先進国
The German IFO and Belgium’s National Bank indicator painted a somewhat mixed picture of European business confidence in April. The IFO Business Climate Index inched up only 0.2 points to 96.8 and disappointed expectations of a much more significant increase…
European industrial equities have further scope to outperform materials over the remainder of 2021. Despite an 11% outperformance since the second quarter of 2020, the ratio of industrials-to-materials equities still stands almost 8% below its pre-COVID-19…
BCA Research’s US Equity Strategy & US Political Strategy service reiterate their recommendations in favor of the BCA Infrastructure Basket and the Biden Fiscal Advantage Equity Basket. President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan is shifting…
Highlights The sheer magnitude of US fiscal stimulus makes forecasting especially challenging, … : It is very hard to say how unprecedented stimulus will impact the economy. … and it may already have scrambled established equity market patterns: Give a bored millennial a smartphone, a brokerage account app, commission-free trades and regular infusions of cash and you just might get a bear market bounce unlike any that’s ever been seen before. We are devoted to the idea that the simplest answers are the best and we think simplicity is particularly suited to navigating through elevated uncertainty: If growth is going to be solidly above trend and the Fed is going to maintain extremely accommodative monetary policy settings despite the risk of overheating, risk assets should outperform Treasuries and cash and investors ought to overweight them. Feature We spent much of last week speaking with investors outside of the US in a series of Zoom meetings. The themes that were most persistent in our discussions were inflation (Is it going to materialize and how bad could it be if it does?), the post-pandemic landscape (How will it be different and how should an investor position for it?), the duration of the equity bull market and the interest rate outlook. We had begun preparing a report that examined each of those themes in turn through the lens of our typical analytical process. As we progressed through that report, however, we found ourselves increasingly preoccupied with other topics we touched on in the calls and observations and questions that kept us thinking after the calls had ended. We will delve thoroughly into the themes that were raised on the calls as time goes by and evidence emerges that supports or challenges our current views. Those themes are important and will impact asset-allocation and security-selection decisions into at least the intermediate term. But this week we instead turn the spotlight on some of our impressions of the current economic landscape and how investors might navigate it. At the very least, it will serve as a change of pace, but we hope it will also be a jumping-off point for ongoing discussions about asset allocation and portfolio management. Uncharted Territory, Part One The word “unprecedented” got a lot of use and loomed over our analysis and recommendations. We believe in our analytical framework and we expect that financial markets and the US economy will most likely thrive over the next twelve months, supported by a “just-right” Goldilocks backdrop of outsized growth and extremely accommodative monetary policy. We think the probability of a “too-cold” outcome, in which growth disappoints despite the Fed’s best efforts, is steadily shrinking as vaccinations continue to outpace the rate required to confer herd immunity on the US by the end of September. While we think inflation will ultimately spell the end of the bull phases in financial markets and may even lead the Fed to induce a recession, we think it will be a couple of years before it can take root and bring about the market- and business-cycle denouements. The key word in those conclusions is think; we do not know that there will be a consumption surge that extends across several quarters, powering the US economy to grow at an inflation-adjusted rate of 4 to 5% across 2021 and 2022. We expect that the immunization campaign will squelch COVID-19 in the US at some point this summer, opening the way for the release of pent-up demand as households regain the full menu of consumption options and can once again return to restaurants, bars, airplanes, hotels, stadiums, concert venues, cinemas and theaters. Households have $2 trillion of excess savings to slake that demand, but we cannot know how much of them will be directed to consumption or the rate at which they will be released. It’s not that we don’t want to do the work; it’s that