We suspect that a common conversation topic over the final weeks of the year will be how glad people are to turn the page on 2020 and begin a new year.

Each year investors like to reflect upon their investment portfolios, and we find this to be especially true at the end of a decade. As always, the last decade was full of countless surprises from an investment perspective.

Early this year former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and past Chairwoman Janet Yellen spoke to a group of economists in Atlanta. At one point the following exchange occurred between them: Dr. Yellen said, “I don’t think expansions just die of old age,” to which Dr. Bernanke replied, “I like to say they get murdered.”

Another year is in the history books and as is often the case, global equity markets behaved in a manner most investors were not expecting. U.S. large cap stocks booked their first negative year in a decade and only their second negative year since 2003. U.S. small cap equities and non‐U.S. equities underperformed U.S. large cap equities; bonds were flat to negative; and hedge funds had a difficult year again. Ned Davis Research found that 2018 was the first year since at least 1972 in which no major public asset class returned at least 5%.