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Pessimism as Contrarian Indicator: Global Week Ahead
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As stock markets worldwide reel from a rolling bear market — a circumstance that picked up steam after Labor Day 2018 — we see journalistic pessimism rise with the mass fall in share prices.
Reuters in London penned five big themes for us. These will likely dominate the thinking of investors and traders alike in the coming Global Week Ahead.
None of the five themes this week is optimistic. That may be a contrarian indicator to some--
(1) Pessimism Builds for the U.S. Economy
If you wanted evidence that the U.S. economy could be rolling over, the surprise miss on the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched Manufacturing index was it. Wall Street and Treasury yields slumped after the ISM index turned in its largest drop since the financial crisis in 2008, and investors now bet that the Fed is more likely to cut rates this year than raise them.
But manufacturing isn’t the big weight in the U.S. economy it used to be. Services now account for roughly 80 percent of economic activity, and on Monday morning investors saw ISM Non-Manufacturing fall to 57.6%, lower than the expected reading of 59.7 from 60.7 in November. A reading above 50 indicates activity is growing.
(2) A Japanese Yen “Flash Crash”
With the brewing China-U.S. trade war biting into global growth already and liquidity tightening around the world, 2019 was always going to be a stressful year. But nobody expected it to start with a currency market “flash crash” that briefly pushed dollar/yen below 105.00.
The move was attributed to automatic sell triggers in thin markets, but it would have fully reversed by now if investors saw no fundamental justification to it. Poor manufacturing surveys in Asia, Europe and the United States and a sales warning from Apple might go a long way in explaining the move.
The yen’s strength is a red flag for world markets, but a massive domestic problem as well. It hurts Japanese exports, and the Bank of Japan — which only months ago looked keen to normalize policy — may see it as a risk to its decades-long efforts to create inflation.
Indeed, on their first day back to work, BOJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda echoed ECB chief Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” comment, and top FX diplomat Masatsugu Asakawa reminded FX traders of past G7 and G20 coordination on intervention. Such reminders may get louder in the coming days and weeks.
(3) Goldman’s Jim O’Neill Has an Annual “S&P 500 Five-Day Rule”
There’s no denying it: it’s been a rocky start to the year for world markets. Just how rocky the ride is for the rest of 2019 remains to be seen, of course, but it might be worth keeping an eye on one of investors’ quirky market guidelines for clues: the so-called “S&P Five-Day Rule.”
It’s a “rule” often touted by ex-Goldman bigwig Jim O’Neill, and goes like this: when the S&P 500 rises in the first five trading days of the year, the market turns in a positive annual performance. O’Neill puts the success rate of this rule of thumb since 1950 at more than 85 percent.
According to the Stock Trader’s Almanac, as the S&P 500 goes over the full month of January, so goes the full calendar year. In the last 70 years there have been 10 major errors: 1966, 1968, 1982, 2001, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2015, and of course 2018.
The S&P 500 usually goes up. In the last 91 years the index has risen in 62 of them and fallen in 29 of them. At the time of writing, after only two full trading days of 2019, the index is down 2.35 percent. Plenty of time for a turnaround, but sentiment is most definitely bearish.
(4) Chip Stocks Earnings Are Soggy
It was a rotten week for Apple (AAPL - Free Report) after boss Tim Cook warned that China’s economic slowdown has caught the company off guard, and trade tensions between Washington and Beijing were starting to hurt consumer spending on smartphones in the world’s 2nd largest economy.
Cook’s bombshell fueled worries that Apple’s relatively pricey smartphones may be falling out of favor in China, where rivals such as Huawei offer cheaper options. Apple shares tumbled 10 percent on Thursday — a remarkable fall for one of the world’s most valuable and liquid stocks — resulting in the S&P Technology index’s worst day since August 2011.
It deepened the recent equities rout and cemented the increasingly gloomy picture for corporate earnings, the early indications of which will become clearer in the upcoming earnings season that kicks off later this month. Analysts’ outlooks are already pretty bleak: estimated earnings growth for world technology stocks 12 months ahead is just 5.6 percent, its lowest since April 2009.
(5) Emerging Market Debt: Still More Room to Worry
The start of the year is normally a busy time for sovereign debt issuers, especially developing nations. Emerging market debt has risen steadily in recent years, and pay-back time is approaching: over $4 trillion of EM debt matures by the end of 2020, of which around a third is denominated in foreign currency, according to the Institute of International Finance.
But it might be different this year. Worries over global growth are deepening and sending tremors through world markets, dampening investors’ appetite for riskier assets and making it harder and more expensive for EM issuers to roll over debt and borrow.
Analysts at Citi (C - Free Report) expect EM spreads to continue widening due to “increased anxiety about the end of the economic cycle in the U.S., uncertainty about damage caused by the Fed’s tightening, and a lack of clarity regarding China-U.S. trade disputes.” It’s shaping up to be a quieter start to the year as governments weigh their options and wait on the sidelines for an opportune moment. Yet some are still planning to make an appearance: Israel will start its investor roadshow in Europe on Monday.
