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Market conditions leading up to the May rate hike were similar (if not worse) than those that triggered Powell’s late-2018 “pivot.” Free-market tightening of 2022 is apt to play into the path of policy. There’s likely a dovish “pivot” in store later this year—one that may be aggressively sold rather than bought.

Our Ratio of Ratios sits at its twelve-month average after an awful month for stocks in both market-cap tiers. The absolute trailing P/E ratios for both Small- and Large-Cap stocks in our L3000 Universe are down significantly from the start of the year.

With the first month of Q1-22 earnings in the books, our Up/Down ratio is 1.08. Gone are the easy hurdle rates of 2020. This abysmal figure sits in the sixth percentile of observations for our 38-year history.

Our tongue-in-cheek celebration of the bull market’s second birthday in late March looks premature. But the “Terrible Twos” we warned about have erupted in full force.

As long as the Fed stays on the current aggressive tightening path, caution is highly recommended.

Most U.S. dollar drivers point to a stronger dollar: attractiveness of U.S. assets; policy differentials; real interest-rate differentials; terms of trade; weaker Yuan; and capital flows/hedging activity. Speculative positioning, however, is a negative and suggests the dollar rally might at least take a pause in the near term.

Read this week's Major Trend.

The U.S. Aggregate Bond Index lost 3.8% in April, bringing its year-to-date return to an agonizing -9.5%. The realization that bonds can lose big money, combined with the outlook for stubbornly high inflation and continued rate increases, is nudging bond investors to consider a wider scope of alternatives.

AdvantHedge was up 10.6% in April, ahead of the inverse S&P 500 (+8.7%), and the inverse Russell 2000 (+9.9%). After a brief bounce during the second half of March, the selloff in growth stocks—both profitable and unprofitable—accelerated during April.

The Leuthold Core and Global portfolios were down in April, but held up well relative to the selloff in the broad equity market.

The April haircut in the S&P 500 (-8.8%) combined with February and January losses brought a few of our 1995-to-date “Estimating The Downside” measures very close to their 27-year medians for the first time in recent memory. At present, downside to the median is now -16%. Based on 1957-to-date, the S&P 500’s estimated downside to the median is -30%.

Read this week's MTI update

Read this week's MTI update

Lent ended last week, allowing Christians to resume the intake of unhealthy foods. But rather than a nice, thick T-Bone steak, we’d suggest sampling one of the few items that’s fattened investors’ accounts in 2022—the Donut!

A replay of a Zoom Call with Chief Investment Officer, Doug Ramsey where he shared his thoughts and observations on today's market and what he sees looking ahead. The slides are available through the PDF Download.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Next month kicks off the seasonally-weak phase of the stock market’s Annual Cycle: May-October. Overlaid on that is the statistically vulnerable stretch of the four-year Election Cycle: the “mid-point” of the Mid-Term Year. There’s a positive way to spin this mid-term malaise: The cycles imply that an ideal window for a major low is about to open.

NIPA’s “all-economy” profit margin declined a bit in Q4—which typically peaks before SPX profits—and that falloff coincided with the economy officially reaching full employment, based on the CBO’s Nominal GDP Output Gap. When the Output Gap has flipped positive (like in Q4), corporate profit margins usually come under immediate pressure.

If earnings’ nearly vertical ascent continues for another six months, 12-month trailing EPS will intersect the 6.9% long-term-growth trend line connecting the five major EPS peaks between 1974 and 2007. The “New Normal” has given way to the “Good Ol’ Days!”