Category Archives: Recent Market Action

stock market issues for 2019

January 3, 2019 By in Current Market Thoughts, Recent Market Action, Uncategorized Tags: , 1 Comment

I see four main issues, which–now that I’m on semester break–I’m planning to write about over the next few days.  They are:

—machines vs. humans.  This is the question of increased short-term volatility.  How do we cope with the apparently mad dashes in and out of the market by trading robots using, by historical standards, half-baked trading algorithms?

 

—decelerating earnings growth.  EPS growth in 2018 for publicly traded companies was around +20%.  Increases for 2019 will likely come in at +8% – +10%.  This kind of sharp falloff is normally a bad sign for stock prices.  In the current case, however, the 2018 EPS surge is only in after-tax earnings and is due mostly to the one-time decrease in the Federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% that went into effect last year.   Pre-tax earnings grew at a much more sedate rate of around 10%, I think.  While the 2019 situation isn’t wildly positive, it would seem to me to imply a flattish market where the investor’s job is to identify areas of potential strength to buy and areas of potential weakness to avoid.

But is this the way algorithms will operate?

 

—the business cycle and interest rates.  Typically, the Fed raises short-term rates when it perceives the economy is overheating.  Higher rates make bonds less attractive.  They make other financial instruments, like stocks, less attractive, too.  But the negative effect of higher rates is offset by surging earnings growth.  Is +10% enough to do the job in 2019?

 

–tariffs.  (A side note first:  it seems to me the Trump administration argument that it can usurp Congress’s power to set trade policy because everything economic is a matter of national security is ludicrous.  Not a peep from Congress, though.  To me, this implies that Mr. Trump is simply the spokesmodel for policies the forces in Congress want enacted but don’t want to be held responsible for.)

Tariffs have, at best, a checkered history.  They invite retaliation.  They have unforeseen/ unintended negative effects: Apple’s preannouncement of weaker than expected results in its current quarter may only be the first.   In addition, the rapid and seemingly arbitrary way tariffs have been enacted in the US has already given both domestic and foreign corporates pause about expanding operations here.  One thing is certain, though –tariffs slow economic growth.  The question is by how much and for how long.

 

—the independence of the Federal Reserve.  By conventional measures, there’s still too much money sloshing around in the US.  So there’s every reason for the Fed to continue to shrink its bloated balance sheet and to slowly raise short-term interest rates (the specter of Japan’s three decades of stagnation–resulting in large measure from saveral bouts of premature policy tightening–continues to be a cautionary tale against moving too quickly).  Because of this, Mr. Trump’s musing about firing Jerome Powell has a distinctly Nixonian ring to it, conjuring up echoes of the runaway inflation and currency collapse in the US of the 1970s.  From a stock market point of view, threatening the Fed may be the single most damaging thing Mr. Trump has done so far.

 

More details over the next few days.

looking at today’s market

October 23, 2018 By in Current Market Thoughts, major changes in market direction, Recent Market Action, securities markets, stock market, Strategy, Technical Analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

In an ideal world, portfolio investing is all about comparing the returns available among the three liquid asset classes–stocks, bonds and cash–and choosing the mix that best suits one’s needs and risk preferences.

In the real world, the markets are sometimes gripped instead by almost overwhelming waves of greed or fear that blot out rational thought about potential future returns.  Once in a while, these strong emotions presage (where did that word come from?) a significant change in market direction.  Most often, however, they’re more like white noise.

In the white noise case, which I think this is an instance of, my experience is that people can sustain a feeling of utter panic for only a short time.  Three weeks?  …a month?  The best way I’ve found to gauge how far along we are in the process of exhausting this emotion is to look at charts (that is, sinking pretty low).  What I want to see is previous levels where previously selloffs have ended, where significant new buying has emerged.

I typically use the S&P 500.  Because this selloff has, to my mind, been mostly about the NASDAQ, I’ve looked at that, too.  Two observations:  as I’m writing this late Tuesday morning both indices are right at the level where selling stopped in June;  both are about 5% above the February lows.

My conclusion:  if this is a “normal” correction, it may have a little further to go, but it’s mostly over.  Personally, I own a lot of what has suffered the most damage, so I’m not doing anything.  Otherwise, I’d be selling stocks that have held up relatively well and buying interesting names that have been sold off a lot.

