It's that time of year - strategists polish their crystal ball in an effort to extract from scraps of evidence a self-evident truth about things yet to come to life.

After the recent stock market rout, a friend contacted me to get my take on some “financial advice” he’d received from his broker.

Using the Russell 1000 as our sample US Equities portfolio, we set out to compare today’s exposures to the AX-US4 Tech sector industry factors with their 1999 counterpart.

In this post we examine how the richness of high quality issuer and sector spread curves enables us to visualize investors’ changing risk aversion to various risk events.

Emerging markets are first to get hurt when the US raises interest rates. This is particularly true for those with large USD denominated debt and account deficits, such as Turkey.