there is no empirical antecedent for this magnitude of fiscal transfers to households. The US has never before injected 25% of a year’s output into the economy across just two years (Chart 1). There is no way, then, to use past history to build a model regressing consumption growth against fiscal stimulus or a sudden surge in household savings driven by sweeping temporary constraints on activity. No way, at least, to build such a model with a reasonable degree of confidence in the predictive quality of its outputs. Chart 1We've Never Seen Anything Like This Before The bottom line, then, is that no investor or researcher should attach a great deal of confidence to his/her current expectations. Everyone in investment management is paid to have an opinion, but all of us should have a healthy degree of humility about our current opinions. All of our views right now are necessarily low-conviction. We eagerly await the ongoing flow of data that will shed some light on whether the consumption surge is materializing and if so, the segments in which it will be concentrated. We are also closely monitoring vaccination progress and the ongoing efficacy of the extant vaccines because victory over COVID-19 by the summer is not assured, even if we do hold our base-case virus view with more conviction than our consumption views. Uncharted Territory, Part Two Shutting down activity to limit interactions fostering the spread of COVID-19 was an eminently logical public health measure. It also made sense to bolster the activity restrictions with direct cash transfers to households to cushion the economic blow of abiding by them. The distributions presumably encouraged compliance with the restrictions, helping to slow the spread of the virus, while also relieving economic distress. But the combination may have borne the unintended consequence of upending established stock market dynamics, a matter of little import for the overall economy but a critical issue for professional investors. Technical analysis is often derided by fundamentally-oriented investors as something akin to astrology or voodoo. We are not dogmatic and are happy to use any tool that might be of value; although we are neither skilled technical analysts nor traders, we accept that technical analysis is the most useful framework for assessing very short-term moves. Even fundamental investors with longer-term time frames may find price charts useful for selecting entry and exit points. Pattern recognition, after all, is an essential investment skill and it’s largely what forward-thinking investors are paying for when they invest in buzzy artificial intelligence applications. Something that upends typical market patterns is therefore important and the economic impact payments and federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefit supplements provided for by the CARES Act and the two rounds of follow-up legislation may have stood the relationship of retail and institutional investors to market movements on its head. The bottom four income quintiles of US households received considerably more aid from the federal government than they needed, strictly speaking. Two-thirds of all taxpayers received the full amount of all three economic impact payments and four-fifths received at least a phased-out portion of them while only 25 million people were out of work at the employment trough in April, less than 10 million were out of work when the second round of checks went out in January and just over 8 million were idled during the current round. Those who were unemployed are estimated to have received CARES Act UI benefits that exceeded their previous compensation by more than a third.1 The net effect is that many idled workers found themselves stranded for several months in 2020 with more money than they could spend. Homer Simpson would have blissfully napped his way through his furlough, with a mountain of empty Duff cans filling the space between the couch and the television, but it’s not a stretch to think that millennials in the same position turned to their phones to relieve their tedium and discovered the joys of commission-free trading in the palm of their hands. Retail investors have traditionally been viewed as being the last to arrive at the party, flooding in at market tops only to seep out at market bottoms, while the smart institutional money drove the trends that retail flows belatedly followed. Over time, institutions following the same cues and adhering to the same heuristics established recognizable bull- and bear-market patterns, like extended bottoming processes and regular backing-and-filling that aligned with Fibonacci