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Stock Risks to Watch: Choose Your Bear Market Dashboard

January 23, 2018ffw1987 crash, asset management, bear markets, bond defaults, business earnings, CPI, credit spreads, fed funds rate, Fed put, Federal Reserve, FOMC, house prices, inflation, Jerome Powell, lending standards, loan delinquencies, market corrections, market cycles, market indicators, monetary policy, S&P 500, VCURVE, virtuous loop34 Comments

“Ya gadda have a praaacess”
– British portfolio managers mimicking their American colleagues

When long ago a former employer sent me to London to join the other Americans, or mostly Americans, building out its U.K. office, my job was to create a process. In institutional asset management, process was the American way. For sales presentations and especially dealing with investment consultants, you needed process charts that showed information flowing this way and that and, ultimately, morphing through its travels on the page into repeatable investment decisions. Those charts proved your legitimacy as an institutional manager. Regardless of whether they described your actual decision making, they let the community know that you weren’t just a “bunch of gunslingers.” And you couldn’t build a business in that community without your process charts.

But British consultants were different. They didn’t care so much about your process as they wanted you to knock them over with flair. They wanted imagination, story-telling, charisma. The process charts in your pitchbook didn’t matter as much as the command in your voice. In London, gunslinging was nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you slung with style.

So it all came down to process versus flair. Along with baseball caps and mismatched accents, the clash of cultures depended on which of the two qualities was deemed most important. And along with the accents, in particular, the contrasting approaches explained mimicry performed by amused Brits when the conference room door was comfortably shut or when the pub was crowded enough that voices didn’t carry. Ya gadda have a praaacess.

So today, I give you what else but a few pieces of process. Not a complete one, not even close, but I’ll share two dashboards that compare current stock market conditions to the conditions that shaped past market cycles. The dashboards can support your portfolio decisions, in my opinion, regardless of whether you’re a process Kool-Aid drinking septic or a flair fancying Anglophile. (For the same approach applied to the economy, see “Here’s a Strong Signal from the Economic Dashboard.”)

Q1 Stock Market Outlook: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Slide

If 2018 rings in a bear market, it could look something like the Kennedy Slide of 1962.

That was my conclusion in “Riding the Slide,” published in early September, where I showed that the Kennedy Slide was unique among bear markets of the last eighty years. It was the only bear that wasn’t obviously provoked by rising inflation, tightening monetary policy, deteriorating credit markets or, less commonly, world war or depression.

Moreover, market conditions leading up to the Slide should be familiar—they’re not too far from market conditions since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In the first year after Kennedy’s election, as in the first year after Trump’s election, inflation seemed under control, interest rates were low, credit spreads were tight, and the economy was growing. And, in both cases, the stock market was booming.

Here’s an updated look at Trump’s stock rally versus the Kennedy rally and subsequent Slide:

As you can see, we’ve now reached the chart’s critical juncture—at this time of the calendar in 1962, the post-election rally was ending, and the Slide was about to begin. Our chart begs the question: Will the similarities continue and lead us into a Trump Slide in early 2018?

Or, with less drama, you might like to hear my Q1 stock market outlook.