesses the opportunities —and the risks.

With the longest economic expansion on record currently underway in the United States, it is hard to imagine that capital markets and investments were in utter disarray a little over ten years ago. Or that technology stocks—the darling of equity markets today—took a severe beating two decades back. We believe that when the going is good (and has been for an extraordinarily long time), it is prudent to rebalance investment portfolios away from highperforming assets, especially at this late stage of the economic cycle.