Read this week's Major Trend. 

Inflation and its potential impact on the stock market is the topic du jour, resurrecting ideas that were in vogue 30- to 40-years ago.

Steve Leuthold’s 1980 book, The Myths of Inflation and Investing, provided an exhaustive review of the evidence. But for lighter reading, more appropriate for a summer Friday, we revisit the “Rule of Twenty” developed by strategist Jim Moltz in the early 1980s.

The CPI numbers exceeded the most aggressive market estimates. The bond market’s message is quite clear: the concerns of Fed tightening outweighs inflation. While it’s still debatable whether inflation is “transitory”, the reflation trade still gets the benefit of the doubt. 

Read this week's Major Trend. 

At today’s 30.8x, the Peak P/E stands in the 99th percentile on all time horizons except the “New Era” (1995-to-date). Yet, that’s still five “handles” below the 35.8x all-time high recorded in December 1999. If that figure is matched, the S&P 500 will top 5,000. 

Statistically, when jobs are “easy to get”—as all the survey evidence now indicates—attractive long-term returns for stocks typically become “hard to get.”

The Fed surprised the market with a hawkish projection of two rate hikes in 2023. Real yields did not move up as they typically do with such an episode. Overall, the damage was limited to the reflation trade, and the risk-rally is intact.

Automotive Retail currently ranks Attractive per our Group Selection Scores. This group offers a range of exposure to a bumpy—but recovering—U.S.-auto industry made up of car dealerships and auto parts & service retailers.

While not yet set in stone, it is the consensus view that infrastructure spending will be raised to a higher level for the next few years compared to past baseline expenditures. Although the exact numbers are still unknown, we examined the President Biden-endorsed bipartisan plan to provide a picture of the relative scale of the anticipated spending in the context of historical trends. In addition, we identified a group of industries that may be beneficiaries of the proposal.

High yield corporate bonds returned over +15% for the twelve months ended June 30th, building on a strong five-year run that was interrupted by a short, but painful, drop at the onset of COVID-19. Chart 1 indicates that high yield bonds compound at a remarkably steady rate, with infrequent but severe drawdowns during times of financial stress.

It’s near the year’s mid-point and U.S. equities are doing what they’ve done nearly every year since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis: trouncing their foreign counterparts. The S&P 500’s YTD gain of 13.5% is about 500 basis points better than EAFE’s, and 800 basis points above that of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

The Value style has broadly underperformed for more than ten years, and the blame for this dismal decade has often been placed squarely on the Price to Book metric. Could it be that Price to Book’s sullied reputation is undeserved?

The performance derby between actively managed portfolios and passive benchmarks is strongly influenced by market conditions.  Active manager success rates are cyclical, but not random, and are driven by slippage created from style, size, and weighting considerations that result from the imperfect slotting of active portfolios into single style boxes.  Moreover, this slippage can be defined and measured, and shows a clear correlation with relative return spreads between benchmarks and their opposite boxes.

Read this week's Major Trend.

CPI figures for the last two months have pummeled estimates and set multiyear records. Equity and fixed income markets seem to be comfortable in the Fed’s assessment that these high inflation prints are transitory.

In the May Green Book, and again in the May 21st issue of “Chart of the Week,” we discussed the trailing one-year correlation between weekly percentage changes in the S&P 500 and the 10-year Treasury bond yield. Rollovers from high levels in this correlation have signaled most of the important pullbacks in the bond market over the last 20 years.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

After years of underperformance, investors who pay attention to both Momentum and Value are finally being rewarded. The turnaround has been substantial, but the relative valuation of expensive Momentum vs. cheap Momentum stocks is still extremely elevated by historical standards.

Impressive strength across the factor spectrum implies that the recent pop in the long-time beaten-down Financials sector should have more room to run. We highlight five attractively-rated Financials groups for investment ideas beyond the popular big-bank-concentrated Financial sector ETFs.