Counter cyclical stocks, those in the consumer staples, health care, real estate, telecom and utilities sectors, continue to have a tough go at things. In fact, as of two days ago this group of bond proxies made a new low compared to all developed market...
Counter-cyclical stocks have underperformed cyclical stocks by about 9% since Brexit lows. That recent bout of underperformance has been enough to spur many to proclaim that the world is on the cusp of faster growth and the reach for yield play has seen its end. A review...
The impressive rallies of late in the industrial commodities could be nearing their end. Both copper and oil are bumping up against substantial resistance at their own 200-day moving averages that have acted to put a lid on previous rallies. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the...
Over the weekend a long-time client asked an excellent question related to our recent blog post entitled, "Is a Bright Spot Emerging in the Global Equity Markets?", in which we tediously documented the relative out-performance trends among the vast majority of emerging market countries. The client...
For about six weeks, between the middle of January and the first week of March, inflation expectations embedded in the US Treasury market bounced after declining for the second half of 2014....
This year, especially in February, there has been something of a cyclical bounce in the developed country stock markets. Since the beginning of the year, counter-cyclical stocks have underperformed cyclical stocks by 75 basis points in the MSCI World Index....
Considering our focus on investing in the most intangible-rich companies in the world, it is no surprise that we follow investments in intellectual property very closely. Unsurprisingly, corporations in developed countries invest more in R&D, advertising, and firm-specific resources than their emerging market counterparts....
The story of 2014, and so far in 2015, is that yields have continued to fall contrary to most economists’ expectations. This matters to equity investors because the appropriate asset allocation in a falling yield environment is much different than the best allocation in a...
Two weeks ago we mentioned that over the past several years the last six weeks of each year has tended to either strongly favor cyclical stocks or counter-cyclical stocks. Today, we wanted to update that chart....
As we have noted before, this market has been somewhat unique in that counter-cyclicals have outperformed cyclicals since the market top in October 2007. As you can see in the first chart below, counter-cyclicals have outperformed by nearly 18% over the past seven years....
Despite the powerful rally over the last several weeks that brought the US equity markets back to their all-time highs, treasury yields are up only slightly and are well below mid-September levels....
Counter-cyclical stocks have been the leadership group all year in pretty much every region of the developed and emerging worlds. As the selloff that took place in early October unfolded counter-cyclical stocks gained even more ground on their cyclical peers, which is not surprising since...
As the region’s only positively performing group so far this year, MSCI Europe’s Health Care sector has had a particularly rough week, falling nearly 4% so far: Which sub-industries have been hit the hardest by the recent sell-off?...
As discussed in yesterday’s quarterly investor call (see here for a recap), the counter-cyclicals (and the growth counter-cyclicals, in particular) are currently the most attractive group in MSCI Europe. Regular readers know that one of our favorite, knowledge-rich, heavy r&d investing groups is the Pharmaceutical...
Regular readers are familiar with our baskets of stocks based on performance in the average business cycle. For review, Cyclicals generally refer to those stocks in the Consumer Discretionary, Energy, Financials, Industrials, Information Technology, and Materials sectors....
