2023 Year in Review

With the beginning of a new calendar year, your team at Clearwater Capital Partners wish you and your family all the best for 2024.

In very many ways, 2023 was an extraordinary year for investors.  Along with many prominent economists and strategists, we had expected the economy would slow resulting in a shallow recession.  Instead, the economy proved resilient, and the capital markets experienced attractive gains.

Index returns, however, do not always tell the full story.  The S&P 500 measures the performance of the largest domestic companies in the United States.  Increasingly, that performance has been dominated by a handful of global technology companies.  Known as the Magnificent 7, these stocks accounted for 62% of the entire S&P 500’s 26% return in 2023 (Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices). 

Incidentally, these same companies that carried the day in 2023 experienced declines of anywhere from 40-65% in 2022.  These are huge year-to-year swings for companies that increasingly dominate the success or failure of the leading benchmark for U.S. stocks.

So, while we were pleased to see some positive results from the stock market in 2023, we have some reservations about a stock market dominated by such a narrow set of companies.  We will have much more to say about this in our Outlook 2024 report that will be published in early February.

As is our custom each January, we want to provide you with a comprehensive recap of asset and strategy performance from the previous year.  This January we are taking it up a notch by utilizing the Clearwater Portal to deliver your Year in Review report.

The formatted 2023 information you will find on the CCP Portal provides the high-level return and benchmark data our clients are accustomed to.  Additionally, the CCP Portal affords us the opportunity to provide each user with options for drilling deeper into the numbers where there may be an interest in accessing further detail.

Whether you are a regular user of the CCP Portal, or you are new to this important platform, we offer the video below to assist you in navigating directly to the 2023 information.  Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to our Operations Team or directly to your Advisor.

-John Chapman