As we head into 2020, we start from scratch with our Q4 playbook and outline our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit in the quarter (and year) ahead.
Part 1 of this playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates.
Part 2 of this playbook will delve deeper into Indian Equities, going sector by sector to identify the trends that matter.
Part 3 of this playbook will outline the individual stocks we want to be buying and selling within the context of today's environment.
As we head into 2020, we start from scratch with our Q4 playbook and outline our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit in the quarter (and year) ahead.
Part 1 of this playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates.
Part 2 of this playbook will delve deeper into Indian Equities, going sector by sector to identify the trends that matter.
Part 3 of this playbook will outline the individual stocks we want to be buying and selling within the context of today's environment.
I was down in New York City this week and dropped by the Nasdaq to chat with my old pal Frances Horodelski on BNN Bloomberg. Frances and I have been rapping about the markets for the better part of the past decade. It was great to chat with her once again.
In this short clip, we talk about the new bull market for stocks, rotation into Emerging Markets and Energy, where we think gold goes and how bad bonds are going to get hit if interest rates get to the 3% mark we're looking for in the US 10-year Yield.
In my opinion, the reason people have been so bearish towards stocks and fighting strong trends is because they're allowing other biases influence their decision making. Whether they don't agree with the Fed, or the Trump, the direction of the Economy, or whatever it is, they're choosing to give more weight to these "opinions" than they do to price itself.
Fortunately for us, we're 100% data driven. So we don't care who the president is. We ignore everything the fed says and does. We assume anything a journalists creates is gossip, whether it is or isn't. And we certainly don't have time to care what the economy is doing.
So because we are so trained to focus on actual data, it's a lot easier for us to ignore those whose job it is to distract us. It's not "easy", but it's definitely easier for us as technicians than it is for most of society. The fact is most people are unaware, or choose not to care, that they're consuming content produced by those with ulterior motives. They're just here to sell ads to their sponsors while we're only trying to make money in the market. It's a big difference, and it becomes a problem.
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:
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:
I was in Las Vegas this past week for a bunch of meetings and conferences. There was a lot going on in that city. There were traders and analysts at every hotel on the strip. It was really cool to see old friends and, of course, meet new ones. I personally found myself in a half dozen hotels arguing about markets and seeing a bunch of live music. Check out this video I shot at the Santana show at Mandalay Bay.
On Thursday afternoon I was hanging out at Bally's with David Keller talking about Stocks, Bonds, Gold, Copper, Sector Rotation, Market Breadth, Sentiment and the current market conditions. This one was short and sweet but we covered a lot:
When stocks are in strong uptrends, they tend to not only do well on an absolute basis, but they outperform their alternatives as well. Two obvious ones are Gold and Bonds.
So if stocks are going to fall hard, like so many people keep telling me, we are likely to see a bid in Precious Metals and US Treasury Bonds. As it turns out, however, we've only seen the exact opposite - bonds and metals struggling below overhead supply.
Back in August I made the case that if stocks were going much higher, as we thought they would, then the S&P500 will hold support at the late December lows relative to both Gold and Bonds. You can watch that short video here. This is what that chart looks like now:
If you haven't seen our thoughts on stocks lately, I encourage you to catch up here: November - October - September. Today, however, we're more focused on the bond market and what we can learn from it.
First of all, here is the US 10-year Yield. If we're below 2.07 then there is no reason to expect a severe bond sell-off. I guess it depends on what you consider severe, but bigger picture I don't think there is any change in trend until we're above that. And it's not happening tomorrow.