{"id":1232,"date":"2023-09-12T17:46:17","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T17:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mcivercapital.com\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2023-09-12T17:50:45","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T17:50:45","slug":"market-forces-011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcivercapital.com\/market-forces-011\/","title":{"rendered":"Market Forces 011"},"content":{"rendered":"

Market Commentary<\/h2>\n

The strong performance from equity markets in the first quarter continued into the second, though we have seen some moderation in returns in the third quarter to date (key markets flat to marginally up). For 2023 so far, we have continued to see strong returns from the S&P 500 and NASDAQ (up ~17% and ~33% respectively), whilst the DJIA and TSX remained the exceptions, generating ~5% returns so far in 2023.<\/p>\n

\"Key<\/p>\n

Whilst equities have been robust on aggregate, the performance of bonds has been far more variable.<\/p>\n

Unprecedented moves in the bond market<\/h2>\n

The key 20-year US treasury bond rallied in January (yields fell by ~50 basis points), then gave up much of those gains with a reversal in February (yields rose by 40-45 basis points), only to again reverse course, rallying in March (yields fell 35-40bp), only then to reverse once again with yields increasing by ~50bp from early April levels to those seen in late May. Volatility then stepped down in later May and June, only for bonds to then sell off again (with yields increasing again by another ~50bp), and breaching levels seen in October of 2022.<\/p>\n

We continue to note that moves of the magnitude seen year to date are an infrequent and extreme occurrence.<\/p>\n

\"US<\/p>\n

On the economic front, the economy and labour market has shown remarkable resilience to date, and inflation continues to recede, though the consequence of this economic resilience appears to be market recognition that interest rates are likely to remain elevated for an extended period as evidence by the above-mentioned move in yields.<\/p>\n

A quick look at current valuations… and valuation metrics<\/h2>\n

In the past, we have indicated that on aggregate we do not believe valuations are overly compelling and continue to highlight the economic risks (more on this later).<\/p>\n

If we look at the P\/E ratio (price to earnings, or more simply explained as how many years of current earnings are needed to recoup the purchase price) of the S&P 500 we note that current levels sit above long-term averages, but not dramatically so (as evidenced by being within one standard deviation of the average).<\/p>\n

\"S&P<\/p>\n

We will now take a deeper analytic dive into the historic data on the S&P 500 and its P\/E ratio, but before we do so we need to acknowledge that the P\/E is a highly simplistic metric, and its popularity likely arises more from its ease of use than its predictive power.<\/p>\n

The term ‘predictive power’ may be unfamiliar to most, so lets explain this using a weather analogy. If we noticed that most of the time after seeing grey clouds in the sky, we tended to see rain, we would likely conclude that grey clouds have predictive power in terms of predicting, or forecasting, rain.<\/p>\n

P\/E = Current Price \/ Earnings*<\/p>\n

* Earnings could be either on a retrospective (i.e. past twelve months of actual earnings) or prospective basis (i.e. expected earnings for the next twelve months)<\/h6>\n

Lower P\/Es would generally be viewed as an indication that the asset is \u201ccheap\u201d and higher P\/Es as an indication that the asset is \u201cexpensive\u201d. Let us disavow these notions immediately.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fundamentally, all assets are worth their future projected cash flows discounted by the appropriate rate reflecting the riskiness of those CFs. The growth rate of these cash flows (let’s substitute earnings as a proxy for now) is critical to valuation. As the P\/E ratio is based on past earnings** it implicitly ignores the all-important factor that is growth.<\/p>\n

** We have chosen to assess the P\/E ratio based on a retrospective (i.e. past twelve months of actual earnings) basis as this removes the forecast risk that we would encounter if using the prospective basis (i.e. expected earnings for the next twelve months)<\/h6>\n

\u201cInvert, always invert\u2026\u201d Charlie Munger<\/strong><\/p>\n

A better way of viewing the P\/E ratio is by looking at it from the opposite angle; to view the ratio as a rough indication of the quantum of growth in earnings that the market is expecting from the stock.<\/p>\n

The results of our analysis back this up, and indicate that whilst P\/Es have some predictive power when it comes to earnings, i.e. the market seems to be fairly good at pricing future earnings evidenced by the data showing higher P\/Es tend to be associated with higher levels of future earnings growth, the same cannot be said for the predictive power when it comes to future returns.<\/p>\n

\"S&P<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Generally, we would stop here at this stage of the analysis, but on visually assessing the above chart it seemed that somewhat different dynamics were at play at varying levels of the P\/E ratio.<\/p>\n

The charts below show the results of this stratification exercise where we divided the data into three separate PE bands namely, <15x, 15-25x, and >25x, and we would highlight the following:<\/p>\n