Quite often, investors describe economic forecasts as a hard landing (recession), a soft landing (weak growth but no recession), or no landing (moderate to strong economic growth). As evidenced by the massive rotation toward economically sensitive sectors like industrials and materials and the significant underperformance of interest-rate-sensitive growth stocks, the no landing, or as it’s […]
Rather than focusing on valuation or fundamentals, momentum strategies use price behavior and relative performance to identify securities that are gaining or losing strength. One would think that, given the massive rotation trade and the resulting gaps in relative performance between various sectors and factors, momentum strategies would be doing well. While some such strategies […]
The dollar-debasement narrative is in full swing, as evidenced by the price of precious metals. However, one look at bitcoin, which should also rally on the debasement narrative, tells you something is amiss. We do not buy into the dollar-debasement narrative; instead, we believe much of the activity in gold and bitcoin is more closely […]
Google’s parent, Alphabet, just issued $32 billion in global debt, including £1 billion of rare century bonds. Alphabet’s century bonds are called such because they do not mature for 100 years (2126). While the century bond is a small piece of its recent debt offering and even less of its outstanding debt ($78 billion), the […]
The delayed BLS employment report came in well above expectations, showing the economy added 130k jobs in January. Furthermore, the unemployment rate slipped to 4.3% versus expectations of a 0.1% increase to 4.5%. The more encompassing U6 unemployment rate fell from 8.4% to 8.0%. The BLS labor report contradicts the monthly and weekly ADP reports, […]
The top graph below, courtesy of Bloomberg, shows that the price of TLT, the 20+ year Treasury bond ETF, has been drifting sideways for the last couple of years. Often, when a security trades in a tight range over an extended period, as we see with bonds currently, a breakout from the range can be […]
In a blog last week titled Japan Is Normalizing: Risks To The Yen Carry Trade, we discussed Japan’s path to economic normalization and how it might affect a great source of global liquidity, the yen carry trade. A week after publishing the article, Japan had a stunning election. As a result, its new Prime Minister, […]
As we wrote in yesterday’s Commentary, efficiently rotating between overbought and oversold sectors, factors, or stocks is a well-established method for outperforming markets. Like any strategy, the hard part is timing, or properly estimating when a pair of sectors, factors, or stocks is about to reverse their respective trends. Currently, there is a massive divergence […]
At the start of 2026, we introduced our Factor Rotation Model. The model summary below was posted in SimpleVisor: We launched a new model on January 2nd called the Factor Rotation Model. Historically, the performance of value and growth factors relative to the S&P 500 exhibits a strong negative correlation. Michael Lebowitz provided an overview […]