retracement levels. The GameStop tempest earlier this year may have been a manifestation of the larger issue that the market had been swamped by newbies who didn’t know the rules and therefore wound up trampling them. A seasoned trader-turned-quantitative-investment-performance-analyst commented to us last summer that these were “not the markets we grew up in.” From his perch at a top hedge fund, he viewed retail flows as having been the catalyst for the market recovery that wiped out the entire pandemic decline with barely a pause for breath (Chart 2). Seasoned analysts and portfolio managers waiting for a consolidation of the initial bounce wound up turbo-charging it as they chased the retail flows that got there ahead of them. “They just couldn’t stand the underperformance any longer,” he said. Chart 2A Whole New Ballgame See The Ball, Hit The Ball We follow careful analytical processes at BCA and our clients do as well, but we try not to overthink our investment conclusions once we reach them. We have found that the less a Little Leaguer is thinking about when s/he steps into the batter’s box, the better off s/he will be, and we think the approach applies to investors as well. Be as still as you can, watch the baseball out of the pitcher’s hand, step towards the pitcher and throw your hands at where you judge the ball will be just before it reaches home plate. Your weight will naturally follow your front leg and your hands and everything else will take care of itself if you correctly anticipated where the ball was headed. Our colleague Peter Berezin, BCA’s Chief Global Strategist, abides by a personal Investment Golden Rule: Stay bullish unless you think a recession is just around the corner. His rule aligns perfectly with our observation that bear markets and recessions tend to coincide (Chart 3). Although we cannot know how much of households’ aggregate excess savings will be spent or when, and we therefore cannot predict quarterly GDP growth to the nearest tenth of a percent, we are confident that the economy will grow at a rate well above its real annual long-run potential of 2%, provided that the pandemic doesn’t spring a nasty surprise on the US. If the economy does grow well above its trend rate in 2021 and 2022 (Chart 4), and the Fed lives up to its pledge to remove monetary accommodation only in response to lagged measures of consumer price inflation and labor market strength, stocks should comfortably generate returns in excess of those on cash and Treasuries and multi-asset investors should overweight them (Tables 1 and 2). Chart 3Recessions And Bear Markets Tend To Travel Together Chart 4Earnings Grow When The Economy Grows, And Stocks Move With Earnings Table 1Stocks Thrive When Policy Is Easy, ... Table 2… Especially In Real Terms Steering Portfolios Through Uncertainty Acknowledging the uncertainty inherent in predictions made in the current environment, with its unprecedented fiscal stimulus, is all well and good, but professional investors have a mandate to invest regardless of their conviction levels. How should they navigate through the next twelve months aside from overweighting equities in multi-asset portfolios? The basic rule guiding our answer in this case is to stay within sight of the shore if there’s a possibility that the weather might change suddenly. Given that no one knows how the big swing factors impacting output and the balance between capacity and aggregate demand – consumer caprice, anti-vaccination sentiment, reopening timetables and labor force participation – will turn out, we think that investors’ first order of business should be to prepare to shorten holding periods. Conviction levels will evolve over time as incoming data validate or contradict investment theses but it is important to be prepared mentally to manage portfolios more dynamically in line with unprecedented conditions. Individual managers and investment committees who prepare to adjust their procedures, perhaps by setting stop levels and/or rebalancing thresholds in advance, will find it much easier to do so in real time should it turn out to be appropriate. Investors may also consider reducing deviations from their benchmarks. Increasing the frequency of portfolio rebalancing, shifting from time to level thresholds, or tightening level thresholds are ways that investors with rebalancing guidelines could narrow deviations. Investors who don't rebalance can reduce their initial position deviations and/or their portfolio concentrations. Shortening holding periods and increasing rebalancing frequencies implies harvesting gains more often and is therefore tax-inefficient, but we think it may be worth sacrificing some tax efficiency to protect overall portfolio value at a time of elevated uncertainty. Doug Peta, CFA Chief US Investment Strategist dougp@bcaresearch.com Footnotes 1 Ganong, Peter and Noel, Pascal and Vavra, Joseph, US Unemployment Insurance Replacement Rates During the Pandemic (August 24, 2020). University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2020-62.
