Latest Research

Some of the best and worst performers of 2011 repeated their performance in 2012.

Our Stock Quality Rankings currently show that stocks with Low Quality rankings outperformed those with High Quality rankings.

Select Industries makes an Advertising buy, looking for the large integrated agencies to make their best pitch.

A review of correlations and factor performance. Plus, weighting matters in sector performance as we compare the S&P 500 to our Leuthold 3000 universe.

The primary benefits are their inflation and U.S. dollar hedging capabilities.

We still think interest rates are likely to be range-bound, but the range will likely shift higher to the 185-240 bps area if the current breakout is successful.

We’re downplaying the new signal’s significance and remain cautiously optimistic towards risky assets near term. Our biggest concern is that a rise is extremely likely going forward. 

While we don’t know which direction it will head next, we break down a few of the MTI categories and present some of our observations.

Retail stocks barely paused during the September-November market setback, and have lately shot to new all-time relative strength (RS) highs. We were recently asked whether this bullish behavior was effectively an “inoculation” against falling into recession over the near term. 

Our annual screen presents the candidates with the largest declines and smallest rebounds, thus far, in each market cap segment.

This group has been Attractive since March, and currently ranks fourth in our Group Scoring model. We think an improving fundamental story, coupled with a strong GS Score, is emerging from this ravaged industry. 

Asset growth is a factor that gets some attention, but not nearly as much as other more mainstream factors like price to earnings, earnings growth, etc. 

Energy looks cheaper and appears much more washed out from a sentiment perspective. Contrarians looking for commodity exposure should favor this sector over Materials. 

We think interest rates will stay low for an extended period of time, so the key question is, when will rates start rising?

A “dozen” major market measures have moved to new bull market highs in the last three months. But many of these have been the groups that do best when “risk” is “off,” and may be a reason “Ain’t Nobody Happy,” even in an up year. 

We have chosen to have the original MTI “subsume” many critical global measures, and put all of our best efforts into a single tool monitoring the overall stock market environment.

We’ve published a series of research notes detailing our thoughts on the Health Care sector in Emerging Asia and formed a thematic group “Asia Healthy Tigers.” Even though most of the investable companies in Emerging Market Health Care are located in Asia, we decided to expand to other regions as well. 

Two groups were purchased in the Select Industries portfolio in late October: Health Care Services and Wireless Telecommunication Services.

Correlations have been extremely elevated over the past few years when compared to historical levels. The question is, which parts of the market has this impacted the most?

We see a strong and clear Poor-Value/Strong-Momentum pattern emerging, which could indicate a looming market top. While QE3 could disrupt it, the pattern looks unmistakable.