Lyell Wealth Management invests substantial resources in proprietary research in order to distinguish real economic and market data from the narratives pushed by the advertising-driven financial media. We periodically publish a Snapshots issue that compiles charts and tables that we think are interesting and relevant....

Lyell Wealth Management tracks its clients’ U.S. stock performance relative to the S&P 500 Index (“S&P”). The S&P is, however, weighted by market capitalization. A market-capitalized index means the most valuable companies have a disproportionate impact on the return calculation and may not necessarily reflect...

The March 23, 2023 public launch of ChatGPT-4 has fueled widespread “Artificial Intelligence (“AI”)” enthusiasm from consumers, businesses, and investors alike. AI has rapidly become a major focus for capital investment and a correspondingly dominant stock market narrative. Excitement is primarily around “Generative AI” which...

The U.S. federal government officially ran a $1.7 trillion budget deficit in fiscal 2023, which ended in September. The accounting around the timing and amount of student loan forgiveness programs understated what was actually a cash deficit of $2 trillion (Chart 1). Either of the...

Lyell Wealth Management invests substantial resources in proprietary research in order to distinguish real economic and market data from the narratives pushed by the advertising-driven financial media. We periodically publish a Snapshots issue that compiles charts and tables that we think are interesting and relevant....

The Federal Reserve (“Fed”) has a dual mandate for maximum employment and price stability. It seeks to achieve these goals through monetary policy by controlling short-term interest rates and money supply. Achieving these two objectives is complicated by the reality that non-monetary factors, such as...

COVID and its economic dislocations, government policy responses, and their after-effects continue to materially alter the global landscape. While Lyell Wealth Management sees some pre-existing investment themes as enduring, such as cloud computing and healthcare advancements, some different industries and asset classes are likely to...

Lyell Wealth Management invests substantial resources in proprietary research in order to distinguish real economic and market data from the narratives pushed by the sensationalist financial media. We periodically publish a Snapshots issue that compiles charts and tables that we think are interesting and relevant....

We are now eight months into the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive financial tightening campaign in decades. While the first policy hikes took place in March 2022, financial markets have been moving since Fed Chairman Jerome Powell began telegraphing interest rate hikes last November. On June...

In 1974, President Gerald Ford responded to an inflation crisis by asking the American people to “grow more food, waste less, drive less, and heat less” to get prices under control. This national voluntary effort to Whip Inflation Now “WIN” failed miserably, and Alan Greenspan...