Latest Research

Our GS Scores currently rank Information Technology as the second highest rated among the ten broad sectors.

A look at U.S. companies’ global IT market dominance, and the key factors that drive the competitive landscape.

Homefurnishing Retail, Apparel Retail, Apparel Accessories & Textiles

Extreme market viewpoints get the headlines, but it’s baked into our disciplines that we will (occasionally) be noncommittal.

Market gains have been less broad than in 2012 and 2013; market direction and leadership have been mismatched; and quantitative factors have been choppy.

The median S&P 500 stock is now expensive enough that we’re able to estimate its potential downside to prior bull market highs! Based on an average of four valuation measures, the median stock needs to drop about –11% to match the typical valuations at the eve of a cyclical bear market.

Government accounting on everything ranging from the CPI, to the budget deficit, to even the unemployment rate is constantly assailed as being too rosy. So when a government report occasionally paints a less optimistic picture than the consensus one, we’re inclined to sit up and take notice (especially when we agree with it).

The S&P 500 record median profit margin of 10.3% is now almost a full percentage point above the last cycle’s peak of 9.4% (second quarter of 2007). Trends across S&P sectors are not as uniform as one might expect, though, with only half of the ten sectors last quarter at profitability levels that exceeded their 2001-2007 expansion highs.

The dollar’s moonshot in recent months has resuscitated a stock market leadership argument we haven’t heard for a long time.

While we expect an eventual break in this relationship, today Emerging Market equities are following, fairly tightly, the cycle of industrial commodities—a cycle that rolled over (on a secular basis, we believe) in 2011.

We’ve been negative on industrial commodities for some time, reflecting the persistently (and unsustainably) high levels of investment evidenced by our Global Group analyses of commodity-oriented industries.

Last month’s tactless comments from MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber contained an (accidental) investment nugget we’ve alluded to several times in the last three years (and, no, it does not relate to the “stupidity of the American voter” or investor).

With the quantitative horsepower now available at the fingertips of even the most technophobic portfolio manager, there’s little tolerance for any model that finds itself out of sync. But “broken” models (and especially value-based ones) have an eerie way of reasserting their relevance just after they’ve been finally tossed to the trash heap.

The price of crude oil staged a dramatic change of fate in the past few months, and the bottom is still nowhere in sight.

Six of the seven factor categories we track have turned in positive performance so far in 2014; Value is the exception. Lost in the numbers is that most of the value has come from the short quintiles, so it has been hard for managers to take advantage of this trend.

Up/Down Earnings: Two Month Reading Slumps To Average

Small Cap Premium Sinks To 15%

Growth Stocks Better In November

S&P 500: Smaller Firms Get Lump Of Coal In 2014