April $howers
Hello everyone! Welcome to the April 2024 edition of the boodle blog! If this is your first visit here, welcome! If you are a returning visitor, we are glad to have you back!
The boodle blog serves as our way of providing you with our current views on what is going on in the market and the economy so that you are able to make good decisions in the management of your money.
At boodle, we believe that the person best suited to manage your portfolio money is you and we provide this blog as a financial tool for your benefit.
Before we offer our opinion on April, let's take a look at the first quarter of 2024 and see how we are doing, and then we will look at April and offer our opinion on what we believe will be in store for the coming month.
Now that Q1 is in the books, here is where the market's 3 indexes that we track, stand- the DOW is at 39807.37 YTD with a gain of 5.62%. The S&P 500 stands at 5254.35 a 10.16 advance and the NASDAQ clocks in at 9.11% over the 3 month period.
These gains for a 3 month period are substantial and for the S&P 500 they represent the best start to a year since 2019.
We are thankful for these returns, because they benefit our clients and they support what we have said since the start of 2024 (we suggest that you go back and read previous months blogs).
We believe that there are several factors keeping the stock market in positive territory and we will list a few of them in this blog:
The Fed has maintained interest rates at their current level. We believe the Fed would like to cut rates, but so far it hasn't been able to do so- we do expect rate cuts, but not for several months.
Employers continue to keep the employment rate near historic lows, and we think the rate will stay low.
The Presidential election will continue to buttress stocks and this factor is one that we believe will continue to play out through 2024.
We believe that April will see market gain consolidation and we suspect that when company earnings are announced for Q1 the upward trend that the market has been on will continue. One note of caution that should be taken into account while applying your strategy- it has been quite a while since there has been a stock market correction (a pullback of 7-19%), and it makes boodle a bit cautious, and you should be too. Corrections are actually nothing to fear, and they are to be expected, and if a correction does occur continue reading this blog or go to the Contact Us — goBoodle page and send us any questions that you may have. So with that being said, we hope you have a good April, and as always, we appreciate you and the faith that you have shown us as we strive to bring you important information that will help empower you to become the manager of your own financial portfolio! We look forward to seeing you here next month. Thank you for choosing boodle!