A big theme for me this year has been the US Dollar and how it will impact stocks as an asset class. The thought process coming into 2019 was simple. The Dollar had rallied throughout 2018 to reach some pretty critical levels. The idea was that if the Dollar was going to rip right through there, it was more than likely happening in an environment where investors would be fleeing to safety. That's the type of market where stocks are selling off. The opposite of that argument was that if the Dollar was not breaking out, that stocks would likely be doing well, both in the U.S. and more importantly globally.
This week on the podcast we have the pleasure of chatting with Craig Johnson, Chief Market Technician at Piper Jaffray. I've known Craig for a long time and love the work that he puts out. During the day he speaks to buy side clients all over the world. As a past president of the CMT Association, he has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the history of technical analysis. His perspective based on who he speaks to and his experiences throughout his career make me want to listen when he has something to say. In this conversation we discuss the rest of the year for U.S. stocks and sectors. There's a part in this episode that focuses on breadth and what we're both looking for moving forward. Inflation, or lack thereof, is something he's watching, so we talk about Gold, Oil and other inflationary factors that could impact stocks and bonds. We covered a lot. I really enjoyed this one!
This week we have a special guest on the podcast: Eddy Elfenbein of Crossing Wall Street and PM for the $CWS Exchange Traded Fund. This is a show about Technical Analysis so I think it's important to also include some of the masters of Fundamental Analysis to tell us how they find charts and technicals helpful in their process. Eddy is one of the original Financial Bloggers and I have a ton of respect for him and his work. He is a pioneer in both social media and portfolio management. I love how he explains his appreciation for Intermarket Analysis and Relative Strength as useful tools throughout his process. As many of you know, these two are near and dear to my heart so it's cool to see the Fundamental community embracing them in similar ways. This was a fun conversation!
The market remains a “hot mess", so we’re looking under the surface at breadth and risk appetite measures to identify clues as to the potential direction that this 15-month range will resolve itself.
Today I want to look at one of those measures, Consumer Discretionary stocks vs Consumer Staples.
If you're a long-only fund manager that believes the market is headed higher, you're going to be in more aggressive areas of the market like Discretionary. If you believe the market is headed lower or isn't going to do much, you're going to be in the lower beta, often higher dividend Consumer Staple stocks.
So what's happening in these sectors right now?
The Equal-Weight Consumer Discretionary vs Equal-Weight Consumer Staples continues to struggle with a flat 200-day moving average and confluence of support/resistance, but just made new 6-month highs this week. While this chart still work to do to confirm an intermediate-term uptrend, this is extremely constructive action and is suggesting that risk appetite among market participants is beginning to pick up.
Everyone these days is talking about yield curves inverting. It's the topic du jour, similar to things like golden crosses and 200 day moving averages. The difference is that this one is more intermarket oriented. "Well if this happens to bonds and that happens to rates, then this historically happens to stocks, or the economy". Observing the behavior of one asset class to help make decisions on another is called Intermarket Analysis, or "Cross-Asset" in some more institutional circles.
I don't think there is much more for me to say at this point about the yield curve. The crew over at The Chart Report pretty much covered it all beautifully last week. The short end of the curve (10-year minus 3-month) turned negative, but the long end of the curve did not. The 10s-30s spread is steepening and controlled by free markets vs the fed controlled short end. We've seen this happen before, like in the 90s for example, without it sparking bear markets.
During last week's Conference Call we discussed a lot of the potential catalysts to drive Equities as an asset class higher over the intermediate/long-term, however, we continue to err on the cautious side given our outlook for sideways chop in the short-term.
Thursday I wrote about a growing number of potential "oopsies" (failed moves), so I want to follow up on that post and outline another group of charts that I think are suggesting short-term weakness in stocks.
If the US Dollar is falling, International Equities trading via US listed ETFs should outperform US Stocks. When the US Dollar is rising, International Equities should underperform US Stocks.
Sounds like a logical relationship, but as usual, it's not that simple.
During last week's Conference Call we discussed a lot of the potential catalysts for a lower US Dollar, so I wrote a free post talking about whether a weaker US Dollar means US stocks have to underperform International stocks. If you haven't read that, please do that first, because in this post I'm going to quickly touch on a short-term theme that continues to build within our Global ETF Ratio universe.
Last week I had the pleasure of being on Real Vision TV where I recorded two segments, one on Bonds and Equities pairs trade (short EWJ/SPY).
The video to the Equities trade is here, but since I'm not sure if/when the free video about Bonds will be out I wanted to go through that trade for you all on the blog. And if the video does come out, I'll be sure to share it.
