Sectors
China’s infrastructure investment growth rate will likely slow from its current nominal 14% to 4-6% in 2023H1, on a year-over-year basis. Funding constraints and a shrinking pool of good projects will cap the upside in China’s overall infrastructure fixed-asset investment (FAI) in the next six months.
This week we present our Portfolio Allocation Summary for December 2022.
2023 will be another challenging year for the US equity market, characterized by the Fed’s battle with inflation, slowing economic growth, and earnings contraction. The S&P 500 is likely to reach new lows in the first half of the year falling as much as 20-25%, only to rebound sharply in the second half, once all the bad news is priced in.
MacroQuant is overweight bonds, underweight equities, and neutral on cash. Within the equity universe, the model is underweight the US and overweight Japan, the UK, and Australia.
Our best calls of the year were long defensives over cyclicals, short Russia and emerging Europe, long aerospace/defense, short Greater China, and long Latin America. Our worst call of the year was long cyber security stocks.
Web 3.0 plays will boom in the coming decade. Play this through a diversified exposure to today’s main blockchain tokens. But the Web 2.0 oligopolies, like Amazon and Meta, are in big trouble.
The S&P 500 is down by 17% year to date, while our portfolio is up 15%. US political analysis is essential for investors but it is best done by geopolitical method rather than Washington punditry.
European asset prices have rebounded sharply since September. Can this trend survive in the face of a weak Chinese economy where deflation prevails?
Excess job vacancies in the US and UK reflect a labour market that cannot efficiently match unemployed workers with vacant jobs. This is because excess job vacancies reflect the shortage of labour supply in the 50 plus age cohort, whose skills are difficult to replace. In economic jargon, the post-pandemic ‘Beveridge curve’ has shifted outwards. Absent an unlikely shift in the Beveridge curve to its pre-pandemic version, killing US wage inflation will mean killing jobs. And killing jobs will mean killing profits. We go through the investment implications.
Airlines have staged an impressive recovery this year, exceeding all expectations. While companies are optimistic, we are cautious. Just as pent-up demand for travel will fade, headwinds from slowing growth and high inflation will intensify. While it is highly likely that Airlines will continue to rally into the yearend, we will stick to our underweight as our three-to-six-month outlook remains negative.