Latest Research

The stock market has disregarded any and all caution flags throughout 2017, and the consensus is that it will continue do so through year-end.

We reconstituted the November and October “Bounce” screens back to 1986 and compared their average performance versus the “non-bounce” companies. Compared with the October list, the November list shows a much weaker bounce effect.

For sector overweight/underweight decisions, applying a Momentum overweight with both EM and DM countries has been most successful.

While the FANGs—and, lately, the Dow stocks—are the market’s undisputed leaders, it’s difficult to argue the market has narrowed in a fashion that’s indicative of a “distribution” phase.

The Fed has long claimed itself to be “data dependent” while providing less and less information on those data points it considers most relevant. We can’t know what’s on that list, but we certainly know what isn’t: the ISM Manufacturing Composite, which (prior to the current cycle) provided an excellent gauge of the Fed’s policy bias.

November’s report might have been lifted verbatim from the Goldilocks playbook, with the reading very strong but below the 60 level that we’ve statistically shown to be a threshold where “good news becomes bad news” for the stock market.

In Q3, the CBO’s Nominal Output Gap swung to positive for the first time since the last business cycle peak. This type of move has historically meant the cyclical peak in profit margins is close at hand.

Comparing current valuations to March 2000 is unfair to March 2000. Any Value or Small Cap manager from that era can attest that values became more plentiful as the S&P ascended into its narrow peak.

Economic and momentum considerations have kept us mostly aboard this bull for much longer than our value-seeking inner selves would have otherwise allowed.

Evidently, being a bull in a bull market is no longer good enough.

Momentum is one of the most widely accepted alpha-generating factors, used by quantitative and fundamental managers alike. Its biggest drawback, however, is high turnover. Herein we explore momentum from the perspective of sector weights.

The Leuthold Core Portfolio and the Leuthold Global Portfolio both lagged their respective all-equity benchmarks in another strong month for domestic and international equity markets.

Read this week's Major Trend Index.

Apparently tax reform wasn’t priced in.

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

The eighth consecutive month of gains for the S&P 500 was made possible by some unlikely heroes.

With a late-month surge in Financials and slump in Tech, our Royal Blue Low P/E Tier turned in its best monthly performance of 2017, and beat the High P/E Tier for only the third time this year.

After some turbulence early this year, our Ratio of Ratios seems to have found a comfortable spot. This is the third consecutive month with a 4% premium for Small Caps.

Our Up/Down Ratio sports a “two-month” reading of 1.43—the lowest level of 2017. All is not lost—we’ve seen decent aggregate earnings growth in 2017 despite below average Up/Down figures.

Asset Management & Custody Banks, General Merchandise Stores, and Hotels & Leisure are among the month’s intriguing opportunities based on the current GS Scores.