Latest Research

Balanced portfolio investors face a difficult challenge finding equity alternatives that modify risk without overly reducing reward. The problem is acute because traditional choices have lost much of their historic appeal. Cash certainly lessens volatility, but, with a zero yield, its reward penalty is excessive.

Perusing current equity-investment possibilities highlights a diverse set of choices. Focusing on only two primary attributes—relative price and relative earnings—illustrates considerable diversity among the major investment styles.

Although COVID-19 has significantly impacted everyone, its economic wake has been unusually bifurcated compared to past crises. Since the pandemic requires social distancing, the recession and its aftermath have been concentrated disproportionately among “social and lower-earning” industries. This odd, if not unique, divergence in the economic fortunes of low and high-earning industries perhaps explains how overall real GDP, the unemployment rate, the housing industry, manufacturing activities, and other economic segments have managed to recover quickly and powerfully.

The Dow Jones Transportation Average has recently notched fresh all-time highs. Following a sizable relative performance dip earlier in the year, the Transports’ relative strength has recovered and moved to new 2020 highs (Chart 1).  Still, compared to the broad market, the index’s YTD return appears fairly unremarkable, outpacing the S&P 500 by about 3%.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

Consumer Price Inflation of 1.2% for the twelve months through October remains way below the Fed’s long-time 2% objective, which is nothing new. But a first step in getting inflation to eventually run a little bit “hot” (the Fed’s new objective) is to break the long-term disinflationary psychology among consumers and investors, and that is clearly happening. In fact, based on the excellent “Inflation Surprise” Indexes published monthly by Citi, the U.S. is now the world’s inflationary hotspot!

Read this week's Major Trend.

Dividends are a cornerstone of equity investing and over the decades they have produced a significant portion of the stock market’s total return.  Previous Leuthold research has identified a strong dividend influence on total returns for small and midcap companies.  Looking at S&P 500 constituents, we see that dividend growers outperformed companies that had flat or declining dividends – an expected outcome.  However, we also found that companies not paying dividends convincingly outpaced dividend payers.  This is contrary to the results in other market segments, but the explanation for this becomes apparent in the course of our research.

If Momentum and Growth investors thought they were escaping 2020 unscathed, they learned otherwise on Monday. Pfizer’s promising news about a COVID-19 vaccine was met with universal excitement and investors rearranging portfolios—taking gains in long-term winners and plowing into beaten-down cyclical stocks. 

FAANG has dramatically outperformed Large Cap Growth the past ten years, but is has become cheaper and slightly less growth-oriented in the process. We examine the extent FAANG performance has carried through to the rest of the Large Cap Growth universe and how to get growth without them.

Read this week's Major Trend.

FAANG has dramatically outperformed Large Cap Growth the past ten years, but is has become cheaper and slightly less growth-oriented in the process. We examine the extent FAANG performance has carried through to the rest of the Large Cap Growth universe and how to get growth without them.

Fundamentally, we don’t have much new to say on the disaster that Energy-sector equities have become. Mostly, we want to illustrate the danger of assuming that the stocks of commodity producers will necessarily follow the path of their underlying commodities.

We’re still coming to grips with Modern Monetary Theory and the stark realization that “the delusional is no longer marginal.”

Small Cap Value was the top performing style box in October—the first time in recent memory. Its YTD underperformance versus our Royal Blue Growth segment is still nearly 40%.

On the basis of both Normalized P/E and Price/Book, there’s plenty of runway for EM stocks if they get back to even the midpoint of their 20-year valuation range. Rising commodity prices and a weak dollar would obviously help, and we expect both in the year ahead.

Diversified, multi-asset portfolios have been weak performers for many years. The ultra-flexible, macro hedge-fund manager represents one extreme of the asset allocation continuum. At the other extreme would be the passive holder of multiple asset classes. It’s been a tough three years for this breed, too.

As we start Q3-2020 reporting, our first Up/Down ratio reads 1.14. Although this observation is in the eighth percentile of our 37 years of data, it is shockingly better than the two quarters that preceded it (0.72 and 0.63).