Market Insights

Our 3 Most Popular Blogs of 2020

We sincerely appreciate your continued interest and support of our market insights.  Below we recap our three most popular blog posts of 2020.  If there is a topic you would like for us to cover, please contact us.  

As always, we welcome your comments or questions.

Best wishes,Prospector...

[PODCAST] Entrepreneurship, Firm Culture and a Winning Team with John Gillespie

Prospector Partners Founder and Portfolio Manager John Gillespie learned some valuable lessons in the process of starting his own asset management firm. Many of those lessons revolved around building a strong team, culture and incentive structure, but these ideas also gave him a new perspective...

Prospector’s Concentration in Financials

The team at Prospector Partners continues to position our funds with large overweights in the financials sector compared with our benchmarks. While this has been a long-standing style bias within our portfolios, it is something we frequently receive questions about and worth revisiting our...

[PODCAST] John Gillespie on the Prospector Investment Approach

Many equity investors tend to be optimists, counting on their portfolio’s winners to offset losers. Prospector founder John Gillespie has a different philosophy. Mr. Gillespie and his team spend just as much time considering what could go wrong with a stock as they do determining what could go...

Is Value Investing Dead? A Cyclical Analysis

Is value investing dead? It’s a question that has been posed time and time again over the past few years as growth stocks continued to outperform. Many investors assumed a recession would cause the pendulum to swing back toward more reasonably-valued or undervalued stocks, but given the unique...

Are Market Cap-Weighted Indices Reflective of the Economy?

The equity markets have rallied considerably since their March lows. In fact, the S&P 500 Index has rallied to such an extent (down just 11.1% year-to-date through May 14^th) that it barely seems to portray an underlying U.S. economy that just had 33 million people file for unemployment benefits....

The Outlook for Financial Services Stocks

Since investing throughout the financial services sector is a specialty of ours, here is an update on where things stand on an industry-by-industry basis, including where we’re seeing opportunities.

Property and Casualty Insurers

Property and casualty underwriter stocks have been harshly...

Short Interest: A Contrarian Indicator?

Earlier this year, versions of the following chart were making the rounds. The graph exhibited short interest on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY). It was mere weeks before the market would begin freefalling, and short interest was at the lowest levels since 2007.

Dissecting Q1 2020 Market Performance by Size, Sector and Factor

Now that the sun has set on one of the most volatile quarters in recent memory, let’s assess the damage. Broadly, large cap indices like the S&P 500 held up better during the selloff, as illustrated by the graph below.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices

The outperformance of large caps isn’t...

QE Infinity, Inflation and Opportunities

We recently authored a two-part series on inflation (The Potential for a Return of Inflation), detailing how high debt levels and the Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) unprecedented campaign of quantitative easing could eventually result in a return of inflation.

Early on March 25^th, 2020, the White...