Research.LeutholdGroup

For many months, we’ve argued that global stocks have been tracing out a major cyclical top. But the global stock market “tape” has narrowed so much that it’s really only the U.S. blue chips that are left to do the tracing.

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Value, High Beta, and Small Cap stocks all captured a few rays of sunlight for the first time in a long while. It’s too early to tell if last month’s leadership U-turns can be sustained, but major market trends are the most susceptible to reverse during cyclical bear markets.

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On October 3rd, the S&P 500 briefly traded below the high it made in January 2018 before reversing to close the day higher.

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Small Caps came tantalizingly close to activating a major VLT BUY signal in September, with the Russell 2000 closing less than a half percent below the trigger level. A new bull signal from this indicator wouldn’t “fit” into our market and economic narrative, but we won’t sweep it under the rug if it occurs.

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Despite an economy operating “beyond” full employment for the past seven quarters, more than one-fourth of the companies in the Leuthold 3000 universe are losing money on a 12-month trailing basis. The Fed has subsidized what’s truly become irresponsible behavior.

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Over the last year of market swings, we’ve tracked the horrific performance of what had previously been a solid long-term system for timing the S&P 500, the 10-month moving average crossover system. In the last 12 months, this generally low-risk approach has generated a total return loss of 13.74%.

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The yield curve’s ten-month moving average inverted in September, hence the yield curve inversion can no longer be dismissed as transitory; the Boom/Bust Indicator remains below its descending 10-month moving average, confirming economic weakness predicted by the yield curve; and, the “Present Situation” component of September’s Consumer Confidence survey slipped below its 10-month moving average for the third time in 2019.

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The U.S. yield curve inversion has lasted long enough that even a few economic optimists now concede it will ultimately prove significant.

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We’ve been expecting weakness in the manufacturing sector to spread to the service economy, but were not prepared for the nearly four-point drop in the latest ISM Non-Manufacturing Composite. We don’t want to overplay a single monthly reading from an historically volatile report, but the Non-Manufacturing Price Index spiked despite the drop in New Orders.

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One of the key pillars of the bullish case has been the supposedly “benign” trend in corporate credit. While that’s been true for holders of the popular junk bond ETFs (HYG and JNK), the broader credit picture is not as reassuring.

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Despite higher volatility, market performance is still up in the high double-digits YTD. Interestingly, as our index of High Quality Stocks versus Low Quality Stocks shows, High Quality is prevailing in terms of relative performance.

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It’s now been more than 19 months since global stocks peaked on January 26th, 2018. Those lucky enough to have been invested solely in the S&P 500 and to have held on for the volatile ride have a 3.7% gain to show for it. Nice going.

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We noted that the December 2018 stock market low was the second most expensive in history, second only to that of October 1998. Similarities between 2019 market action and the 1998-99 rebound remain eerie. Something isn’t right, and it’s not bullish.

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The manufacturing economy has thrown us a deflationary curve in 2019: The Price Index broke down in advance of New Orders, a reversal of the textbook recession/recovery sequence between these two measures.

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We always do our own work and draw our own conclusions. Lately, though, we’ve wondered what the late “Monetary Marty” Zweig might say about the stock market’s current liquidity backdrop.

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A recent theme in our valuation work is that we no longer need to assume a full-blown “reversion to the mean” to illustrate current U.S. stock market risks: Even a reversion to “old” bull market highs in ratios like S&P 500 Price/Sales, Price/Cash Flow, and Normalized P/E would result in bear-sized losses.

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While investors in Value, Small Caps, and especially foreign stocks might beg to disagree, a key MTI technical measure suggests this decade’s stock-market ride has been almost entirely “pain free.”

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The Russell 2000 is the most important major index on the cusp of a new BUY signal. Our best guess is that Small Caps will still trend lower for now, creating a buying opportunity in the months ahead.

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A general rule of thumb for thematic equity investors is that the dominant leadership sectors and groups in a given bull market normally don’t repeat as leaders in the subsequent bull.

