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Read this week's Major Trend

Last week we argued that U.S. money growth remains way too high to reasonably expect a peak in consumer price inflation during the next few months. At the peaks of the last five bouts of inflation of 5% or more, real growth in the M2 money supply had turned negative in four cases and had slipped to less than 1% in the other one. Today, real M2 is growing at nearly a 7% rate.

Read this week's Major Trend.

From the start of the inflation upswing this spring, pundits cited well-known disinflationary factors they believe will soon halt the current inflationary upswing—like free trade, the speed of technological advance, and aging populations globally. 

Read this week's Major Trend.

Tesla zoomed 44% higher in October and became the newest firm to reach $1 trillion in market cap. Tesla is now valued at 6.25x the combined weight of Ford and General Motors even though the young upstart sports just one-third of either’s revenue. TSLA and MSFT contributed one-fourth of the S&P 500’s 7% October gain.

Total returns since the end of March: Royal Blue Growth +24%; Small Cap Growth +3%. Small Cap Value continues to be the only style-box that is undervalued compared to its history.

Our Ratio of Ratios’ preferred habitat for the last five months has been a Small Cap discount of 18%-21%. We’re surprised it hasn’t broken even lower as the S&P 500 had a price return of +9.5% over that period compared to +1.2% for the Russell 2000.

With the first month of Q3-21 earnings in the books, our Up/Down ratio reads 2.70. While that falls into the 95th percentile of our 38-year history, it is a far cry from our scale-busting “one-month” figure from July (4.52).

Three groups bumped up to Attractive this month, Insurance Brokers, Thrifts & Mortgage Finance, and Oil & Gas Exploration & Production.

After years of languishing in the rock bottom of Group Selection Scores and sector rankings, Energy exploded higher this month, jumping from 10th lowest (out of eleven broad sectors) to 3rd highest in our composite rankings.

With seasonality once again turning positive and inflation breakeven rates bumping above the recent range, we continue to favor the reflation trade.

We believe concerns about central-bank policy error are mostly a foreign issue, because they have moved much more aggressively than the Fed. The market has shown no indication of a Fed-policy mistake and we are still on board with the reflation trade.

In the June 2018 Green Book, we noted that stocks have shown a fairly reliable correlation with a calendar of an entirely different sort: the solunar calendar. It turns out that the days that our $9.95 “iSolunar” iPhone app predicts to be good ones for fishing (based entirely on phases of the moon) are the same days that stocks have enjoyed the largest average gains!   

October’s nearly +7% S&P 500 surge was impressive, but came a month early—according to the traditional seasonal cycle—which turned bullish on November 1st, and will remain intact for the next six months.

For those believers in a new economic- and stock-market era, there’s good news. The CPI-PPI spread has not been an effective proxy for profit margins during the 1995-to-date “New Era.” But, the failure of an inflation measure during a mostly non-inflationary era shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The environment where massively above-trend federal outlays have generated massively above-trend readings in both current and projected S&P 500 EPS, the idea of normalizing EPS over a period as long as five years might seem hopelessly out of touch. But it’s during times of extraordinary conditions—both good and bad—that render this work especially valuable.

It is much easier to predict inflation, itself, than to predict when investors will become traumatized by it. Some of the most helpful measures for the latter task come from the ISM Manufacturing Report. October’s readings saw three key measures above the statistical “speed limits” we calculated years ago.

Technical types who have the luxury of avoiding the worsening valuation, inflation, and liquidity backdrop probably view today’s market as a much “safer” one than has existed for many months, now that breadth and leadership cracks have been mostly sealed up. 

If NBER is correct that a new economic expansion began in mid-2020, then this cycle is unfolding in “dog years.” After limiting between-meal snacks earlier this year, champion-breeder Jay Powell has informed his pack of canines that their portions will also be reduced as of later this month.