Top Zacks #1 Rank (STRONG BUY) Stocks—
The anatomy of the 2018 “rolling” bear market gets revealed by just looking into the largest 3 stocks by market capitalization. These are at the top of the current Zacks Rank list.
None of these large-cap stocks is found in a share price uptrend. Each one has lost -25% in value from its recent high. When nine of 10 stocks in the S&P 500 are beneath their 200-day moving average, this is what it looks like at an individual stock level.
No earnings estimate revision helped stem this rout. I show a defense stock, a tech stock and a Japanese automaker. Each sold off about the same amount.
Lockheed Martin (LMT - Free Report) : This is a $75B market cap Aerospace & Defense stock. On Oct. 10th, these shares traded at $350. They are $265 now. That’s up from $244 a few days ago. The Zacks VGM score is C.
Qualcomm (QCOM - Free Report) : This is a big San Diego, CA-based wireless equipment company. The market cap is $68B. On Sept. 10th, these bellwether tech shares traded at $76 each. They are now $56. The Zacks VGM score is F.
Honda Motor (HMC - Free Report) : This is a $49B market-cap Japan-based auto/motor company. After hitting a peak of $37 a share in January 2018, these shares headed all the way down to $28 a share. Now, they have bounced to $31. The Zacks VGM score is C, but the Value score is A.
Key Global Macro--
While the U.S government shutdown becomes the longest in history, the main market focal points will likely be elsewhere:
On Monday and Tuesday, the US-China trade negotiations happen, Key Fed communications get issued throughout, and Friday’s U.S consumer inflation update closes matters.
On Monday, Japan’s composite PMI comes out. The prior reading was 52.4.
U.S. Durable Goods orders come out. The ex-transports were down -0.3% in the last monthly reading. The overall number was up +0.8%.
On Tuesday, the NFIB Small Business Optimism index lands. The 104.8 prior reading is a strong one. Can this reading hold up, too?
On Wednesday, the Brazilian FGV inflation rate shows up. The consensus has +6.5% y/y, while the prior reading is 8.4%.
U.S. trade balance data hits the tape, just after the U.S. and China trade negotiation meeting closes this week.
Eurozone unemployment comes out. The prior 8.1% may be in play for a weaker reading, given the poor growth data of late.
On Thursday, Canada’s building permits and house price index comes out. They may signal whether North American housing markets are about to roll over.
On Friday, U.K. GDP growth comes out. The +0.1% m/m prior reading will be refreshed.
The U.S. CPI ex-food and energy comes out. The prior +0.2% m/m reading was relatively tame.
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Pessimism as Contrarian Indicator: Global Week Ahead
As stock markets worldwide reel from a rolling bear market — a circumstance that picked up steam after Labor Day 2018 — we see journalistic pessimism rise with the mass fall in share prices.
Reuters in London penned five big themes for us. These will likely dominate the thinking of investors and traders alike in the coming Global Week Ahead.
None of the five themes this week is optimistic. That may be a contrarian indicator to some--
(1) Pessimism Builds for the U.S. Economy
If you wanted evidence that the U.S. economy could be rolling over, the surprise miss on the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched Manufacturing index was it. Wall Street and Treasury yields slumped after the ISM index turned in its largest drop since the financial crisis in 2008, and investors now bet that the Fed is more likely to cut rates this year than raise them.
But manufacturing isn’t the big weight in the U.S. economy it used to be. Services now account for roughly 80 percent of economic activity, and on Monday morning investors saw ISM Non-Manufacturing fall to 57.6%, lower than the expected reading of 59.7 from 60.7 in November. A reading above 50 indicates activity is growing.
(2) A Japanese Yen “Flash Crash”
With the brewing China-U.S. trade war biting into global growth already and liquidity tightening around the world, 2019 was always going to be a stressful year. But nobody expected it to start with a currency market “flash crash” that briefly pushed dollar/yen below 105.00.
The move was attributed to automatic sell triggers in thin markets, but it would have fully reversed by now if investors saw no fundamental justification to it. Poor manufacturing surveys in Asia, Europe and the United States and a sales warning from Apple might go a long way in explaining the move.
The yen’s strength is a red flag for world markets, but a massive domestic problem as well. It hurts Japanese exports, and the Bank of Japan — which only months ago looked keen to normalize policy — may see it as a risk to its decades-long efforts to create inflation.
Indeed, on their first day back to work, BOJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda echoed ECB chief Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” comment, and top FX diplomat Masatsugu Asakawa reminded FX traders of past G7 and G20 coordination on intervention. Such reminders may get louder in the coming days and weeks.
(3) Goldman’s Jim O’Neill Has an Annual “S&P 500 Five-Day Rule”
There’s no denying it: it’s been a rocky start to the year for world markets. Just how rocky the ride is for the rest of 2019 remains to be seen, of course, but it might be worth keeping an eye on one of investors’ quirky market guidelines for clues: the so-called “S&P Five-Day Rule.”
It’s a “rule” often touted by ex-Goldman bigwig Jim O’Neill, and goes like this: when the S&P 500 rises in the first five trading days of the year, the market turns in a positive annual performance. O’Neill puts the success rate of this rule of thumb since 1950 at more than 85 percent.
