Dec 10, 2020 | Global Economy
Reflation narratives are becoming consensus, but there is little reason to be contrarian for contrarian’s sake Strategists are flooding client inboxes with year-ahead forecasts and themes, and it’s striking how similar the arguments are. The common conclusion from...
Nov 19, 2020 | China, European Economy, Global Economy, US Equities
Excerpt from November 10th: The US and China are the current engines of growth, keeping the global recovery on track. A vaccine only reinforces the recoveries in China/US, and should eventually put Europe back on a stronger footing The three main engines of global...
Oct 29, 2020 | US Economy, US Equities
The US presidential election on Tuesday is currently the number one event risk for US equities. But investors should focus on two more important underlying themes: positioning and reflation. Markets haven’t whole-heartedly embraced the reflation trade as money...
Sep 24, 2020 | US Economy
Governments are becoming very concerned about the resurgence in virus cases seen since summer. In context, the rise in cases should not be too alarming. More testing means more cases will be found, and the relatively high false positive rate for the most common tests...
Jan 15, 2020 | US Economy
Only a few weeks ago, top-of-mind risk for market participants was the trade war, according to BAML’s Global Fund Manager Survey. Now it is highly likely the list would be topped by tensions in the Middle East after the US assassination of the Iranian general, Qasem...
Dec 18, 2019 | US Economy, US Equities
The auto and housing sectors are two parts of the economy that are highly sensitive to interest rate changes. In light of the Fed’s dovish pivot at the start of the year, culminating in 3x25bps of interest rate cuts, we would expect activity in both sectors to surge....
Nov 1, 2019 | Monetary Policy
This post was taken from our weekly report, dated October 15, 2019. In the last month yields have since then done a round trip, falling and then rising again, but crucially term premium (TP) has not fallen. It was TP’s relentless fall through 2019 that meant the...
Oct 11, 2019 | US Economy, US Equities
With consumer confidence measures released a couple of weeks ago, we have observed an interesting divergence between the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index and Conference Board consumer confidence index (top-left chart). When we plot the spread and...
Sep 6, 2019 | US Equities
Falling yields across the developed market world have posed greater hurdles for investors with yield and income targets. As the spread between bond yields and equity dividend-yields diverge, these investors move up the risk spectrum to meet their targets. As such, we...