UK retail sales surged in March, which indicates that the domestic demand recovery is taking shape. Retail sales including auto fuel accelerated 5.4% m/m, surprising expectations of a deceleration to 1.5% m/m from a revised 2.2% in February. Notably, it…
April’s flash Markit PMIs show that the economic recovery is firming across developed markets. The US composite PMI strengthened to 62.2 from 59.7. The Eurozone composite index surprised to the upside and gained 0.5 point versus expectations of a…
Weekly Performance Update For the week ending Thu Apr 22, 2021 The Market Monitor displays the trailing 1-quarter performance of strategies based around the BCA Score. For each region, we construct an equal-weighted, monthly rebalanced portfolio consisting of the top 3 stocks per sector and compare it with the regional benchmark. For each portfolio, we show the weekly performance of individual holdings in the Top Contributors/Detractors table. In addition, the Top Prospects table shows the holdings that currently have the highest BCA Score within the portfolio. For more details, click the region headers below to be redirected to the full historical backtest for the strategy. BCA US Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA US Portfolio S&P500 TRI -0.56% -0.84% Top Contributors QFIN:US VIPS:US UTHR:US SEM:US VICI:US Weekly Return 36 bps 20 bps 13 bps 12 bps 12 bps Top Detractors MO:US EXPI:US SCCO:US TRTN:US DCP:US Weekly Return -29 bps -27 bps -25 bps -24 bps -16 bps Top Prospects TX:US ESGR:US UHAL:US MO:US BRK.A:US BCA Score 99.89% 97.61% 96.90% 96.18% 94.68% BCA Canada Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA Canada Portfolio S&P/TSX TRI 0.03% -1.44% Top Contributors LIF:CA CFP:CA RUS:CA RCI.B:CA NWC:CA Weekly Return 20 bps 13 bps 8 bps 8 bps 7 bps Top Detractors PXT:CA ENGH:CA DIR.UN:CA CSU:CA WEED:CA Weekly Return -10 bps -10 bps -9 bps -9 bps -8 bps Top Prospects LNF:CA IFP:CA CFP:CA NWC:CA LNR:CA BCA Score 99.43% 98.42% 98.23% 92.71% 90.60% BCA UK Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA UK Portfolio FTSE 100 TRI 1.01% -0.59% Top Contributors SVST:GB NLMK:GB FXPO:GB NFC:GB EMIS:GB Weekly Return 48 bps 30 bps 30 bps 26 bps 25 bps Top Detractors AO.:GB OXIG:GB PRTC:GB CNE:GB PZC:GB Weekly Return -28 bps -25 bps -13 bps -9 bps -8 bps Top Prospects SVST:GB NLMK:GB GLTR:GB BPCR:GB GYS:GB BCA Score 99.75% 98.71% 97.45% 96.76% 96.70% BCA Eurozone Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA EMU Portfolio MSCI EMU TRI 0.64% 0.66% Top Contributors VIRP:FR CNV:FR VGP:BE MONT:BE GCO:ES Weekly Return 68 bps 16 bps 13 bps 11 bps 9 bps Top Detractors ROTH:FR AOF:DE SOL:IT TEN:IT PHH2:DE Weekly Return -23 bps -15 bps -10 bps -9 bps -8 bps Top Prospects PHH2:DE SOL:IT CNV:FR SOLV:BE ROTH:FR BCA Score 99.84% 99.37% 98.98% 98.92% 97.81% BCA Japan Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA Japan Portfolio TOPIX TRI -1.86% -1.87% Top Contributors 5451:JP 4980:JP 7994:JP 8966:JP 6960:JP Weekly Return 7 bps 4 bps 3 bps 2 bps 1 bps Top Detractors 6269:JP 7279:JP 4008:JP 8425:JP 8173:JP Weekly Return -18 bps -18 bps -15 bps -15 bps -11 bps Top Prospects 9436:JP 1766:JP 4008:JP 8595:JP 6960:JP BCA Score 99.44% 99.23% 99.06% 97.37% 97.09% BCA Hong Kong Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA Hong Kong Portfolio Hang Seng TRI 1.58% -0.05% Top Contributors 990:HK 856:HK 2232:HK 867:HK 215:HK Weekly Return 42 bps 32 bps 22 bps 19 bps 13 bps Top Detractors 148:HK 1888:HK 41:HK 2798:HK 373:HK Weekly Return -38 bps -15 bps -7 bps -6 bps -5 bps Top Prospects 990:HK 86:HK 2232:HK 811:HK 3306:HK BCA Score 99.85% 98.90% 98.45% 97.69% 96.00% BCA Australia Portfolio Total Weekly Return BCA Australia Portfolio S&P/ASX All Ord. TRI 0.56% -0.07% Top Contributors ADH:AU GRR:AU HT1:AU REH:AU BLX:AU Weekly Return 55 bps 45 bps 18 bps 12 bps 11 bps Top Detractors STX:AU PDN:AU AGL:AU RIC:AU AQZ:AU Weekly Return -41 bps -20 bps -16 bps -12 bps -11 bps Top Prospects BSE:AU GRR:AU PSQ:AU PIC:AU ZIM:AU BCA Score 99.88% 98.80% 97.39% 97.21% 97.00%
Yesterday’s ECB monetary policy meeting offered no surprises for investors. All policy interest rates were left unchanged, as were the sizes of the ECB’s asset purchase programs. In the press conference following the meeting, ECB President…

