Happy Holidays From Westwood

With Christmas and Hanukkah in full swing and Kwanzaa set to begin in a few days, we thought it best to give you and your family time to enjoy the season, away from the sometimes volatile (and stressful) news headlines and market gyrations. The time just before Christmas and up until just after the New Year tends to be a relatively quiet, low-volume time for markets as most investors and traders disconnect, take a vacation or spend quality time with their families. It’s also a nice pause to digest what happened over the past year and to plan a strategy for the coming months. 

A new decade begins in less than a week’s time and we look forward to bringing you continued news, strategy and tactics for the coming election year. We at Westwood hope you all have a happy, healthy, safe and prosperous holiday season. Basis Points will return, along with our 2019 recap, on Jan. 2, 2020.

Fun New Year’s Facts

New Year’s celebrations have been traced back more than 4,000 years ago to ancient Mesopotamia. And while we doubt there were any sparkly balls dropped in the middle of the town center, the new year is one of the most widely recognized occurrences across a myriad of cultures and religions. Early Romans celebrated New Year’s Day on March 1, while others marked the new year to coincide with the winter solstice or autumn equinox. 

It was the Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1582, which standardized Jan. 1 as New Year’s Day. The month of January is derived from the Roman god Janus, who represents transitions, time and duality — he’s also the only god with two faces, one looking forward and one backward. 

And in case you wanted to know more about that shiny ball dropped in Times Square, it started as a 700-pound, 5-foot sphere laden with 100 25-watt light bulbs. The latest ball has swelled to 12 feet in diameter, weighing in at nearly 12,000 pounds. It’s illuminated by 32,256 LED modules containing 48 LEDs each!