Read this week's Major Trend. 

This year marks the 25th anniversary of a slew of major bank mergers: Wells Fargo/Norwest, Banc One/First Chicago, NationsBank/BankAmerica, Star Bank/Firstar, First Union/CoreStates Financial, and SunTrust/Crestar Financial. Who knew the KBW Bank Index would celebrate the occasion by returning to its price level of that same era?!

At 144 months, this is now the longest Large-Cap cycle on record, but its dominance will have to prolong to eclipse the second-longest leadership phase (1946-1957), in which Large Caps achieved a 190% performance spread above Small Caps.

Tightening peaked in Q4-2022, with the BAA yield at 266 bps above its year-earlier level—the most contractionary move since the early 1980s. If the standard lead-time applies, the full impact will be felt in Q4-2023.

Despite the Fed’s tough-talk about getting the funds rate above 5%, monetary and liquidity measures are significantly less bearish. Thank SVB depositors, who required a bailout big enough to reverse five months of QT in just two weeks. The market reaction looks like that after September 2019’s Overnight Repo-market turmoil, which forced the Fed to end its first experiment with QT.

Volatility returned, as two large bank failures had investors questioning growth expectations. Value was hit the hardest; growth was the main beneficiary. 

We studied market behavior around yield curve re-steepening and identified six historical cases. Of those, three were successful and preceded major recessions. The other three instances failed and reversed to new lows. The gist of the study: We are at a critical crossroads.

Here we evaluate the returns of fixed-income ETFs since the Fed began its boosting campaign last March; for many mainstream offerings, the picture is not a pretty one. We recap the pain felt by investors in conventional fixed-rate bond funds.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

Yesterday the NASDAQ 100 closed up more than 20% from its late-December low, prompting the media to enthuse that it had entered a “new bull market!” Sadly, though, the “NDX” has no company among the broad indexes: During this NASDAQ move, gains in the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 have been just 6.5% and 2.9%, respectively, while the DJIA is down 0.5%. (So much for January’s “breadth thrust!”)

One of the most vivid memories of the Great Depression is the sight of nervous depositors lined up outside a bank hoping to withdraw their meager savings before the bank failed.  Like a rare tropical disease that was thought to be eradicated by modern medicine, the classic bank run reappeared this month in the form of Silicon Valley Bank.  At the beginning of March, the market had no particular concerns about the potential for systemic bank failures, but SVB’s sudden demise has cast a pall over the entire industry.

Read this week's MTI

Read this week's Major Trend. 

Style investors recently witnessed a rare event when, on February 13^th, the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 Growth Index fell below that of the S&P 500 Value Index. At first glance, it is tempting to attribute this valuation flip-flop to the 2022 bear market, which saw Value outperform Growth by a whopping 24.2%. However, the bear-induced collapse of Growth stock prices in 2022 only served to return the P/E spread to a level just below its historical median of 5.1, meaning that the final move toward parity was caused by a force outside the market itself. That “something else” was the S&P 500 style reconstitution that occurs annually on the third Friday of December.

CPI readings for February were in-line with consensus estimates. Attention has been and will continue to be focused on banks and credit markets for investors and the Fed in the coming weeks. The Shelter Index made a fresh YOY high despite almost a year of declining YOY rent prices.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Steve Leuthold, a nationally respected investment strategist known for his contrarian nature and unpretentious style, passed away peacefully at his home in Carlsbad, CA, on March 7, 2023, at the age of 85.

Factor performance stabilized in February, recovering from a brutal start to the year. While those dynamics bled into the first two days of February, the trend quickly reversed as interest rates bounced off recent lows and stayed on an upward trajectory for the rest of the month.

While the valuation gap between Growth and Value sectors was compelling just a couple of years ago, it has closed drastically the last twelve months. Our analysis shows that Value sectors (Energy, Industrials) are still more favorable than Growth sectors (IT, Health Care).

Imagine telling a Small Cap investor in mid-2018 that: (1) the U.S. economy would spend all but two months of the next 4-1/2 years in expansionary mode; and (2) M2 money supply would increase by 50% in that time, and yet the Russell 2000 would gain a grand total of just 9% over the same span.