 

What’s the argument for this being a downturn of the second sort–a marker of a substantial change in market direction?  As far as the stock market goes, there are two, as I see it:

–Wall Street loves to see accelerating earnings.  A yearly pattern of +10%, +12%, +15% is better than +15%, +30%, +15%.  That’s despite the fact that the earnings level in the second case will be much higher in year three than in the first.

Why is this?  I really don’t know.  Maybe it’s that in the first case I can dream that future years will be even better.  In the second case, it looks like the stock in question has run into a brick wall that will stop/limit earnings advance.

What’s in question here is how Wall Street will react to the fact that 2018 earnings are receiving a large one-time boost from the reduction in the Federal corporate tax rate.  So next year almost every stock’s pattern in will look like case #2.

A human being will presumably look at pre-tax earnings to remove the one-time distortion.  But will an algorithm?

 

–Washington is going deeply into debt to reduce taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations, thereby revving the economy up.  It also sounds like it wants the Fed to maintain an emergency room-low level of interest rates, which will intensify the effect.  At the same time, it is acting to raise the price of petroleum and industrial metals, as well as everything imported from China–which will slow the economy down (at least for ordinary people).  It’s possible that Washington figures that the two impulses will cancel each other out.  On the other hand, it’s at least as likely, in my view, that both impulses create inflation fears that trigger a substantial decline in the dollar.  The resulting inflation could get 1970s-style ugly.

 

My sense is that the algorithm worry is too simple to be what’s behind the market decline, the economic worry too complicated.  If this is the seasonal selling I believe it to be, time is a factor as well as stock market levels.  To get the books to close in an orderly way, accountants would like portfolio managers not to trade next week.

Trump on trade

August 27, 2018 By in currency effects, currency markets, Current Market Thoughts, foreign trade, Recent Market Action, securities markets, stock market, Strategy, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

so far:

intellectual property…

One of Mr. Trump’s first actions as president was to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a consortium of world nations seeking, among other things, to halt Chinese theft of intellectual property.

…and metals

Trump has apparently since discovered that this is a serious issue but has decided that the US will go it alone in addressing it.  His approach of choice is to place tariffs on goods imported from China–steel and aluminum to start with–on the idea that the harm done to China by the tax will bring that country to the negotiating table.  In what seems to me to be his signature non-sequitur-ish move, Mr. Trump has also placed tariffs on imports of these metals from Canada and from the EU.

This action has prompted the imposition of retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US.

the effect of tariffs

–the industry being “protected’ by tariffs usually raises prices

–if it has inferior products, which is often the case, it also tends to slow its pace of innovation (think:  US pickup trucks, some of which still use engine technology from the 1940s)

–some producers will leave the market, meaning fewer choices for consumers;  certainly there will be fewer affordable choices

–overall economic growth slows.  The relatively small number of people in the protected industry benefit substantially, but the aggregate harm, spread out among the general population, outweighs this–usually by a lot

is there a plan?

If so, Mr. Trump has been unable/unwilling to explain it in a coherent way.  In a political sense, it seems to me that his focus is on rewarding participants in sunset industries who form the most solid part of his support–and gaining new potential voters through trade protection of new areas.

automobiles next?

Mr. Trump has proposed/threatened to place tariffs on automobile imports into the US.  This is a much bigger deal than what he has done to date.   How so?

–Yearly new car sales in the US exceed $500 billion in value, for one thing.  So tariffs that raise car prices stand to have important and widespread (negative) economic effects.

–For another, automobile manufacturing supply chains are complex:  many US-brand vehicles are substantially made outside the US; many foreign-brand vehicles are made mostly domestically.

–In addition, US car makers are all multi-nationals, so they face the risk that any politically-created gains domestically would be offset (or more than offset) by penalties in large growth markets like China.  Toyota has already announced that it is putting proposed expansion of its US production, intended for export to China, on hold.  It will send cars from Japan instead.  [Q: Who is the largest exporter of US-made cars to China?  A:  BMW  –illustrating the potential for unintended effects with automotive tariffs.]

 

More significant for the long term, the world is in a gradual transition toward electric vehicles.  They will likely prove to be especially important in China, the world’s largest car market, which has already prioritized electric vehicles as a way of dealing with its serious air pollution problem.

