Market Insights

A Wild Second Quarter & Outlook for Remainder of 2020

Coronavirus Pandemic

The COVID-19 global pandemic continued to have massive implications during the second quarter, as cases continued to rapidly rise in the United States. The unemployment rate reached 14.7% in April, and U.S. GDP is estimated to have contracted by over 30% in the quarter after...

Pandemic Continues to Differentiate Restaurant Business Models

From publicly traded entities to mom and pop operations, restaurants have been one of the hardest hit industries during the coronavirus pandemic. With some U.S. regions facing a new surge in virus cases, restaurant business models are again under investors’ microscope.

In this blog, we share how...

Growth Stocks: Widest Valuation Gap in 20 Years

Multiple expansion has been a tremendous contributor to the outperformance of growth stocks since the Global Financial Crisis. Has it gone too far?

The below chart illustrates the valuation differential between deep value and high growth stocks since the late 1980s. One can see that the difference...

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 Partners

[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...

[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 punished...