According to the Stock Trader’s Almanac, as the S&P 500 goes over the full month of January, so goes the full calendar year. In the last 70 years there have been 10 major errors: 1966, 1968, 1982, 2001, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2015, and of course 2018.
The S&P 500 usually goes up. In the last 91 years the index has risen in 62 of them and fallen in 29 of them. At the time of writing, after only two full trading days of 2019, the index is down 2.35 percent. Plenty of time for a turnaround, but sentiment is most definitely bearish.
(4) Chip Stocks Earnings Are Soggy
It was a rotten week for Apple (AAPL - Free Report) after boss Tim Cook warned that China’s economic slowdown has caught the company off guard, and trade tensions between Washington and Beijing were starting to hurt consumer spending on smartphones in the world’s 2nd largest economy.
Cook’s bombshell fueled worries that Apple’s relatively pricey smartphones may be falling out of favor in China, where rivals such as Huawei offer cheaper options. Apple shares tumbled 10 percent on Thursday — a remarkable fall for one of the world’s most valuable and liquid stocks — resulting in the S&P Technology index’s worst day since August 2011.
It deepened the recent equities rout and cemented the increasingly gloomy picture for corporate earnings, the early indications of which will become clearer in the upcoming earnings season that kicks off later this month. Analysts’ outlooks are already pretty bleak: estimated earnings growth for world technology stocks 12 months ahead is just 5.6 percent, its lowest since April 2009.
(5) Emerging Market Debt: Still More Room to Worry
The start of the year is normally a busy time for sovereign debt issuers, especially developing nations. Emerging market debt has risen steadily in recent years, and pay-back time is approaching: over $4 trillion of EM debt matures by the end of 2020, of which around a third is denominated in foreign currency, according to the Institute of International Finance.
But it might be different this year. Worries over global growth are deepening and sending tremors through world markets, dampening investors’ appetite for riskier assets and making it harder and more expensive for EM issuers to roll over debt and borrow.
Analysts at Citi (C - Free Report) expect EM spreads to continue widening due to “increased anxiety about the end of the economic cycle in the U.S., uncertainty about damage caused by the Fed’s tightening, and a lack of clarity regarding China-U.S. trade disputes.” It’s shaping up to be a quieter start to the year as governments weigh their options and wait on the sidelines for an opportune moment. Yet some are still planning to make an appearance: Israel will start its investor roadshow in Europe on Monday.
Top Zacks #1 Rank (STRONG BUY) Stocks—
The anatomy of the 2018 “rolling” bear market gets revealed by just looking into the largest 3 stocks by market capitalization. These are at the top of the current Zacks Rank list.
None of these large-cap stocks is found in a share price uptrend. Each one has lost -25% in value from its recent high. When nine of 10 stocks in the S&P 500 are beneath their 200-day moving average, this is what it looks like at an individual stock level.
No earnings estimate revision helped stem this rout. I show a defense stock, a tech stock and a Japanese automaker. Each sold off about the same amount.
Lockheed Martin (LMT - Free Report) : This is a $75B market cap Aerospace & Defense stock. On Oct. 10th, these shares traded at $350. They are $265 now. That’s up from $244 a few days ago. The Zacks VGM score is C.
Qualcomm (QCOM - Free Report) : This is a big San Diego, CA-based wireless equipment company. The market cap is $68B. On Sept. 10th, these bellwether tech shares traded at $76 each. They are now $56. The Zacks VGM score is F.
Honda Motor (HMC - Free Report) : This is a $49B market-cap Japan-based auto/motor company. After hitting a peak of $37 a share in January 2018, these shares headed all the way down to $28 a share. Now, they have bounced to $31. The Zacks VGM score is C, but the Value score is A.
Key Global Macro--
While the U.S government shutdown becomes the longest in history, the main market focal points will likely be elsewhere:
On Monday and Tuesday, the US-China trade negotiations happen, Key Fed communications get issued throughout, and Friday’s U.S consumer inflation update closes matters.
On Monday, Japan’s composite PMI comes out. The prior reading was 52.4.
U.S. Durable Goods orders come out. The ex-transports were down -0.3% in the last monthly reading. The overall number was up +0.8%.
On Tuesday, the NFIB Small Business Optimism index lands. The 104.8 prior reading is a strong one. Can this reading hold up, too?
On Wednesday, the Brazilian FGV inflation rate shows up. The consensus has +6.5% y/y, while the prior reading is 8.4%.
U.S. trade balance data hits the tape, just after the U.S. and China trade negotiation meeting closes this week.
Eurozone unemployment comes out. The prior 8.1% may be in play for a weaker reading, given the poor growth data of late.
On Thursday, Canada’s building permits and house price index comes out. They may signal whether North American housing markets are about to roll over.
On Friday, U.K. GDP growth comes out. The +0.1% m/m prior reading will be refreshed.
The U.S. CPI ex-food and energy comes out. The prior +0.2% m/m reading was relatively tame.