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This Stock Market section’s unifying theme has been that of an historically two-tiered market, one in which Domestic, Large Cap, Growth, Consumer-oriented, and Low Volatility stocks have reigned supreme.

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Despite a historic economic expansion during the past decade, there is an ever-increasing number of companies that are finding profitability has become harder to achieve.

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The need to sound contrarian has become a borderline obsession among market pundits. Media opportunities for talking heads have exploded in the last decade, forcing those who hold the safest consensus views to falsely portray themselves as lonely and misunderstood market mavericks.

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Rather than stocks disconnecting from the economy, as some equity bears contend, we see the blue chips disconnecting from the rest of the market. The underperformance of leading groups, along with multimonth divergences in momentum, bullish sentiment, and credit spreads are all consistent with the deteriorating prospects for earnings and the economy.

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We’d concede the monetary backdrop for stocks is now mixed, an upgrade from the almost uniformly negative environment of last fall. On the negative side, the U.S. yield curve inversion has now persisted long enough that even the economic optimists are getting nervous.

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The early August setback took the S&P 500 below its late-January 2018 high—and the time when we first trimmed net equity exposure in Leuthold tactical funds from a nearly fully-invested posture.

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Earnings results for the second quarter have so far "beaten" expectations (as they always seem to), but that hasn’t changed the calculus for Small Cap companies. About one-third of them have negative earnings over the last twelve months.

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Trend followers who use the ten-month moving average discipline finally had a positive month in July. But after the early-August decline, they are still holding an S&P 500 loss of 60 points from their latest trade initiated at the end of June.

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While re-leveraging of the U.S. corporate sector during this economic cycle has been well-documented, the common belief is that the consumer balance sheet remains in good shape. That’s technically true.

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For at least two years, the unofficial title of “the scariest chart in the Leuthold database” belonged to the S&P 500 Price/Sales ratio. That chart still rattles us, with the July month-end ratio still in the vicinity of its old Y2K high.

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Here are some brief follow-up notes on topics covered in recent months’ Green Books.

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The 2.00%-4.99% yield range is the sweet spot for yield investors from a risk/reward standpoint; while the other end of the spectrum (>5% yield) incurs too much risk for the fat payouts. Here we spotlight four ETF strategies that focus on dividend paying stocks.

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The S&P 500 has rallied 9.2% in the 22 trading days since its June 3rd low, but the move hasn’t (yet) been enough to lift the Major Trend Index out of its negative zone.

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Over a 12-month horizon, we now believe a U.S. recession is very likely, but aren’t confident enough to make the call when the forecast window is cut in half. Second-half stock returns could be decent if the business-cycle peak is still a year away. Then again, there’s peril in waiting for “too much” confirmation of recession.

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The granddaddy of all technical indicators—the NYSE Daily Advance/Decline Line—continues to make new highs alongside the S&P 500, suggesting the market should move to even higher (but perhaps narrower) highs well into the fall. As noted a month ago, we increasingly suspect that granddaddy may be telling a lie.

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The 10-year-old bull grabs most of the headlines, but its younger sibling has begun to command more respect.

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Current leadership trends continue to track their 1998-99 behavior in an almost eerie fashion—so much so that we now wish we’d used that historical period as our instruction manual!

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One of the more impressive feats that bullish pundits have pulled off is their successful portrayal of themselves as lonely and misunderstand contrarians even as the eleventh year of a cyclical bull market grinds on.

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Many technicians consider the 10-month moving-average crossover technique as the gold standard among long-term timing practices. The method was successfully applied to several asset classes in the SSRN’s most-downloaded paper of all time, “A Quantitative Approach To Asset Allocation” by Meb Faber.

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We’ve never understood investment quants’ desire to project correlations among assets. Such correlations are inherently unstable.

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Last month we noted that current interest-rate expectations might indicate good timing for dividend investments; however, we strongly suggested being selective, and lean toward high-quality dividend payers.

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