Research

Level Set – The Pause Playbook

Given that a Fed pause is now seemingly the consensus view, we thought it would be appropriate to look back in time at previous Fed pauses and evaluate the performance of major asset classes and US equity sectors to look for patterns of behavior and create a Pause Playbook. To be clear, we aren’t certain

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Calling 17 of The Last Zero Market Pullbacks?

Over the last 35 years, the S&P500 was down 2.5% or more in a month in 17% of the months, or roughly 2x per year.  Recently, however, the pace has been higher, with 2022 having seven such months – the most over this period.  Every day, Wall Street “experts” reference or posit different signals to

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Industrials: The Case For Caution

The GICS classification shows that the industrials sector has the greatest number of sub-industries (13) with more than 15 stocks in each, more than any other sector in the market. The stock returns of the biggest 20 companies in the industrials sector have been more disperse as of late than at any time in the

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Level Set – Dispersion, Transports, Tech, Creep, and Recent Research

As earnings season progresses, we thought we would highlight the key themes and trends we observed. Dispersion has been notable and in aggregate, stocks have performed well during earnings season to-date. The weak performance of the transports industry is noteworthy in our view, including UPS, trucking stocks, and the rails, where clearly a slowdown in

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Growth: A.I. Risk Factor, Fed, and FAANGM

We are not sure of the ultimate impact – probably no one is – but in the next ten to twenty years it is likely that somewhere between 20 and 50% of all human activity will be severely impacted or even totally commoditized by A.I.  This could have a massive implication on humankind and the

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Level Set – The VIX Does Not Predix

Several times this week, investors have mentioned to us the surprisingly low VIX and if there are any investible implications. The consensus thought appears to be that the VIX is “wrong” and that buying equities is not as low risk as this popular gauge indicates. After all, there appears to be a rather pronounced negative

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