As President of BankChampaign, not only does Mark Ballard stay current on industry trends and best practices, but he shares his financial expertise on his informational investment blog featured on BankChampaign’s website. Ballard has been with BankChampaign since 1991. Spanning topics such as stock market standings, investment metrics, inflation trends, portfolio management, company investment analysis, …
UPDATE #2: This is officially the second largest bank failure ever UPDATE: California bank regulators have closed SIVB down – this typically means they will reopen on Monday in a different corporates format. We will see… Yesterday, the 16th largest bank in the country lost > 60% of its market value. In the past 18 …
Has A Black Swan Landed In The Financial System? Read More »
We discuss where the stock market is and potentially could head given interest rates being higher for longer.
Introduction If you read my recent “2023 Investment Focus” blog post, you will see that I noted several focus areas for investing during 2023, and the energy supply/demand imbalance plays prominently in that list. I thought adding a bit more color to the concept for you might be interesting, so below I’ll give you some …
Energy Supply/Demand Imbalance Will Drive Macro Investing Trends Read More »
If you read the 2022 In Review series on this blog, you got a feel for how we managed to outperform the stock market in 2022. Much of that strategy will apply to 2023, but I wanted to give you a broadened look at the Macroeconomic issues I believe we are facing and some of …
This is the final entry in our 2022 In Review series. It relates directly to the earlier posts in this series, so I recommend you do a quick review of it before reading this Part 4. Successfully Managing Investments in 2022 As 2021 was winding down, in the last few months we became increasingly concerned …
Recap In the first two installments of 2022 In Review we looked at how our model portfolio performed compared to the stock market (favorably) and why investments in index funds or funds and investment managers that mirror index funds too closely will likely underperform in coming years. If you haven’t read them, you might want …
RECAP In the first post of this series, I discussed the stock and bond markets’ performance for the year and compared that to our Model Portfolios upon which client portfolios are managed. Today, I want to talk a bit about why 2022 was a stock pickers market and why I believe that 2023 and beyond …
THE MARKETS We all lived through 2022 and it was an ugly year in the markets. Both stock and bond indexes were down in double digits and most of the investment world suffered severe losses for their clients. Here at BankChampaign, our clients faired much better than the markets overall, but we will discuss more …
Just before the Beijing Olympics, Russia and China issued the statement below that is intended to change the world order. In it, it gave Russia permission (in political speak) to invade Ukraine and China to invade Taiwan (I’ve put that paragraph in bold below). George Soros wrote his analysis of this document which you can …
Geopolitics and Its Impact on Investment Strategy Read More »
What’s Up With The Market? The S&P 500 peaked on January 4th and it has been a volatile ride down since that date. The prospect of rising inflation, the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet caught up with the major index even though the growth stocks in the index fell along …
Nitrogen Fertilizer Shortages and Their Impact On AG Stock Prices
