Markets Off to a Great Start in 2023!
Last week I covered the idea that negativity is what sells. So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw a Reuters article with the headline:
Later that night, I saw a non-finance site linking to the same article which It summarized by saying:
This all sounds very bad and scary. Lots of negative words designed to get lots of clicks. The catch, of course, is that nothing really happened that day. The S&P 500 was down just .25% and the Nasdaq was down 1.07%. Even worse, the headlines ignore the facts that the Dow was positive .24% on the day and, as of the time of the article, on a year-to-date basis, the S&P 500 was up 6.8%, and the Nasdaq composite was up more than 15%.
Unfortunately, these same headlines have repeated daily since January of 2022 and will likely persist until they are eventually replaced by equally scary election coverage.
That may be why the title of this email feels uncomfortably positive. “Markets Off to a Great Start in 2023!” is counter to everything else you are reading . . . but it is also the truth. Such is the benefit of looking at performance every 90 days rather than every 90 minutes.
Finally, for additional positivity you probably haven’t read anywhere else: In 2022, a year that the stock market was notably beaten up, the S&P 500’s cash dividend increased by 10.8% over the year before. It was the 13th year in a row that dividends went up, and the 11th consecutive record high.
As Nick Murray notes here:
“You may wonder why no one (with the possible exception of your financial advisor, who may have to be restrained from shouting it from the housetops) has ever reported this to you. Permit me to speculate: (1) It’s an unalloyed good, and financial journalism tends to devote very little space to unalloyed good things. And (2) it isn’t really “news,” but rather a cumulatively very powerful truth.”