The Halfway Point of 2021
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
I have always had a sort of unfair pet peeve with people talking about time moving either too fast or too slow. I think what I hate is the thoughtlessness of it – the sort of expected cliche when someone says, “wow, this year has flown by.” For one thing, it can’t possibly feel that way for everybody, yet it seems like everybody says it. Plus, it often times is just patently false – what people say they feel is the opposite of how I feel, and therefore I assume they must be wrong. I know, I know, but I already said it was unfair.
The first half of 2021 did not “zoom by” and it also has not “dragged on” – for me. There are moments I can look back on and say “that feels like it was years ago” and there are other moments (perhaps more of these) that I do feel came and went quickly. At the end of the day, the holidays and the turn of the year were about six months ago. That much I know is true.
As I do every year, I wrote a lengthy white paper between Christmas and the New Year to recap last year and to lay out our themes and perspectives for this year ahead. I prefer to wait for the next six months to do a deeper dive there, but I will check in this week on some of those perspectives.
But primarily what I want to do in this week’s Dividend Cafe is give you a look at what has transpired so far this calendar year, and why. Accurately knowing what happened in financial markets is useful – and not to be taken for granted (remember, “what you know that just ain’t so” can be dangerous stuff). But I really want to explain today why things have played out how they have, and from there offer up a viewpoint on the future.
Jump on into the Dividend Cafe …
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:12.8 | Well, hello and welcome to a I think special dividend cafe. We're at the midway point of 2021. And so I am here to bring you listeners of the |
| 0:25.0 | podcast and viewers of the video, a little recap of where we are halfway through 2021 and what |
| 0:32.0 | we're kind of looking to into the second half of the year. As we delve into the third quarter, it is kind of surreal to think about where we are |
| 0:43.3 | because you're looking and analyzing and thinking about markets while at the same time |
| 0:49.6 | doing that through the whole context of what's been going on with COVID, what's been going on with our national politics, the election we had seven, eight months ago. |
| 0:59.1 | You know, you have a lot of things that all kind of overlap with one another. |
| 1:04.1 | And for one thing, it distorts our view at time. |
| 1:09.1 | And I talk about that a little bit in Dividon Cafe today that you get this sort of mixed |
| 1:14.8 | feeling of, oh, it seems like it's been forever or it seems like it's just been yesterday. |
| 1:19.7 | I think that's a lot of the reason why people have these kind of cliche responses about time |
| 1:24.2 | going by is because it's a mixed bag. |
| 1:27.7 | I mean, there's a, |
| 1:28.4 | there's a sense in which it does seem like things are going on longer than they |
| 1:33.7 | have been in another sense, |
| 1:35.0 | which has gone so quickly. |
| 1:36.2 | But just isolating to the calendar year 2021, |
| 1:39.2 | the way I think about these things is that the calendar year is useful as a kind of differentiator in markets |
| 1:47.7 | from one year to the next, you know, technically what should have changed in markets from the |
| 1:53.4 | second week of January versus the third week of a December. Obviously, nothing. It's totally |
| 1:59.0 | irrelevant, except for you need kind of points of |
| 2:02.4 | segmentation and calendars help provide some of that divisibility in the way we look at |
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