Good morning, and welcome to May.

We are pleased to provide you with the latest edition of the KCS Fireside Chat series. This marks the 57^th consecutive month that we’ve shared some of our thinking on a pension or investment-related subject. We hope that you continue to find our insights useful.

In this edition, we explore the concept of Consumer Sentiment: how it is determined, where we are presently, and what might it be saying about our current equity market. We have not touched on this subject before, but given the high level of “sentiment” and the very weak GDP reading from Q1’17, we wanted to explore how this dichotomy was possible.

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if we can be of any assistance to you. We always welcome feedback and encourage challenges to our conclusions.