A reader asked me my opinion about this tweet by Nautilus Research. According to this study, equities have performed poorly once the inflation-adjusted 10-year Treasury yield turns negative. With real yields barely positive today, Nautilus went on to ask rhetorically if the Fed is behind the inflation fighting curve. Since the publication of...
Mid-week market update: Increasingly, I have seen cases being made for an equity market correction. This Bloomberg article, "Five charts that say not all is well in the markets" summarizes the bear case well. Uncertainty is at a record high: The number of news stories using the word "uncertainty" is surging. Wall Street vs. Washington:...
I have had a number of discussions with subscribers asking for more "how to" posts (see Teaching my readers how to fish). This will be one of a series of occasional posts on how to build a robust investment process. For traders and investors, one of the challenges is how to build a robust discipline...
Recently, I have seen several variations of market analysis concluding that stocks are expensive based on forward P/E ratios. Here is a tweet from Jeroen Blokland. David Rosenberg characterized the current equity environment as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Blokland followed up the above tweet with an additional comment indicating...
As 2016 has drawn to a close, it's time to review the report card from my 2016 calls. My inner investor performed very well, though my inner trader suffered a number of hiccups. Overall, I had a solid year in 2016. My inner investor: Steadfastly bullish The chart below depicts the key highlights of my...
Business Insider recently featured a chart from Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle, who observed that the market cap to GDP ratio has become highly elevated to its own history starting about 1996. You might recall that the market cap to GDP ratio was also said to be one of Warren Buffett's favorite equity market valuation...
Preface: Explaining our market timing models We maintain several market timing models, each with differing time horizons. The "Ultimate Market Timing Model" is a long-term market timing model based on the research outlined in our post, Building the ultimate market timing model. This model tends to generate only a handful of signals each decade. The Trend...
Mid-week market update: Two weeks ago, I had forecast a minor stock market pullback as the SPX neared 2200 (see The market catches round number-itis). The corrective move hasn't happened and remain in a tight trading range. The one bright spot for the bull case is stock prices haven't fallen in response to bad news,...
I have spent a lot of time in these pages writing about the influence of macro-economic factors on market analysis. Indeed, Matt King at Citigroup recently highlighted the growing importance of macro factors on the equity market (chart via Bloomberg): [Please see Bloomberg story for chart] Here are three key macro factors that I...
In the past few months, I have received a lot of feedback and criticism over my use of forward 12-month EPS estimates, such as the chart below that appeared in last weekend`s post (see Brexit panic: A gift from the market gods?). I would like to clarify why this form of analysis matters and this...
How would you feel if the average doctor was right 55% of the time? What if a "superstar" doctor, the one whose new patient waiting list stretched out for 1-2 years, was right 60-70% of the time? That's how thing work in investing. A "good" quantitative factor, or system, is often acceptable if it has...
Mid-week market update: Rather than the usual mid-week market technical comment, I thought that I would present updates on a number of trades that I had suggested in the past: How to play the Brexit referendum (published February 29, 2016): Setting up for a trade? A possible generational low in oil and energy stocks (published January 20, 2016):...
Some minor buzz has arisen among finance academics and professionals as a result of a paper by Ronald Kahn and Michael Lemmon, both of whom are employed by Blackrock, entitled The Asset Manager’s Dilemma: How Smart Beta Is Disrupting the Investment Management Industry. Here is the abstract: Smart beta products are a disruptive financial innovation...
I've been giving much thought about the investment philosophy behind the post over at Philosophical Economics about the GTT market timing model. To understand what`s behind his investment philosophy, let`s start back with first principles of equity investing. The equity claim represent the "stub" claim behind debt, or bond financing in a company and therefore...
Dana Lyons recently wrote a terrific piece about the level of complacency in the current bout of stock market weakness. The SPX had fallen over 9% in two weeks, but the VIX Index was barely challenging its December highs and it was nowhere near the highs set during the August/September selloff. He found that past...
The blogger Jesse Livermore at Philosophical Economics recently wrote another brilliant post about the use of trend following models and market timing. He found that trend following models work very well on diversified stock indices, but didn't really understand the mechanism of how they worked. As I pride myself on being a left and right...
As 2015 draws to a close, this would be a good time to review how I did during the year. As regular readers know, I have two personas, my inner investor and my inner trader. My inner investor had a decent year, while my inner trader had a year that he would rather forget. ...
This is another in a series of occasional posts on quantitative analysis. I am indebted to Josh Brown for pointing me to an article by Larry Swedroe, which discusses a study on demographics and real interest rates. While I found that I can derive significant insights from single variable studies like these, the world is...
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