This is an area where the US is now a world leader.  Trade retaliation that would slow domestic development of electric vehicles, or which would prevent export of US-made electric cars to China, could be particularly damaging.

This has already happened once to the US auto industry during the heavily protected 1980s.  The enhanced profitability that quotas on imported vehicles created back then induced an atmosphere of complacency.  The relative market position of the Big Three deteriorated a lot.  During that decade alone, GM lost a quarter of its market share, mostly to foreign brands.  Just as bad, the Big Three continued to damage their own brand image by offering a parade of high-cost, low-reliability vehicles.  GM has been the poster child for this.  It controlled almost half the US car market in 1980; its current market share is about a third of that.

In sum, I think Mr. Trump is playing with fire with his tariff policy.  I’m not sure whether he understands just how much long-term damage he may inadvertently do.

stock market implications

One of the quirks of the US stock market is that autos and housing are key industries for the economy but neither has significant representation in the S&P 500–or any other general domestic index, for that matter.

Tariffs applied so far will have little direct negative impact on S&P 500 earnings, although eventually consumer spending will slow a bit.  So far, fears about the direction in which Mr. Trump may be taking the country–and the failure of Congress to act as a counterweight–have expressed themselves in two ways.  They are:

–currency weakness and

–an emphasis on IT sector in the S&P 500.  Within IT, the favorites have been those with the greatest international reach, and those that provide services rather than physical products.  My guess is that if auto tariffs are put in place, this trend will intensify.  Industrial stocks + specific areas of retaliation will, I think, join the areas to be avoided.

 

Of course, intended or not (I think “not”), this drag on growth would be coming after a supercharging of domestic growth through an unfunded tax cut.   This arguably means that the eventual train wreck being orchestrated by Mr. Trump will be too far down the line to be discounted in stock prices right away.

 

 

~$70 a barrel crude (ii)

January 17, 2018 By in Current Market Thoughts, market rotation, oil, oil and natural gas, Recent Market Action, shale oil, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Two factors are moving the Energy sector higher.  The obvious one is the higher oil price during a normally seasonally weak time.  In addition, though, the market is actively looking for alternatives to IT.  It isn’t that the bright long-term future for this sector has dimmed.  It’s that near-term valuations for IT have risen to the point that Wall Street wants to see more concrete evidence of high growth–in the form of superior future earnings reports–before it’s willing to bid the stocks significantly higher.  With IT shunted to the sidelines for now, the market is not being a picky as it might be otherwise about alternatives such as Energy and Consumer discretionary.

The fancy term for what’s going on now is “counter-trend rally.”  It can go on for months.

 

As to the oils,

–a higher crude oil price is clearly a positive for the exploration and proudction companies that produce the stuff.  In particular, all but the least adept shale oil drillers must now be making money.  This is where investment activity will be centered, I think.

 

–refiners and marketers, who have benefitted from lower costs are now facing higher prices.  So they’re net losers.  Long/short investors will be reversing their positions to now be short refiners and long e&p.

 

–the biggest multinational integrateds are a puzzle.  On the one hand, they traditionally make most of their money from finding and producing crude.  On the other, they’ve spent very heavily over the past decade on mega-projects that depend for their viability on $100+ oil.  This has been a horrible mistake.  Shale oil output will likely keep crude well short of $100 for a very long time.

Yes, the big multinationals have all taken significant writeoffs on these ill-starred projects.  But, in theory at least, writeoffs aren’t supposed to create future profits.  They can only eliminate capital costs that there’s no chance of recovering.  As these projects come online, they’ll likely produce strong positive cash flow (recovery of upfront costs already on the balance sheet) but little profit.

The question in my mind is how the market will value this cash flow.  As I see it–value investors might argue otherwise–most stock market participants buy earnings, not cash generation.  Small companies in this situation would likely be acquired by larger rivals.  But the firms I’m talking about–ExxonMobil, Shell, BP…–are probably too big for that.  Will they turn themselves into quasi-bonds by paying out most of this cash in dividends?  I have no idea.

Two thoughts:

—–why fool around with the multinationals when the shale oil companies are clear winners?

—–as/when the integrateds start to show relative strength, we have to begin to consider that the party may be over.  So watch them.