Despite elevated uncertainty over pandemic developments and expected policy tightening, and in the face of aggressive valuations, the S&P 500 still managed to gain a delightful +28.7% in 2021. Even more noteworthy, in our opinion, is that this advance came with nary a single correction of more than 10%.

Bond mutual funds had a stellar 2021. With data available through November, this subset has already amassed YTD net-cash inflow trumping 2009’s all-time record.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

It’s once again that time of year for what our founder deemed the great “thermal pollution.” Market pundits and prognosticators will divine, guess, and predict all that the market will bring in the new year.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

The S&P 500 is flirting with new all-time highs, and the news gets even better for followers of seasonal patterns: The Santa Claus rally has yet to officially begin!

Read this week's Major Trend. 

With the most speculative year in U.S. stock market history drawing to a close, we could probably all use a rest. How about a rest that lasts 12 months?

The year 2022 on the Jewish calendar is a Shmita year—historically considered to be a year of rest, or sabbatical, following six years of work. Unfortunately, markets have frequently taken this suggestion quite literally! There’s been a major financial disruption in seven of the eight Shmita years dating back to 1966:

Extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies during the pandemic have created distortions and disequilibria throughout the economy. The most visible bubbles may be in financial markets, evidenced by the boundless valuations applied to visionary startups and the speculative fascination for digital assets of all types. This report examines a bubble of a different kind; not a financial bubble but rather a real-world bubble in “fun”. Producers of recreational goods are flourishing during the pandemic, posting massive sales gains and a tripling of net income, yet selling for miniscule valuations.

Read this week's Major Trend 

October and November’s readings both signal that monetary stimulus is now doing more harm than good. The Fed policy pivot from supporting the labor market to fighting inflation has begun. Gains in consumer prices have resulted in a headline CPI value not expected until the middle of 2024 under the pre-pandemic trend.

It’s easy to misread where the true “consensus” stands on any financial forecast. Here’s a disconnect we see in current consensus thought: The “crowd” seems broadly bullish on commodities, yet the same crowd (previously known as Team Transitory) thinks consumer price inflation is near a cycle high.

The NBER informs us that the economic expansion is only in its sixth quarter. That’s good to know, but we don’t think investors should be positioned nearly as aggressively as such a statistically-youthful recovery would normally mandate. 

There has been a torrent of new policies coming out of China recently. The goal of this report is to disentangle these seemingly random or even nonsensical policy moves and present a clearer roadmap of what China is thinking and doing.

There should be a name for the syndrome suffered by foreign stock investors over the last decade or so. “Groundhog Day” doesn’t quite cut it, because that event repeats only once a year. It seems like this time of year we always feature a chart showing a healthy YTD double-digit gain in the S&P 500, along with a bond-like gain in EAFE, and a bond-like gain or loss in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

We think 2021 has earned its place in the books as the wildest and most speculative year in U.S. stock-market history, eclipsing even 1929 and 1999. That doesn’t mean 2022 will bring a panic or a crash, maybe just a degree of sobriety.

While retail spending has boosted staples and durables alike, we believe that discretionary durables have been the prime beneficiary of changing lifestyles and spending patterns, with skyrocketing sales and inventory outages that may not reach equilibrium even in 2022. 

Read this week's Major Trend.

Read this week's Major Trend

Last week we argued that U.S. money growth remains way too high to reasonably expect a peak in consumer price inflation during the next few months. At the peaks of the last five bouts of inflation of 5% or more, real growth in the M2 money supply had turned negative in four cases and had slipped to less than 1% in the other one. Today, real M2 is growing at nearly a 7% rate.