There are plenty of ways to take apart and dissect the move in the bond market that accelerated over the past week. From an investment perspective, if the 11% YTD decline in TLT holds, Q1 statements are going to be a jolt for investors who were led to believe that bonds are a portfolio stabilizer and that you can't lose money in Treasuries. From a market perspective, bonds are putting pressure on the Fed. It’s not yet showing up in the CPI, but Fed officials claiming not to see any inflation pressure strain credibility. It's not the rise in yields at the long-end of the curve that will catch the Fed’s eye, but the move higher in the belly of the curve. The short-end remains anchored by Fed actions, but this week saw 3-year, 5-year, and 7-year yields spike. The 5-year yield is approaching resistance at early 2020 levels, while relative to the 2-year yield (which is responsive to Fed policy) the 5-year yield is at its highest level since 2017. For all the talk of central bank omnipotence and bazookas, the bond market > Fed balance sheet. The Fed may need to adjust its approach.
Whenever I want to talk about bonds, I always know just who to call. Larry McDonald is a former bond trader at Lehman Brothers and author of the book, Colossal Failure of Common Sense. I highly encourage you to give it a read, especially if you're looking for some perspective on what really happened back in 2007-2008.
It's no coincidence that I reached out to him to come on the podcast. Larry and I had a very timely conversation in February of last year. So with the bond market recently losing 5-6 Trillion dollars in such a short period of time, who better to talk to than by favorite bond trader.
Our Top 10 report was just published; our weekly report highlighting the best 10 ideas and respective charts we are seeing across the markets this week.
Here we go with our next round of the Top-Down Take post. At All Star Charts, we like to keep things simple and look at the bigger picture. We let the charts speak to us and then decide what to do. Always remember, the Trend is our Friend.
Today we’re taking a look at a sector that has been an outperformer in the recent past despite broader market correction. Nifty Metal is now moving from strength to strength as more constituents break out of long-term bases.
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when Value stocks were the place to be. The kids these days look at me like I'm nuts when I talk to them about banks and energy stocks!
There's a whole world of companies that used to do great. In fact, early in my career these were the names to be in: BTU, WLT, LEH, MER, BSC..... Good times!
Tech and all that other stuff came much later and has been the big driver in the U.S. over the past decade. But the rest of the world has suffered, without that exposure to Tech and Growth, and instead loaded with banks and natural resources, the worse places on earth for some time now.
Fast forward to today and we continue to get more and more evidence suggesting that it's changing.
It's no longer US over International and EM. It's been EM and International over US. It used to be Growth over value for so long.
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday March 1st @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.
I've been incredibly fortunate to travel and learn from other cultures over the years. The tools and strategies I've picked up during my experiences in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Taipei, Dublin and many other cities around the world have really helped shape the way I approach markets.
After so many conversations with smart folks, from all kinds of different backgrounds, for so many years, it makes it almost impossible not to learn a few tricks along the way.
Today I want to share on of my favorite gauges of risk appetite:
Indian Small-caps vs Indian Large-caps.
This is the one we want to watch, more specifically the NIFTY Smallcap 100 Index relative to the NIFTY 50 index. The latter represents 50 of the largest Indian companies on the National Stock Exchange.
It's the ratio between the two that we want to focus on:
Previous leaders have been overwhelmed by strength elsewhere
Market following those who are stepping into the fray
Market dynamics working against passive investors
Have the generals lost their way? Maybe not in an absolute sense, but definitely relative to where the action on the battlefield is taking place. More importantly, does this doom the army to defeat?
Market discussions of generals and their armies usually focus on whether the army is retreating as the generals advance. A very different situation is playing out currently. The mega-cap leaders that have been pacing the market for years (a trend that intensified this time last year as the shock of COVID overwhelmed the world) have been bogged down even as other areas of the market have heated up. So far, at least, it has been a case of marching in place more than actually sustaining losses. Upward pressure on bond yields and the emergence of better opportunities elsewhere could soon turn a relative weakness into absolute weakness.
