Since May 2020, the Chinese Yuan has defied the path of other emerging market currencies, strengthening by almost 12%. This has left it overvalued compared to other emerging market countries. While Yuan strength made sense in 2020 when the USD was weakening. It is curious…
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For all the following charts, we are looking at the sector performance and internals of our group of companies within each sector in North America. We look at the top 85% of market cap, so we consider both large and mid-caps. In the table below,…
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Below we highlight a few takeaways from Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s confirmation hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, broken down by topic. -Focus on “less accommodative” moves -Powell made numerous statements indicating that COVID, though prevalent, will not be as pressing in policy decisions…
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In this quarter’s strategy report, Forward Thinking 2022, we discuss the following: -US economic growth is expected to be quite robust in 2022, despite the disruptions from the Omicron variant. Capital spending is expected to lead economic growth, which makes sense as companies invest in…
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This Friday we’ll see where the US CPI comes out. We recently got the November print for the Eurozone CPI, and it came in hot, hitting 4.9% year over year. This makes it all the more interesting to see the latest ZEW Inflation expectations for…
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For years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, call option volume averaged about 15% of daily NYSE volume. This was a normal level of speculation that investors were used to. Then, as the chart above illustrates, in 2020 call buying just exploded. As of this writing the…
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We find compelling evidence that seasonal factors exist, historically leading November and December to be the highest 2-month combined returns all year. In our allocation portfolios, we have increased our equity exposure significantly in an effort to capitalize on these year-end trends. Please find below…
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In this quarter’s strategy package, we share our analysis on Japan’s Reopening Trade. In the full slide presentation, we cover the following: -Japan seems to have crushed the COVID-19 virus (for now at least) with daily new cases under 400/day. Lockdowns are over and the…
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Fed funds futures for 2022 and 2023 have broken out to new highs, likely on the back of rising inflation expectations. As things stand now, the market is looking for three hikes by the end of 2023, with the effective fed funds moving from 8bps…
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In this Mid-Quarter Update, we discuss our analysis on the following topics: -Recent readings on consumer confidence have rolled over. The surveys are validated by the stagnation in real consumer spending in the last few months. -In conjunction with the slowdown in house sales and…
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Just when everyone thought we had COVID-19 whipped, the delta variant came along and US cases inflected higher. The 7-day moving average was about 13,000 in early July and has jumped about 10-fold to 132,000 as of yesterday. The first place this can be seen…
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We believe the technology sector is broadly breaking down. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the correlation between pure growth stocks and pure value stocks has plunged. This means that growth only explains about 5% of the movement in value stocks right…
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Interest rates have been falling in recent months leading some to speculate that the “re-opening” trade has run its course. This in turn begs the question as to whether the “value” trade is over. On both accounts, we see signals that still point to an…
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We believe the US technology sector has reached a level of valuation such that it is has the potential to substantially subtract from portfolio returns going forward. In this mid-quarter update, we: -Highlight how we monitor valuations in the global stock markets while shining a…
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In this Q1 2021 slide presentation of our quarterly strategy report, we discuss the following topics: -The level of speculative activity in markets this year has been extreme in our view. More money has come into world stock markets in the last 5 months than…
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