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The hostile monetary backdrop makes recent stock market exuberance even more irrational than in early 2021. Yet, this is the middle of a seasonal window that historically boasts an elevated level of craziness: It is the year preceding a presidential election—a time when monetary and fiscal stimulus are ramped up. 

Stocks are off to a strong start in 2023, and speculative juices are again flowing. In the final week of January, NASDAQ trading volumes were eight times those of the NYSE, a level seen only at the very peak of the meme-stock mania in early 2021. (Pre-COVID, the ratio oscillated between two and three. It’s a brave, new world.)

After working well in 2022, Momentum took a beating out of the gates in 2023. Investors rejected the winners from last year and returned to the lowest quality and most speculative winners from the previous low-rate playbook.

The S&P 500 had an almost biblical upheaval to start 2023. The “last were first” and the “first were last.” In January, the 100 worst performing stocks of 2022 had an average return of +16.1% while last year’s 100 best performers posted +1.7%.

Both Growth and Value Small-Cap style boxes gained 10% in January’s rally. However, SC Growth remains well in the rearview mirror since its relative strength peak in September 2020: Small Cap Growth +8% versus Small Cap Value +60%.

In January, the Russell 2000 had its best month relative to the S&P 500 since last February. Another Small Cap head-fake? Or maybe the start of a fresh run, like September 2020-February 2021? (i.e., Russell 2000 +46%, S&P 500 +13%.)

Our Up/Down ratio kicked off Q4 earnings season with a 1.57 reading. This “one-month” ratio is by far the highest of 2022, thus far. As usual, January reporting was very light, so don’t read too much into the numbers.

Seasonality is still an advantage, and financial conditions have eased. Within fixed income, we remain favorable toward both Treasuries and higher-quality investment-grade corporate bonds. We maintain a neutral stance on the yield curve.

The weight of evidence clearly leans more toward a recession, but the wild card is the recent dovish turn of global central banks, which can significantly boost confidence from investors, consumers, and businesses.

The fourth quarter of 2022 saw broadly positive equity-market performance with the S&P 500 returning +7.6%, the Russell 1000 Mid Cap Index at +7.2%, and the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index gaining 6.2%. Strong returns usually present a headwind for active managers, but the fourth quarter proved productive for actively managed funds.

Read this week's Major Trend.

The S&P 500 bounced 6.2% in January, recovering nearly all of its December loss.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

Phil Segner takes another look at the 4% club. For those of you not familiar with this vignette: back in the day, achieving a 4% weight in the S&P 500 had been a rare feat, occurring only during periods of extreme enthusiasm for technology, conglomerates or oil. The blessing of membership soon turned into a curse, with most taking just a cup of coffee behind the velvet ropes before being thrown to the curb because of dramatic underperformance to the rest of the Index.

Deflating valuations in the Technology and Innovation space produced ghastly results for growth investors in 2022, with the S&P 500 Growth index experiencing an agonizing 29.4% loss. Meanwhile, last year’s bear market was no more than a mild irritation for value investors as the S&P 500 Value index lost just 5.2%. The collapse in exuberantly priced growth stocks produced a 24.2% return spread between the value and growth styles, which goes into the record books as the second biggest annual win for value since 1975.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

The defining characteristic of last year’s bear market was the collapsing valuations of speculative growth stocks. A mania for themes such as cloud computing and disruptive innovation during 2016-2021 drove those names to fantastical valuations and bestowed market capitalizations of tens- and even hundreds of billions of dollars on such companies, many of which had yet to turn a profit.

The rally that’s kicked off 2023 is internally much stronger than suggested by the major averages, which contributed to the Major Trend Index’s upgrade to neutral in the latest calculation (after nearly a year in the negative zone).

Read this week's Major Trend. 

This year is off to a much stronger start than suggested by the 3-4% gains in the blue-chip averages: Through January 12th, the Value Line Arithmetic Composite—an equally-weighted index of about 1,700 stocks, was up 7.0%.