Over the completion of the current market cycle, we estimate that roughly half of U.S. equity market capitalization - $17 trillion in paper wealth - will simply vanish. Nobody will “get” that wealth. It will simply disappear, like a game of musical chairs where players think they've won by finding chairs as the music stops, and suddenly feel them dissolving as if they had never existed in the first place.
Presently, based on the most historically reliable valuation measures we identify, we expect annual total returns for the S&P 500 averaging just 0.6% over the coming 12-year period; a prospective return that we expect will not only underperform bonds over this horizon, but even the lowly yields available on risk-free T-bills.
During the later part of the roaring 20’s, Irving Berlin wrote “Blue Skies,” which captured some of the optimism of the era that preceded the Great Depression. Unfortunately, untethered optimism is not the friend of investors, particularly when they have already committed their assets to that optimism, and have driven valuations to speculative extremes.
"The issue is no longer whether the current market resembles those preceding the 1929, 1969-70, 1973-74, and 1987 crashes. The issue is only - are conditions like October of 1929, or more like April? Like October of 1987, or more like July?
As Benjamin Graham observed decades ago, "Speculators often prosper through ignorance; it is a cliche that in a roaring bull market, knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss."
If there’s any point in U.S. stock market history, next to the market peaks of 1929 and 2000, that has deserved a time-stamp of speculative euphoria that will be bewildering in hindsight, now is that moment.
Investors and even financial professionals rarely recognize asset bubbles while they are in progress. As the price of a financial asset rises, investors have an increasing tendency to use the past returns and the past trajectory of the asset as the basis for their future return expectations.
There are moments when one has the responsibility to speak if one has a voice.
The key to drawing useful information out of noisy data is to rely on multiple “sensors.” Alone, each sensor may capture only a small portion of the true signal, and may not be greatly useful in and of itself. The power comes when the sensors are used together in order to distinguish the common signal of interest from the surrounding noise.
One of the attempted barbs tossed my way at various points in the past 20 years is “Cassandra.” Frankly, I kind of like it.
Outcomes are not independent of initial conditions. While there are certainly policy shifts that could encourage greater productive investment and raise the long-run trajectory of economic growth, no shift in economic policies is likely to produce rapid, sustained economic growth in the next few years because the underlying factors that drive rapid, sustained growth aren’t presently in a position to support it.
When investors are euphoric, they are incapable of recognizing euphoria itself.
Nearly all of the variation in GDP growth over time is explained by the sum of employment growth plus productivity growth.
Don’t be lulled into complacency by thinking that severely hostile market conditions have to resolve into immediate market losses. That’s not the way these environments work, and they never have.
The stock market has reestablished an extreme overvalued, overbought, overbullish syndrome of conditions that - unlike much of half-cycle advance from 2009 to mid-2014 - lacks internal uniformity, particularly among interest-sensitive and globally-sensitive sectors.
My sense is that investors are exuberant to have a new theme, any theme, other than watching the Federal Reserve.
If you net out all the assets and liabilities in an economy, you’ll find that the nation’s accumulated stock of real investment is the only thing that remains.
Short-term oversold conditions offer a sense of potential knee-jerk dip-buying behavior, but the conviction of that behavior is often fairly weak and short-lived.
My continued impression is that the global equity markets broadly peaked in the second-quarter of 2015, and that the more recent marginal U.S. highs in August were a “throwover” in response to the post-Brexit plunge in global interest rates.
Put simply, it’s not valuation norms that have increased, but instead the willingness of investors to repeatedly chase stocks to valuation levels that remain associated with predictably dismal subsequent outcomes.
Several weeks ago, we shifted from a rather neutral near-term stock market view, to a hard-negative outlook, based on fresh deterioration in various trend-sensitive components within our broad measures of market action.
Historically, the best opportunities to boost market exposure emerge when a material retreat in valuations is joined by an early improvement in market action. At present, exactly the opposite is true. Extreme valuations and compressed risk-premiums have been joined by deterioration in market internals. This deterioration is an indication of growing risk-aversion among investors. Much of the recent bubble has been driven by yield-seeking, trend-sensitive speculators, with value-conscious investors progressively stepping back. As a result, any coordinated attempt by trend-sensitive market participants to exit by selling stock is unlikely to be met by demand from value-conscious investors at prices anywhere near present levels. This, in turn, leaves the market vulnerable to potentially abrupt losses.
Every financial bubble rests on the presumption that there is still some greater fool available to purchase overvalued assets, no matter how overvalued they might become. In the recent half cycle, central banks have intentionally extended this speculation by promising that they, themselves, could be relied upon to be those greater fools.
