With the market’s major indexes continuing to climb to new all-time highs, investors are getting increasingly jittery about the incorrigible bears’ warnings that the huge correction they have been predicting is on its way. The selloff will signal the market has hit its peak, they assert. What to do?In my last comment on the real risk in the stock market, I discussed why I believe the real risk in the stock market right now is a melt-up, not a meltdown that many bears are warning about.
Ride with the bulls — and face any pullback with enough cash firepower to buy the battered shares of fallen angels with proven track records. The proven antidote to a massive pullback is to embrace it and prepare to buy shares of companies that are fundamentally sound and equipped to thrive after a market pullback. The key is to be prepared – not by selling but to be an opportunistic buyer as prices plummet.
“The bears keep seeing market tops as the bull charges ahead,” notes Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research. Even some of the bulls had warned about an imminent correction but instead, after a 3.9% drop from July 24 through Aug. 7, the S&P 5000 made a new record high on Monday, Yardeni points out.
But should perplexed investors really worry about the coming of a Big Correction? Not if you listen to savvy market watchers and analysts who recommend running with the bulls. True, the bull market is over five years old now, but Yardeni looks at it this way: “It seems to be maturing rather than aging. It is certainly less prone to anxiety attacks, and has treated buying dips as buying opportunities.”
Indeed, although the market continues to gain and treks to higher grounds, it appears more persistent in climbing walls of worries in the U.S. and overseas.
“While the bears continue to look for signs that the bull market is about to break up, I don’t see any significantly bearish divergences, or decoupling, between key internal stock indicators and the overall market,” says Yardeni. “It’s a well-adjusted bull,” is how Yardeni describes it.
The market’s technical picture looks particularly healthy, according to some veteran technical analysts. “The trend remains bullish and an extension above 2,000 (in the S&P 500) would favor a strong push higher into 2030, where we would expect some initial profit taking,” says Mark D. Arbeter, chief technical analyst at S&P Capital IQ. He notes that the S&P 500 has been in an uptrend within an ascending trend channel for the last few years.
So where is the index headed from here?
“The long-term outlook is pointed higher, while above support at 1,838 – 76. Only a drop below the lower trend channel boundary and support at 1,738 would substantially damage the structure of the big picture rally,” says the analyst.
And based on the fundamentals, the market’s outlook seem as positive, as well. “Indeed, the market may be feeding off of consensus expectations for a near 11% climb in yearly earnings-per-share growth through the second quarter of 2015, as compiled by Capital IQ,” says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S&P Capital IQ. He sees the S&P 500′s “fair value around 2,100 a year from now, based on earnings per share growth forecasts, the expectation that inflation will remain around 2%, and that we get a meaningful digestion of gains along the way,” says Stovall.
Meanwhile, the bears aren’t getting much confirmation for their bearishness, notes Ed Yardeni – not even from the Dow Theory, which postulates that the Dow industrials and transportation groups should both be moving higher in a sustained bull market. Well, both the Dow Jones Transportation and the S&P 500 Transportation indexes rebounded to record highs in recent days, notes Yardeni.
Now that the S&P 500 is almost at our 2014 yearend forecast of 2014 for the S&P 500, well ahead of schedule, we remain bullish and continue to favor financials, health care, industrials and information technology.
These groups appear to be the stocks of choice for continued strength and stamina in this long-running bull market? As the S&P Investment Policy Committee sees it, the energy, health care, industrials, and information technology are the attractive sectors, which they recommend to clients to overweight in their portfolios. The committee rates the financial sector as “underweight.”
Admittedly, my thinking centers around the big picture, meaning there is an abundance of liquidity in the global financial system -- even if the Fed continues tapering -- and some risky sectors of the stock market are going to take off. If the ECB finally engages in quantitative easing to combat the euro deflation crisis, it will unleash another massive dose of liquidity which will further bolster global equities and other risk assets.
Soon after I finished writing my comment yesterday, perma bear David Tice, President of Tice Capital, came onto CNBC calling quantitative easing a "short-term economic fix" and warning that a 50% correction in coming. Abigail Doolittle, Peak Theories founder, also appeared on CNBC proclaiming that the range has started to reverse the QE 3 uptrend, and a major move down is coming.
Another perma bear, SocGen's Albert Edwards, wrote a note to clients warning the S&P is running on fumes:
With U.S Federal Reserve policy easing drawing to a close, Societe Generale's uber-bearish strategist Albert Edwards predicts that a bubble in stock markets is on the verge of bursting.Global deflation is coming and the bond market knows it, but Edwards is wrong if he thinks the S&P is running on fumes and won't continue to grind higher. Some of the riskiest sectors, like biotech, are booming again after a spring selloff. When the ECB starts engaging in massive quantitative easing, risks asset (and gold) will really take off.
