I was visited by six ghosts recently warning me of dangers related to predictions, allocations, apparitions, legalizations, expurgations and ablations. Here’s what they said.
A reflection on the 2024 election and who tells your story. On Trump’s victory: market implications of a supply side boost from deregulation clashing against inflationary impulses of tariffs and deportations. The ten year Treasury will be the most reliable barometer of all. To conclude, an ode to vaccines and an RFK bibliography.
For participants in the China equity rebound trade: once you hit your return targets, take the money and run.
The US is about to conduct its most polarized Presidential election in 100 years.
NVIDIA and its GPU customers are now a large driver of equity market returns, earnings growth, earnings revisions, industrial production and capital spending.
A surge in the Japanese Yen is resulting in home repatriation of Yen-funded positions overseas, and close-out of Yen-funded positions abroad. While Google was found guilty of home bias anti-competitive search engine behavior, any judicial remedies could be as bad for recipients of Google’s shelf space payments as they are for Google itself. Work-from-home trends have plateaued at ~30%, which has important implications for owners of impaired office buildings. Most distressed sales now require discounts of 60%+ vs pre-COVID levels; the fundamentals of the office sector explain why.
From 1930 to 2010, there were six extended periods of small cap outperformance as it dominated large cap over that entire period. But since 2010, small cap sits alongside value stocks and non-US stocks in the unholy trinity of underperforming portfolio strategies. While poor profit fundamentals argue against a prolonged period of outperformance vs large cap, small cap stocks are at their cheapest levels in the 21st century with potential market and political catalysts in their favor. First, a few words on the CrowdStrike outage.
US small cap stocks were the lions of the 20th century, generating substantial returns over large cap stocks during six different extended periods of time. It has been 20 years since the last one due to a combination of poor small cap profit fundamentals, higher exposure to rising interest rates and the pricing power accruing to the largest stocks in a winner-take-all economy. Small cap has joined value stocks and non-US stocks in the trinity of severely underperforming asset allocation strategies. Relative to large cap, small cap stocks are now at their cheapest levels in the 21st century. While poor fundamentals argue against a seventh multi-year small cap outperformance regime, small cap is much closer to fair value for diversified portfolio investors.
Recent Supreme Court rulings may now usher in the largest pushback on the regulatory state since the Reagan Administration. A look at the end of Chevron deference, a revised statute of limitations for challenging government regulations, the Major Questions Doctrine, the right to a jury trial and a District Court injunction against Biden’s LNG export moratorium.
US Presidential elections: a brief primer on candidate replacement; Supreme Court decisions. As part of our ongoing coverage in the Eye on the Market of issues related to the US political process (third party candidates, the 11th and 12th amendments, the Electoral Count Reform Act, faithless electors, the No Labels movement, etc), I want to share a brief description of what we understand regarding candidate replacement procedures after the last Presidential primary and before the general election in November.
Investing in professional sports leagues and related businesses. As rules around private equity ownership of sports leagues expand, we review team valuations and profitability, emerging sports categories, streaming and broadcast revenues, the decline of regional sports networks, drivers and comparisons of league parity, relegation and financial pressures in the English Premier League, stadium subsidies, sports betting and other adjacent businesses, antitrust issues, the esports winter, the worst teams that money can buy and the best basketball players of all time.
With spring planting season having arrived in Zone 7, it’s a good time to review agriculture from an investor’s perspective. Topics include agricultural price inflation in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; public and private equity investments in agriculture, farmland ownership and the drivers of farmland returns; seed bio-engineering designed to reduce consumption of fertilizer, fungicide and water; and some satellite data on the immense agricultural damage occurring in Gaza and Israel. The Appendix addresses the avian flu’s impact on agriculture and the food supply.
Cicadian Rhythms: the fading prospects of a US disinflationary boom; Japan’s structural reform/M&A emergence; and Eye on the Market mailbag responses to questions on Tesla/Musk, GLPs, housing, China, Truth Social and Meta’s latest open source model.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: on tech valuations, AI, energy and US politics Last week I spoke to the firm’s tech CEO clients at a conference in Montana. This note is a partial summary of that presentation, entitled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: an investor lens on tech valuations, AI, energy and the US Presidential Election”.
Electravision. The predominant vision for the future involves the electrification of everything, powered by solar, wind, transmission and distributed energy storage. This vision primarily relies upon the greater efficiency of electric motors and heat pumps vs their fossil fuel counterparts. While the grid is getting greener, electrification is advancing at a much slower pace for reasons related to chemistry, physics, cost, politics and human behavior. Our 14th annual energy paper takes a closer look, and also includes sections on nuclear power, China, hydrogen, “net zero oil” and Gaza’s energy future.
Five Easy Pieces: on Magnificent 7 stocks, open source large language models, the No Labels movement, the Armageddonists and bottom-fishing in Chinese equities.
This Eye on the Market is about all the things that can be true at the same time. The collapse of the political middle in Congress should not be an excuse for everyone else to abandon the ability to believe things that may appear contradictory, but which are all part of a more complicated reality.
Falling US inflation and possible Fed easing are increasing talk of a soft landing rather than a hard landing and bear market. Our 2024 Outlook takes a closer look at equities, fixed income, China, Japan, antitrust, weight loss drugs and ten surprises for 2024.
A review on industry returns in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, commercial real estate, infrastructure and private credit
Six questions and answers on the intersection between geopolitics, US politics and financial markets
A comparison of NYC to 21 other US cities with respect to urban recovery, commercial real estate, mass transit, crime, outmigration, work-from-home trends, tax rates, economic pulse, fiscal health, unfunded pensions, energy prices, industry diversification and competitiveness.
I asked Chat GPT-4 questions on economics, markets, energy and politics that my analysts and I worked on over the last two years. This piece reviews the results, along with the latest achievements and stumbles of generative AI models in the real world, and comments on the changing relationship between innovation, productivity and employment. The bottom line: a large language model can process reams of text very efficiently, and that’s what it’s made for. But it cannot think or reason; it’s just something I paid for. Upfront, a few comments on oil prices.
Global Resilience to higher rates
The impact of underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs
Comments on mega-cap stocks and artificial intelligence. Then, it’s time for some of my unsolicited letters to Barron’s, MSNBC, “No Labels”, FHFA and more.
Time to retire the US/Emerging Markets barbell for a while
Renewables are growing but don’t always behave the way you want them to.
