I was down Philly last week chatting with Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel, WisdomTree's Jeremy Schwartz and Tim Hussar of WhartonHill. This was a lot of fun and I thought we had a great discussion about what to expect for stocks and bonds in 2020. PHD Liqian Ren was also there and asked some great questions about rotation into emerging markets and how we try to incorporate alternative data into our analysis.
This was my first time visiting the Wharton School and it did not disappoint.
Hopefully I wasn't too hard on Professor Siegel and Tim Hussar and they invite me back on sometime!
This episode was live on SiriusXM and will be replayed several times over the holidays, but here is the podcast version of it so you can give it a listen at your convenience:
I love how people still think we're in a 10-year bull market for stocks. This lack of understanding of basic reality is one of the many catalysts, I believe, that will take stocks much much higher.
The greatest trick the market ever pulled was convincing investors it's been in a decade long bull market.
The best part is that nothing could be further from the truth.
When we talk about "Stocks", we have to recognize that "Stocks" are an asset class. It doesn't just mean the S&P500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is a global stock market, and becoming more of one with every day that passes. Those of you who have been reading our work for years know how valuable that information has been to us for so long. Today is no different.
Look at Europe doing nothing for 2 decades and now starting a new bull market:
Before we get in to stocks and charts, I just want to thank you for your support all these years. It really means a lot to me. Today I noticed I had 61.8K followers on Twitter! How about that? Leonardo Fibonacci would be proud!
This was my first week back living on the east coast. My 2-year plan to be in California turned into 4.5 beautiful years in Sonoma Valley. This was after spending 15 years total in the northeast between college in Fairfield, CT and over a decade in New York City.
I keep getting asked, "But JC why would you ever go back???" (this is happening at least several times each day).
As we head into year end there's a lot going on in markets, particularly on the macro and intermarket front.
With that being said, I gotta give the people what they want so today's Chart of The Week is going to focus on a trade setting up in one of 2019's most controversial stocks...Beyond Meat.
There's been lots of frustrating talk about companies with high share prices not splitting their stock. I tend to agree. While technically splitting shares of a stock doesn't do anything to enhance the value of your investment, it does help to provide greater liquidity for one to get into or out of a position quickly and at a fairer price.
But this is an argument for academics. We're just here to make money.
Perhaps you've seen JCs recently bullish post on Amazon $AMZN and you agree that you'd like to take a long position, but the high share price scares you?
How quickly people forget what a beast Amazon has been for years. All it took was an 18-month consolidation for investors to fall out of love with one of the greatest stocks in American history.
The bet the bears are making is that Amazon has been lagging and dragging down the Consumer Discretionary sector, considering it's 22% weighting in the index $XLY. So if you believe this is a big market top, I understand why you would think Discretionaries are setting up for a big fall. I totally get that.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it's a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
People don't like it when I tell them we're near the beginning of a new bull market in stocks. For some reason, they prefer that cozy feeling of going to bed thinking stocks are near an important high, and they've somehow outsmarted the system by selling stocks in uptrends instead of buying them.
I'm convinced some of these people must be looking at their charts upside down.
Anyway, let's take a look at the markets so I can show you why I think we're closer to the beginning of a new bull market and not near the end of an old one:
Mobile Payment stocks have been a key part of our focus on the Technology theme taking place across various sectors of the market.
Since the summer the space has cooled off a bit but is back at levels where it would make sense for the trend to reaccelerate to the upside.
Here's the Mobile Payments ETF vs S&P 500 ratio (IPAY/SPY) pulling back to trendline support. This looks like a normal pullback within a long-term uptrend, however, our concern is that momentum got oversold for the first time since mid-2016.
The strongest uptrends do not get oversold, but unfortunately, this one has so we need to watch if prices bounce from this level and resume their uptrend (preferably getting overbought once again) or if they roll over through support and make fresh lows.
