The S&P 500 has fully erased its January and February losses, but there’s probably a market message in the fact that it took so long to do so.

As mania surrounding Apple’s stock was reaching a fever pitch in early 2012, The Leuthold Group wrote a piece entitled, Apple, Just How High Can It Go? To those caught up in the hysteria, the article served as a cautionary reminder.

The increasingly greater attention given to the yield curve by equity investors has prompted us to come up with an equity basket that can track the movement of the yield curve. Overall, it does a reasonably good job of capturing the major moves.

What some EM countries are going through is a classic sequence that can potentially lead to a full-blown EM crisis.

While Momentum continues to work overall, the gains have been skewed to the companies trading at the highest valuation multiples. Extremes, based on both price and valuation, have only been greater a handful of times during the period measured.

Herein we include an executive summary previewing our forthcoming, in-depth special report on September’s GICS sector changes. The full report, “A Prehistory of the Communication Services Sector” will be distributed soon.

The Attitudinal category neared a new negative extreme for the rally off February lows, while the Intrinsic Value category reached a new extreme for the entire bull market. This combination of overvaluation and overconfidence will eventually be resolved with large market losses…

Higher corporate leverage and rising short-term interest rates have not yet led to problems in the credit markets, but investors should be mindful of potential risks.

It’s difficult to knock a stock market in which Small Caps and major breadth measures are making frequent new highs, however, there are performance anomalies that suggest liquidity is no longer sufficient to “float all boats.” Recent underperformance of the Equal Weighted S&P 500 is a case in point, at the same time, the current dichotomy in market breadth pales in comparison to the 1999-2000 episode.

The S&P 500 is on the verge of reversing its early-2018 losses and, if achieved, it would initially be accompanied by six “Red Flags”—which are based on key market indexes failing to record new highs in the 21 trading days preceding a new S&P 500 high. The last time the tally reached “six” was in May 2015—occurring at the final high before an S&P 500 loss of nearly 15% over the ensuing nine months.

Whatever one’s philosophical leaning, the practice of adjusting earnings has left investors with too many watches to consult. We look deeper into the topic of adjusted earnings to gauge the slippage between commonly-referenced earnings clocks.

Movies & Entertainment & Broadcasting’s Group Selection (GS) Score has been steadily improving of late; it rose to High Neutral in March and pushed up to Attractive two months ago. Currently a member of the Consumer Discretionary sector, this is a less-correlated option to the many retail industries also currently ranking strongly among the Discretionary components.

Value finally performed well during July, turning in its best month of 2018 on a spread basis. While the factor category is still deep in negative territory for the year, almost 85% of its underperformance is coming from the worst quintile outperforming the universe; meaning Value has mostly struggled because of expensive stocks outperforming, not cheap stocks lagging.

The underperformance of investment grade credit this year prompted the question of whether a risk-barbell portfolio of safe Treasuries and risky high-yield bonds may offer better performance than a middle-of-the-road portfolio of 100% investment grade corporate bonds in a highly-uncertain environment.

A large gain in the Momentum category was almost entirely the result of a positive flip in a key market Reversal Model which had been bearish since March. While the long-term record of this model is good, its BUY signals over a forward three-to-six-month horizon have been less reliably bullish than, say, a breadth or momentum “thrust.”

Investment Banking & Brokerage and Department Stores are this week's best groups. Internet Retail and Advertising are this week's worst groups.

Trade wars or trade tensions, quietly started in 2017, hadn’t captured the market’s attention until early March this year—as demonstrated through a review of internet keyword search data of “Trade War” and “Tariff.” We present our Trade War thematic group which captures U.S. companies that could suffer the most from a trade war between the Trump administration and the rest of the world.

After yet another benign figure on wages for June, the idea that inflationary pressures might be a problem for the stock market seems far-fetched.

Our Ratio of Ratios has been stuck in the Small Cap premium range of 2% to 7% for the last ten months—limiting the ability to make a call on market cap preference with this vignette.

Brick-and-mortar retail, not to mention antiquated Department Stores, have pretty much been declared dead in the age of Amazon. Often, this is when our GS Scores shine brightest... by picking industries that, at the time, are not intuitive and hard to stomach.