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Those who heeded the old advice to “Sell In May” have missed out on an additional 5% gain (and counting) so far in 2021. However, the best way to have played this seasonal anomaly over the years was not to have “sold-out,” but rather to have “reduced the beta” of one’s equity holdings versus cutting equity exposure outright. That strategy has paid-off handsomely the last three months, even as this “Nothin’ Matters And What If It Did” stock-market powers higher.

High yield bonds returned a robust 15.4% in the year ending June 30, extending a winning streak that produced a 56.4% cumulative return since the end of 2015.  After a quick, severe drawdown at the height of the COVID-19 scare, junk bonds have experienced nearly ideal market conditions, heralding a return to trends that have been in place for several years. The post-pandemic move toward this record low has been a boon to high yield bond investors, but it has also created a significant risk of reversal.  We believe most things in the financial markets are defined by cycles, with Treasury yields and credit spreads no exception.  Tight readings for both rate series demand that we consider the possibility that a cyclical reversal could weigh on junk bond prices going forward.

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. 

Inflation and its potential impact on the stock market is the topic du jour, resurrecting ideas that were in vogue 30- to 40-years ago.

Steve Leuthold’s 1980 book, The Myths of Inflation and Investing, provided an exhaustive review of the evidence. But for lighter reading, more appropriate for a summer Friday, we revisit the “Rule of Twenty” developed by strategist Jim Moltz in the early 1980s.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

This summer marks the first anniversary, not of the COVID-19 stock-market low, itself, but of the much belated “confirmation” of that low.

After the last two months’ violent reversal of the “re-opening” trade, the major indexes for U.S. Large Cap, Small Cap, Growth, and Value all stood with YTD gains in the 14-16% range. Yes, a few nimble portfolio managers might have migrated out of “re-opening” stocks in early April and into the “old” Large Cap Growth leadership but the surest route to superior performance has been to avoid what’s become an almost annual pitfall since the Great Financial Crisis: Foreign stocks. EAFE and MSCI Emerging Markets already trail the S&P 500’s 16.0% YTD gain by about 8% and 12%, respectively.

At today’s 30.8x, the Peak P/E stands in the 99th percentile on all time horizons except the “New Era” (1995-to-date). Yet, that’s still five “handles” below the 35.8x all-time high recorded in December 1999. If that figure is matched, the S&P 500 will top 5,000. 

We’ve long considered ourselves lucky to have escaped from our graduate-economics program after only a year. Among the few nuggets we managed to retain was the startling conclusion to a paper written by a famed department professor asking, “Do Large Deficits Produce High Interest Rates?”

It’s certain that today’s cyclical bout of inflation will prove “transitory,” if only because the word itself is practically meaningless. Our time on earth will also prove transitory, and so too will the current stock market mania—to the shock of most of the nearly 20 million “investors” on the Robinhood platform.

Inflation is already “too high” for the current cyclical setting, and the level of inflation that equity investors are willing to tolerate will drop further as the economy recovers.

Statistically, when jobs are “easy to get”—as all the survey evidence now indicates—attractive long-term returns for stocks typically become “hard to get.”

The “Nothin’ Matters” market lifted the S&P 500 to eight all-time highs in the nine trading days through July 7th. It’s been difficult to assail the stock market’s technical merits, but there are suddenly some short-term cracks among the handful of market indexes we consider “bellwethers.” 

At some point during the June/July streak of seven-consecutive S&P 500 daily-closing highs, an album from 1980 popped into our heads: Nothin’ Matters And What If It Did—released when John Mellencamp was still known as John Cougar. It brought to mind some “nothin’s” that seem not to matter.

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The S&P 500 posted its fifth consecutive monthly advance in June and its fifth consecutive quarterly advance as we closed out Q2-21. The index’s 8.2% second quarter gain has not exacerbated our downside-to-median estimates, which stand exactly where they did at the end of March.

The much-publicized rotation out of Growth and into Value and Cyclical stocks may have ended in Q2. Bond yields retreated and the specter of ruinous inflation receded. Also gaining traction: the notion that outrageous earnings and economic growth numbers we’re currently seeing are not long for this world. From bust-to-boom-to-moderation in record time?

Large Cap Growth came storming back in Q2 and closed its performance gap with Value and Cyclical stocks. Small Value still leads all the other style boxes: +26.7% YTD.