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The rally’s initial resemblance to the first up-leg off the secular 2009 market bottom is remarkable. Both rallies started in March, and achieved gains of almost 40% within 50 trading days. Both, of course, sprung from a backdrop of unprecedented monetary stimulus.

Peak P/E has just moved into its top decile on a postwar basis. If the recent rally is indeed the first roar of a new bull, then this is a bull that’s a “baby” on a calendar basis, but quite elderly from a “character” perspective.

With the S&P 500 now within spitting distance of breaking even year-to-date, we seem to be witnessing an illusion worthy of David Copperfield. From the market’s perspective, the problems that were very much right in front of us during the limit down days of March seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Stocks (and more specifically, U.S. blue chips) did not fully (nor even approximately) discount the economic calamity. The result is that, in just over two months, the “baby bull”—if that’s what it is—has achieved what took his legendary predecessor more than eight years to accomplish: Top 25x on our Normalized P/E.

The average “super-overbought” MBI reading occurred 54 days after a market low; June 4th marks the 51st trading day since the March 23rd low. Thus, any signal in the days ahead would arrive essentially “on time,” but the slippage (the S&P 500 gain already realized) would be enormous at around 40%!

Our Royal Blue Growth segment ended May with a 7% YTD gain. In just the first five months of 2020, that grouping has outperformed Royal Blue Value by nearly 21%.

Last month we detailed two technical shortcomings of the rally off the March 23rd market low. The stock market duly noted our critique and has issued its response.

Two consecutive months of outperformance for Small Caps has helped lift our Ratio of Ratios off its contemporary low. During the last two months, the absolute trailing P/E ratio has jumped from 11.6x to 15.9x for Small Caps, and from 18.1x to 22.5x for Large Caps.

The bull and bear labels can be dangerous to stock market operators, so much so that famed speculator Jesse Livermore is said to have abandoned them in favor of softer terminology: “Lines of least resistance.” We aren’t about to ditch the old labels, or even our collection of bull and bear bookends.

With the second month of Q1-2020 earnings in the books, our Up/Down ratio reads 0.75. This is only the seventh reading we’ve recorded below 1.0 in 145 quarters of our Up/Down history.

For the third consecutive month, Health Care, Communication Services, and Information Technology remain the top-three rated sectors (out of eleven total). Materials moved up to 7th place from 9th, while Utilities declined from 8th place to last, with Real Estate and Energy the next lowest rated.

A brief overview of two (very different) Attractively-rated Discretionary groups that are longstanding SI portfolio holdings that have managed to maintain their “Attractiveness” throughout the tumult.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Since the market peak on February 19th the S&P 500 Health Care sector is down only 1.1%. Among the S&P 500 sector indexes, Health Care and Consumer Discretionary are the performance leaders.

Our Risk Aversion Index fell sharply in May and generated a new “Lower Risk” signal. Within fixed income, we are turning more constructive on credit, overall, and maintain our favorable view toward investment-grade corporate bonds.

The latest action in rates is not what would be expected during a strong stock-market rally off a bear market low, but the constantly changing nature of the stock/bond relationship should not come as a big surprise. We propose a more refined four-state definition of the stock/bond relationship.

Late last year, we presented data showing that profitability has become more elusive for small companies despite a record-long period of economic expansion. We discussed the potential causes underlying this phenomenon.

Asset allocation decisions are fairly straightforward for groups of profitable and growing companies that fit nicely into a discounted cash flow model, but it is more difficult to describe the valuation of groups that include unprofitable companies.

AdvantHedge was down 10.5% in May, trailing the inverse S&P 500 (-4.8%), and the inverse Russell 2000 (-6.5%).

The Leuthold Core and Global Portfolios both turned in solid performance in May thanks to strong performance from the underlying equity strategies.