As I wrote last week, I think the market wants to rotate away from the winners of the past 18 months or so.

Two reasons: the outperformance of tech vs. the rest of the market has been so extreme as to make many professionals (me included) worry that something else must get a turn at bat; and there are echoes of the Internet bubble of 1999-2000 in current trading–lots of chaff, to my mind, along with the wheat.

The big question is where to go. In 2000, the rotation within tech–when that sector began to decline–was to the highest quality names. The (more important) rotation away from TMT (Telecom, Media, Tech), as it was called back then, was to traditional value names that had been in the Wall Street doghouse for the better part of a decade–Utilities, Staples and real estate stand out to me, mostly because I mistakenly chose not to own them.

Also: value managers fired in 1998-99 after many years of wretched returns, of necessity formed hedge funds, and then entered (a short, and) immensely lucrative period of outperformance that established their bona fides as savvy operators. They retain much of that aura today despite weak returns for the past decade and a half.

Hence the Wall Street drumbeat, intensified by hedgies, that a return to “value” is the next big move.

I don’t think history will repeat itself, though, for several reasons:

–my overall view is that the 2000-2002 period was the last hurrah for the 1930s Depression-style investing canon (value investing) that stressed the enduring value of balance sheet assets. While price/working capital, price/book or price/cash flow all retain their roles as starting points, the internet era has enabled such rapid change in economic activity that many of the traditional “moats” value investors like to talk about no longer defend against competition the way they once did. In fact, they can be a detriment. The important advice that it’s “better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it to you” is extremely difficult to listen to in a traditional company where executives’ minds have atrophied and whose jobs are threatened by change.

–structural change + Trump’s worst-in-the-world pandemic response are all negatives for utilities, oil and gas, commercial real estate, as well as many types of consumer spending, like restaurant meals or going to the movies. So, yes, these stocks are all beaten up, but to my mind they’re not cheap/

–more than this, the inept/ignorant Trump macroeconomic “strategy” has been to: suppress overall growth, discourage domestic tech research, defend/subsidize non-competitive firms with tariffs, while promoting fossil fuel use (a move which stands to render US auto companies even less world-competitive than they are now). Sort of the plan Putin could only dream of for his enemy

The sum of of all this is that while Trump is in office the last place an equity investor would want to have money–except at extremely low valuations–is in traditional companies making things in the US and serving US customers.

Arguably, industrials overall will rally if Trump is defeated in November. It isn’t clear to me that the Democrats have a coherent economic program, however, so such a move may not have legs. And it’s also possible Trump’s tariff bungling has already given a coup de grace to many of these firms.

I’m not a fan of betting on politics, either.

So I think the best course is to still focus on industries of the future, but to broaden out beyond tech. Personally, I already own ETFs that focus of genomics and fintech–two areas I think are important but that I don’t know much about. I’m trying to build up my exposure to the Chinese economy. I’m not willing to buy individual names in Shanghai or Shenzhen, so I’m concentrating on Hong Kong-listed, where I know the financial statements will be reliable, and where information is available in English.

The non-tech place I typically feel most comfortable is Consumer Discretionary. Here the task is to imagine what post-covid life will be like–and how that will differ from pre-covid days.

More in two days.