I just finished this week's Top 10 Charts Report for Institutional Clients, but I wanted to carve out two Asian Equity Market charts for this post to highlight a tactical opportunity we're seeing in that part of the world.
Late last week we discussed the structural breakout in Larsen & Toubro, so today we want to look into the entire sector to see what other opportunities there are among its components.
We've been writing about the lack of trend in India and Equities around the globe for months and despite the breakout to new highs in the Nifty 50 and several Large-Cap stocks, we remain cautious about calling this a "confirmed uptrend" and getting overly aggressive on the long side.
In this post, we'll explain why this remains a two-way tape.
While updating our Members-Only Chartbooks today we came across two major breakouts that need to be pointed out as they play key roles in the Infrastructure and Public Sector Bank Sectors.
On May 1st, we wrote an update called "Canada or Cantada" going through the major sectors/indexes to provide a view on how we wanted to approach Canadian Equities.
As we can see, there are more uptrends than downtrends from a structural perspective. Tactically however, most of these are not at levels where we want to be initiating new positions or have a lot of conviction. After strong moves since December, they need some consolidation to digest those gains and set up for a sustained move higher.
Another thing to note is that the more defensive areas of the market like REITs and Staples have the clearest structural uptrends of the group. They make up a smaller portion of the market, but I think it's still an interesting signal about market participants' risk appetite and outlook for Interest Rates.
Additionally Energy and Materials account for roughly 30% of the index and remain a headwind, so without rotation into those names I think it'll be tough for the TSX Composite to break out to the upside.
Life can be simple or you can make things complicated and noisy. It's up to you.
What business are you in? The business of trying to make money in the market or the business of making and/or consuming noise?
I was out in Greece on my honeymoon for a couple of weeks last month, but I was keeping an eye on what was going on. I love the market and I enjoy observing human behavior. So why should I completely shut myself off from something I like doing?
Now that I am married, I would very much like to keep my wife happy, and I also think it's important to get away (see here). So appropriately I shut things off and enjoyed my time in, what are now officially, my favorite islands in the world. It was funny because some of the locals in the Cyclades Islands were telling me how much they wanted to go to the Caribbean. I was like, "Naw man, stay here. Trust me!"
Stocks showing relative strength in this environment remain on our radar since the list of them has shrunk day by day over the last month.
For our Institutional Clients, we provide more tactical trade ideas or "plus-ones" that don't necessarily fit a broader theme but are still an attractive opportunity worth exploring.
Today I want to share one of those ideas from a subsector of the market that may surprise you...Retail.
Wall Street is a game of relative performance and we each are tasked with our own mandates/constraints in managing our portfolios.
The good news is that even when the market is a hot mess on an absolute basis, there are still plenty of ways to find performance within the context of those constraints.
If you need to have most of your capital allocated most of the time, then your focus is on either avoiding/shorting areas of relative weakness and owning areas of relative strength.
If you have the flexibility to raise cash and go to the beach or have short exposure on your books, that works too.
At the beginning of May, we put out a note about the failed breakout in many of the major indexes and why a more cautious stance was warranted for US and global equities. The divergences we were seeing slowly add up had finally been confirmed by price and we raised cash and stepped aside.
