Research

The SP500 is the most followed benchmark for equity investors. In today’s report we take a step back from the recent market turbulence and focus on one of the biggest challenges of beating the SP500 – additions / deletions to the index. For context, over the last 20 years, on average about 5.5% of SP500 companies are added and deleted each year. We decomposed the substantial differences between stocks that are added and dropped from the index to understand the impact. Further, to capture some of the performance of the additions and avoid that of the deletions, we created two proprietary “potential add and potential drop” baskets to the SP500 to create alpha from names just below the top 500 in market cap.

A constant investor question we get is “what playbook should we apply?” The last few months have been stressful for markets, as all of us try to find a relevant historical analog to apply to the next several months. What has happened the last three months? A huge change in the perception about interest rates fueled by multi-year highs on inflation, morphed into a “classic” growth scare, and now a war has created more fodder for the “risk-off” mentality. In the end, however, there are no historical periods that closely parallel today’s regime. In today’s research, we contextualize changes to perceptions about rates, growth scares, and wars to provide some analysis amidst the volatility.

Over the past several months we have done a lot of work on growth stocks, and various frameworks for investing in growth. The result of that has been number of ways to generate ideas in the space. With the Nasdaq down 10% YTD, and many individual names down far more, we have received many investor questions asking for us to contextualize the sell-off. This short deck is the “best of” those TMT themes.

We established a systematic approach to analyzing the high conviction ideas of money managers through their 13F filings. We used this approach to inform recommendations about position sizing, and sometimes whether we would even buy or short a stock. While 13F filing data are lagged, and we do not know any manager’s real exposure as we are not assessing the options market or any short positions, we found it instructive to define a proprietary universe of fundamental managers, define high conviction, and use our quantitative models to improve our ability to find superior and inferior groups of equities.

We took a detailed look at dividend-related strategies given the massive shift in the perception about the path of interest rates. This report is part of our ongoing research on capital use and its consequences.

We believe there is above normal potential for dividends to matter going forward given the pending Fed lift off and historically wide valuation dispersion among the dividend yielders. Our quantitative models that specifically focus on dividend-yielding stocks are effective for picking winners / losers among this cohort.

Our latest market overview: a comprehensive document containing the best of our recent work and up-to-date views.

We discuss the recent QQQ and SPX sell-off, merited in part by a change in macro conditions and perceptions about growth. Financial conditions have materially tightened and are now the least “loose” since early in 2021. The 2022 US GDP forecast is about 25bps lower from its peak late in 2021, having slowly declined, without a single uptick.

We did some new work on interest rates that go beyond the basic measurement of the relationships between historical stock performance and the 10-year yield that we initially did over a decade ago.

We have long thought that what matters to investing is changes to perceptions about growth and changes to perceptions about rates. In that light, we analyzed the Fed Funds future curves over multiple horizons (6,12,24, etc. months) minus the Fed fund rate as a proxy for changes in perception of interest rates vs. subsequent stock return

Our 2022 outlook is focused on long and short stock ideas followed by some analysis on changes in multiples and market dynamics. Though we do not do deep fundamental analysis as a firm, these stock ideas are ones that embody the themes of our research. They are meant to stimulate thought and idea generation for our clients. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss our work.

Our latest market overview: a comprehensive document containing the best of our recent work and up-to-date views.