"Is that a hissing I can hear?" Edwards quipped in his latest research note, published on Thursday.
Edwards claimed the "share buyback party"—which some analysts see as the key driver for recent record Wall Street highs—was now over.
"Companies themselves have been the only substantive buyers of equity, but the most recent data suggests that this party is over and as profits also stall out, the equity market is now running on fumes," Edwards said.
Buybacks occur when firms purchase their own shares, reducing the proportion in the hands of investors. Like dividend payments, buybacks offer a way to return cash to shareholders, and usually see a company's stock push higher as shares get scarcer.
According to Societe Generale's research, share buybacks fell by over 20 percent the second quarter versus the first quarter. However, TrimTabs Chief Executive David Santschi said in a research note on Sunday that buyback announcements were "solid" as earnings season wrapped up.
Some firms borrow cash to buy back their shares, taking advantage of ultra-low interest rates in the U.S. and other developed nations. Edwards warned that as companies had issued cheap debt to buy expensive equity, a "gargantuan" funding gap could yet emerge.
"The equity bubble has disguised the mountain of net debt piling up on U.S. corporate balance sheets. This is hitting home now QE has ended. The end of the buyback bonanza may well prove to be decisive for this bubble," Edwards wrote.
Edwards is known for his markedly pessimistic predictions, and regularly touts the idea of an economic "Ice Age" in which equities will collapse because of global deflationary pressures.
Some analysts remain unconvinced. MacNeil Curry, head of global technical strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, sees no imminent hit to equities. He predicts further upside for the S&P 500—currently near all-time highs—over the next few weeks, and sees the benchmark index reaching 2,050-to-2,060 points by late September.
Of course, nobody really knows where the stock market is heading. A million things can derail this rally and cause jittery investors to pull the plug and sell their stocks. But with pension deficits rising as bond yields fall, pensions will be forced to take on more, not less risk. And where will they be taking that risk? Stocks, corporate bonds and alternative investments like real estate, private equity and hedge funds.
Bloomberg published an interesting article yesterday on the rise of multi-strategy hedge funds, profiling Neil Chriss, founder of Hutchin Hill Capital. He's the type of manager I love, young, smart, hungry and completely focused on delivering results.
The article highlighted why pension funds are attracted to multi-strategy shops:
Multistrategy firms, which use a range of tactics to invest across asset classes are the most popular this year after collecting a net $29.5 billion, according to Hedge Fund Research. The funds returned 4.4 percent through July 31, compared with 2.5 percent for hedge funds overall.The article also mentions why sovereign wealth funds are increasingly becoming the major investors in large multi-strategy shops:
“Pension funds see multistrategy hedge funds as a one-size-fits-all investment,” said Brad Balter, head of Boston-based Balter Capital Management LLC. “It’s very difficult right now to identify attractive opportunities, so they are letting the manager make the tactical decisions rather than wait for their own investment committees to re-allocate capital.”
Hutchin Hill, which employs more than 60 investment professionals, uses five main strategies, including equities, credit and one that makes trading decisions based on quantitative models.
Chriss’s goal is to provide better and more consistent returns than he might using just one approach. His background is in computers and math: He taught himself to program at age 11 and sold a video game to a software company when he was a high-school sophomore.
Chicago-based Citadel, run by billionaire Ken Griffin, helped spark a backlash against multistrategy funds after it lost 55 percent in 2008, one of the worst hedge fund declines stemming from the financial crisis. Six years later, its $22 billion in assets have surpassed its previous peak in 2008.I remember back in 2008, I was telling my readers to use the huge drawdown at Citadel to jump into that fund. In the hedge fund world, I wouldn't bet against guys like Ken Griffin or Izzy Englander, they're running two of the best multi-strategy hedge funds in the world (there are other great funds which I cover in my top funds' activity updates).
Its main hedge fund, which is up 9.9 percent this year, has pulled in a net $1.2 billion in 2014, even though it’s limiting inflows primarily to sovereign wealth funds, according to an investor. The firm’s Global Fixed Income fund, run by Derek Kaufman, attracted $2.7 billion.
Millennium, founded by Israel “Izzy” Englander, has collected a net $2.6 billion this year, after only taking in enough money to replace client withdrawals in 2013. The New York-based firm, which manages $23.5 billion, decided to raise money again because it’s adding more teams to the 150 that currently work at the firm. The fund has climbed about 4.2 percent this year and has posted an annualized return of 14.6 percent since January 1990, said investors, who asked not to be named because the fund is private.
I leave you with an interesting clip below. Charles Biderman, TrimTabs Investment Research CEO, analyzes current market conditions saying the market is essentially rigged and you have to "ride the tide." You sure do but make sure you're in the right sectors because some tides will be a lot bigger than others.