Inside The Stock Market ...trends, cross-currents, and outlook

While investors in Value, Small Caps, and especially foreign stocks might beg to disagree, a key MTI technical measure suggests this decade’s stock-market ride has been almost entirely “pain free.”

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The Russell 2000 is the most important major index on the cusp of a new BUY signal. Our best guess is that Small Caps will still trend lower for now, creating a buying opportunity in the months ahead.

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A general rule of thumb for thematic equity investors is that the dominant leadership sectors and groups in a given bull market normally don’t repeat as leaders in the subsequent bull.

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This Stock Market section’s unifying theme has been that of an historically two-tiered market, one in which Domestic, Large Cap, Growth, Consumer-oriented, and Low Volatility stocks have reigned supreme.

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Despite a historic economic expansion during the past decade, there is an ever-increasing number of companies that are finding profitability has become harder to achieve.

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The need to sound contrarian has become a borderline obsession among market pundits. Media opportunities for talking heads have exploded in the last decade, forcing those who hold the safest consensus views to falsely portray themselves as lonely and misunderstood market mavericks.

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Rather than stocks disconnecting from the economy, as some equity bears contend, we see the blue chips disconnecting from the rest of the market. The underperformance of leading groups, along with multimonth divergences in momentum, bullish sentiment, and credit spreads are all consistent with the deteriorating prospects for earnings and the economy.

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We’d concede the monetary backdrop for stocks is now mixed, an upgrade from the almost uniformly negative environment of last fall. On the negative side, the U.S. yield curve inversion has now persisted long enough that even the economic optimists are getting nervous.

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The early August setback took the S&P 500 below its late-January 2018 high—and the time when we first trimmed net equity exposure in Leuthold tactical funds from a nearly fully-invested posture.

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Earnings results for the second quarter have so far "beaten" expectations (as they always seem to), but that hasn’t changed the calculus for Small Cap companies. About one-third of them have negative earnings over the last twelve months.

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Trend followers who use the ten-month moving average discipline finally had a positive month in July. But after the early-August decline, they are still holding an S&P 500 loss of 60 points from their latest trade initiated at the end of June.

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While re-leveraging of the U.S. corporate sector during this economic cycle has been well-documented, the common belief is that the consumer balance sheet remains in good shape. That’s technically true.

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For at least two years, the unofficial title of “the scariest chart in the Leuthold database” belonged to the S&P 500 Price/Sales ratio. That chart still rattles us, with the July month-end ratio still in the vicinity of its old Y2K high.

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Here are some brief follow-up notes on topics covered in recent months’ Green Books.

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The 2.00%-4.99% yield range is the sweet spot for yield investors from a risk/reward standpoint; while the other end of the spectrum (>5% yield) incurs too much risk for the fat payouts. Here we spotlight four ETF strategies that focus on dividend paying stocks.

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The S&P 500 has rallied 9.2% in the 22 trading days since its June 3rd low, but the move hasn’t (yet) been enough to lift the Major Trend Index out of its negative zone.

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Over a 12-month horizon, we now believe a U.S. recession is very likely, but aren’t confident enough to make the call when the forecast window is cut in half. Second-half stock returns could be decent if the business-cycle peak is still a year away. Then again, there’s peril in waiting for “too much” confirmation of recession.

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The granddaddy of all technical indicators—the NYSE Daily Advance/Decline Line—continues to make new highs alongside the S&P 500, suggesting the market should move to even higher (but perhaps narrower) highs well into the fall. As noted a month ago, we increasingly suspect that granddaddy may be telling a lie.

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The 10-year-old bull grabs most of the headlines, but its younger sibling has begun to command more respect.

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Current leadership trends continue to track their 1998-99 behavior in an almost eerie fashion—so much so that we now wish we’d used that historical period as our instruction manual!

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