Over the last few weeks there has been quite a bit of chatter among strategists about whether the market is undergoing a sustainable rotation into “value” stocks from “growth” stocks. It’s a bit surprising to us to see the outpouring of commentary on the issue,…
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Over the weekend the world learned of the Senate Republican’s “opening bid” for the next round of fiscal stimulus in the United States. That number came in at a nice, round $1tn. Now, as large as that number is, it still pales in comparison to…
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With the US dollar index recently having completed a so called “death cross”, we thought it would be a good opportunity to review the investment implications of a potential trend change in the USD. The “death cross” is a technical chart formation in which the…
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Regular readers of our content know that we have been building the case for several years now on why gold deserves a place in diversified portfolios. Sure, we see significant upside in gold (unlimited upside, in fact), aided as I will show by the unprecedented…
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As funding strains appeared in March, the USD surged. Then the Fed stepped in with massive foreign exchange swaps as a way to lend USD to foreign central banks, intended to ultimately be lent to borrowers in need of USD. As F/X swaps reached almost…
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The returns of the 2009-2020 bull market were nothing short of extraordinary. From the 2009 low in the S&P 500 to the 2020 high, stocks gained a massive 488%, or nearly 18% on an annualized basis. This compares to an average nominal price return for…
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Even as the stock market chugs up the wall of worry, we were reminded today that the economic fundamentals remain mired in simply unprecedented territory. As you can see in the first chart below, April saw both the largest increase ever in personal income (blue…
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Since the March 23, 2020 low, when the Federal Reserve announced basically unlimited liquidity via a variety of programs, corporate spreads have narrowed, and the stock market has risen substantially. In the chart below, I overlay US investment grade spreads over the S&P 500 Index….
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As Steve highlighted yesterday, we are beginning to see some important divergences develop between the stock market and other data that suggest we are not out of the woods yet. Of course, this makes complete sense since next week we may learn of an unemployment…
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While not 100% correlated, there tends to be a pretty good relationship between movements in the S&P 500 and credit spreads, both investment grade (IG) and high-yield (HY). As stocks sold off in February and March, credit spreads widened rapidly. And, then on March 23,…
Read MoreEnergy companies are facing a life or death moment in 2020 with the price of WTI crude oil falling to $13.64/barrel as of this writing. Indeed the collapse in energy prices combined with poor fundamentals leading into the COVID crisis make most of the oil…
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Back in the good ole’ days of mid-January, asset allocators could look to long-duration US government bonds as a refuge for stormy weather. Those days are no longer. In recent weeks investors have panic bought into this supposed safety asset to a degree never before…
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Despite the relief rally yesterday, financial conditions have tightened significantly in the last couple weeks. This likely explains why the Fed just made an emergency 50bps cut to the fed funds rate. The graph below highlights that the two main areas of weaker financial conditions…
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Anyone reading this post already knows that palpable panic has set into equity markets over recent days. We present these charts to highlight the extreme nature of the selloff so far, and as a reminder of the rarity of these events. In times like this,…
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Widespread underperformance of Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks is a significant negative indicator for US stocks in our view. In this special report, we present charts of the 30 Dow stocks relative to long-duration US treasury bonds and gold for the last five years. Spoiler:…
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