• Roughly one third of all the companies in the S&P500 and nearly half of the companies In the Dow Jones Industrial Average will report quarterly earning this week. Quarterly earnings are currently estimated to rise 6.6% year-over-year, which is the slowest growth rate since the fourth quarter of 2020.
• Dividend paying stocks are attractive to some investors right now for two reasons. First, dividends tend to provide comparatively more dependable income. For example, since 1940 “earnings per share” have been 10x more volatile than reported “dividends per share”. Second, dividends have historically outpaced the growth rate of inflation over all rolling 12-month periods by 2.4%.    
• With the exception of Apple all of the FAANMG stocks (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet) have performed worse than the S&P500 this year. In fact, these stocks have accounted for 3.9%, or roughly half, of the S&P500’s 7.8% decline so far this year.
• In the latest “Barron’s Big Money Poll” one-third of institutional investors reported that they are bullish on the outlook of stocks over the next year while roughly 45% said they were neutral. This is a big change from one year prior when 67% of respondents said they were bullish.