The good news is Zephyr has updated our popular “Market Cycles” template and we’ve made it available for download in our Template Library. The bad news is the update was made to incorporate the recent summer swoon in the markets.

The Market Cycles template was designed to give a different perspective than the standard trailing one-year, three-year, five-year, ten-year time frames people tend to use in the finance industry. In the real world, markets tend to move whenever they move and are not constrained to neat, concise time-periods. The Market Cycles template reflects real-world, non-overlapping time periods like “The Credit Crunch” (Aug 2007-Feb 2009) or “Irrational Exuberance” (Dec 1996-Mar 2000).

The most recent time frame in the Market Cycles template was called “Rebound” and was initiated in March 2009 when markets started to pick up following “The Credit Crunch”. Driven by massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, markets rallied strong off of their bottoms. However, starting May 2011 the rally has run out of steam. Equity markets worldwide were spooked by how developed economies choose to address their various debt-to-GDP issues. Responses included bailouts and possible default (Greece and other fringes of Euroland), ambitious austerity programs (the United Kingdom) or partisan brinksmanship (the United States) but all cast a pall over the markets and gave rise to concerns about a double-dip recession in the world economies. This updated Market Cycles template terminates the “Rebound” period as-of April 30th, 2011 and initiates a new period called “Double-Dip??” starting in May.

The download of this updated template is optional. If you’re more of an optimist and believe that the recent downturn in the markets is only temporary, you can continue to use the previous version of the Market Cycles template. Also, it is worth mentioning that we are releasing two versions of this report; one in StyleADVISOR’s traditional layout, and a second version utilizing Zephyr’s new publisher layout we call “Report View”. The report view version of the template is located in the Fact Sheets section of the template library under the Market Cycles (Report View) subhead and it is necessary for you to have at least version 8.13 of StyleADVISOR in order to use this template.

As a side note, we do have Market Cycles for fixed income and hedge funds too. Obviously the market cycles for these asset classes will be different. Finally,you can always come up with your own definitions for market cycles if you disagree with the date ranges we have you can always define your own. These templates are just a starting point, as always you have the ability to do what you want in StyleADVISOR.