Brett Gallagher Companies Quotations

It seems to me that this is a market where fundamental analysis has fallen flat. If you're looking for higher quality companies whose fundamentals are on the mend, you're not catching this market.

One positive is that S&P earnings so far have looked better than the year-earlier period. Granted, comparisons are a lot easier as companies take less write-offs, but it's still something that's encouraging. I don't think we're going to have a big profit recovery, but we'll have the appearance of improvement.

There's been very little investment in infrastructure at these companies over the past decade -- tech was sucking up all the capital, ... Demand is picking up and you have this big, new demand from China, which is pulling away supply that might otherwise have headed to the United States.

However, expectations for this quarter in general are so low that it will be fairly easy for companies to beat and that can give us a short-term boost. But will it mean anything? Expectations for the subsequent quarters are still too aggressive and unrealistic.

Every market and every sector has different things that make it tick. So when we're looking, for example, at developed markets, we are bottom up stock pickers. We'll pick the best companies and see what kind of allocation that ends up giving us.

As we kick off earnings season, it's going to be important what these companies are saying. Estimates are down so low, that if companies keep disappointing, markets are gonna have a big hurdle to overcome.

I think it's extremely important for U.S. investors to get this idea. It's slowly becoming more mainstream. As the world has become more global, it's more important to get best-in-class, and the only way you'll do that is to compare companies globally.

Some companies have a policy of currency hedging, and you have to factor that into the picture.