And Now to the Back Half of the Year

Welcome to Q3. Yes, we’ve passed the midpoint of the year and for those working on a calendar fiscal year, we have now entered the third quarter. This is the time when businesses usually do something of an update or check-in on how they are matching up to budget and then plotting the tweaks they have to make.

But this is no ordinary year so the routine is likely to change.

Q1 of the year was pretty much on schedule until the last two weeks. Then the pandemic hit….the lockdown began, the stock market cratered and everyone froze. These moves pushed Q2 into totally new territory – ironically – to both extremes.

We hit some new lows. ScotiaBank has just revised what it calls its Nowcast rather than a forecast and, at the end of Q2 (Tuesday of this week), it said the quarter-over-quarter GDP decline was altered from -36% to -44%. But the good news is…it has bottomed and has started to improve.

Further evidence of improvement is the fact that after Q1 sell-off in the stock market, Q2 was one of the best quarters for publicly-traded equities ever.