Daily Commentary

MarketMinder’s View: This is a pretty misperceived mish-mosh of advice that winds up giving you no clear guidance or any way to actually think about “buying the dip,” the tactic of holding cash in your portfolio to deploy when stocks inevitably endure volatility. It first cautions that you don’t know the current volatility is over, which is true but would literally always be true. You never know if an upturn will last. You never know anything about the next couple days of trading, so the simple fact is you shouldn’t overrate it in your investment approach. Ditch that line of thought. It then runs through a litany of advice about ways to approach holding “dry powder” and such, but only one nugget seems sensible to us: “Of course, hoarding cash while waiting for rock-bottom prices before entering the market can also be risky, experts say. There’s a cost to missing the market’s best-performing days, which often closely follow the worst days, according to JPMorgan Asset Management research.” Yep. So here are the actual considerations you should weigh: One, what are your longer-term goals? Two, what rate of return do you need over time to achieve them? Most people need growth, which prioritizes stocks over other assets, especially low-to-no-return cash. Three, do you know something—anything—about market movement others don’t that justifies deviating from assets likely to deliver long-term returns commensurate with your goals? Absent that, you should likely be invested in keeping with your long-term mix of stocks, bonds, cash and other securities. Dip buying is a dangerous practice that hides myopic loss aversion in a cloak of offensive investing. Don’t be fooled.

MarketMinder’s View: Yes, as this piece details, the flash eurozone March Consumer Price Index reading jumped to 2.5% y/y from 1.8% in February, as a sharp, war-driven spike in energy costs pushed the rate above the ECB’s 2% target. But before you presume inflationary doom will necessitate a flurry of hikes, consider: This climb was smaller than expected, and the core rate (excluding food and fuel) cooled as did the services prices the ECB has long hyperventilated over as “sticky.” We don’t diminish the potential pain some households may feel from rising fuel and energy costs, but this piece goes too far in drawing implications from it. Taking the data for what they are, this supports the ECB staying on hold. But all the talk of hikes herein shows you how far sentiment and expectations have swung. There is a lot of room for bullish surprise here, in our view.

MarketMinder’s View: The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings, Layoffs and Turnover (JOLTS) report showed hiring rates cooled to the lowest since April 2020 (or 2011 before that), while layoffs inched up to still very low levels. So this report largely showed continuation of existing labor market trends early this year. But wait! As this notes, the data are from February, before the war, so many presume things will only worsen from here. Perhaps, but weekly unemployment filings don’t suggest a major shift in firings. Furthermore, these data could show skew from terrible East Coast weather in the month. And regardless, labor data are always late lagging and reveal next to nothing about where the economy heads from here. So chalk this one up as a data point showing the labor market we had in February largely matched 2025’s, confirming there wasn’t any clear sign of marked weakness before the war.