Latest Research

This months-long research effort culminates with this commentary as we lay out our thoughts on factor rotation and introduce The Leuthold Group’s recently launched Factor Tilt strategy.

The Leuthold Core Portfolio and the Leuthold Global Portfolio both outperformed their respective benchmarks during a volatile month.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Higher volatility when credit spreads are already thin makes even the higher-quality issuers less immune to credit sell-offs. We tactically reduced these bonds to Neutral.

While the late rebound in risky assets pared back earlier losses, weakness was observed in all major risk asset classes. We continue to recommend defense for the time being.

A potential trade war (not quite there yet) is not good for the dollar as it will inevitably invite retaliation and sour sentiment toward dollar assets.

The U.S. 10-year ended the month 15 bps higher but non-U.S. bonds fared much better with bond yields in Europe and Japan 4-5 bps lower.

This multi-factor estimate of stock market risk is based on a regression to median stock market levels.

The setback that began in late January qualifies as the sixth intermediate correction of the current bull market, where “intermediate” is defined as an S&P 500 loss ranging between 7%-12%...

Subjectively, we sense that investor sentiment has rebounded (too?) rapidly following the stock market’s air pocket earlier this month. Statistically, though, we’ve found that many of our sentiment measures perform better when the observations are smoothed using various moving average lengths.

While watching a forecast go awry is painful, there’s an alternative that we consider to be even worse: the failure to be paid on an accurate forecast. The resulting feeling of helplessness must be similar to that of a corporate director who manages to lose money on inside information.

Read this week's Major Trend

For at least the last year we have argued that late bull market conditions would tend to reward momentum strategies over mean-reverting ones. That’s played out not only during the market’s melt-up phase, but also (to our surprise) during the recent two-week air-pocket, at a time when we would have expected to see at least a temporary setback in the ratio above.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Our ongoing research into the relative performance of Active vs. Passive fund styles is based on the belief that just as market conditions cycle, so does the active-passive return spread..

Things were bigger when you were a kid. Like that enormous sweatshirt your aunt gave you for your birthday or that hand-me-down ten-speed bike with the cross bar taller than your shoulders.

Bond market strategists remain hell bent on identifying the key yield level on 10-year Treasuries at which one can finally declare an end to the 1981-20XX secular bond bull market.

In the past few years, we’ve shared our concerns that traditional market breadth measures may have become compromised by several developments.

The market’s stumble in early February was so abrupt that there was no time for us market numerologists to bask in the limelight of the bullish January Barometer.

While there are many parallels between recent action and that of 1999-2000, stock market leadership is not one of them.