4Thought provides you with actionable investment analysis and perspective on the financial markets.
Contact us to determine whether any ideas presented are applicable to your situation before taking any actions with regards to your financial plan or investment portfolio.
Hear from Chief Investment Officer Jesse Mackey in this week's Market Perspective.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I’m Jesse Mackey, CIO of 4Thought Financial Group, and this is 4Thought’s Market Perspective as of January 25th, 2022.
Yesterday the S&P 500 reached a maximum intraday draw-down of 12.37% from its January 4th peak price, confirming a 10%+ technical correction. It then sharply rebounded late in the day, leaving it only 8.48% below the record by the close of business. Despite the broad recent slide across both stocks and bonds globally, the S&P 500 Index has still experienced net gains of 20.96% since the point of recovery from its last 10%+ correction, which was on November 9th, 2020.
Thinking more broadly, historical data indicates that once a new Bull Market has been confirmed (which happened on August 18th of 2020 when the S&P 500 Index had recovered from its March 23rd, 2020 Bear Market low point and achieved a new record price), the longest time period on record (since 1950) before the beginning of another Bear Market was 7.44 years, with an average of 2.44 years. Only 1.44 years have elapsed from the point of Bull confirmation in this instance so far.
There has usually been at least one 10%+ correction (but often several) between most bear markets in history. The first correction in the current Bull Market was completed on September 24th, 2020, and what may be the second (if it isn't something deeper) has been initially confirmed as of yesterday, January 24th, 2022. We refer to the combination of a correction and its corresponding recovery (which was last registered on November 9th, 2020) as a Wolf Market.
About 55% percent of Wolf Markets like the last one we experienced have been followed by a period that exhibits trailing 1-year returns of 30% or greater without a 10%+ correction (something we refer to as an Eagle Market). The first Eagle Market subset of the current Bull Market was quantitatively confirmed on March 1st, 2021, and based on yesterday's data, is now confirmed to have ended on January 4th of this year. This Eagle had continued for 10.53 months, which places it well above the average duration of 5.35 months. Eagles may be followed by any of the other three market types, including a flattening of growth rates to return to a standard Bull Market, or an immediate reversion into a Wolf or Bear market. Given that stocks may still be relatively early in the (traditionally defined) Bull portion of the market cycle (by historical standards), an immediate Bear market (although certainly possible) appears the least likely of the various scenarios. It is therefore more likely that the correction that was first registered yesterday will remain only a correction of 10-20% before the resumption of the broader Bull Market, and is less likely to deepen further into a full-blown Bear Market drop of 20% or greater.
Based on analysis of the complete historical market type data set using our Multi-Method Adaptive algorithmic process, we are now allowing overweight allocations to Opportunistic Investing, neutral allocations to Strategic Asset Allocation and Liability-Driven Investing, and underweights to Selective/Concentrated Investing.
From a probabilistic analysis perspective, valuations tell a story that's neutral for most stock types and somewhat more favorable for portions of the bond markets. On this basis, most stock types are now near fair value. Bonds range from moderately undervalued (in the case of investment grade corporate bonds) to near fair value (in the case of Treasury Inflation Protected Securities). Investment grade corporate bonds now reflect the most attractive pricing relative to the alternatives, while US large cap stocks are the least attractive.
Against this backdrop the outlook for stocks is now neutral in the short to intermediate term based on the overall aggregate of our historical market-type data analysis and quantitative probabilistic analysis.
I hope this was helpful. If you have questions or you’d like to discuss what this means for your particular situation, please contact 4Thought at 516-300-1617 or at info@4tfg.com – and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog feed and our YouTube channel. Thanks for watching, and see you next week.
Leave a Comment