Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
I do like to start off each week with a summary of what I saw happening with the stock market this week, I’m going to use a little bit of a different view here, because I’ve got some charts that are a little bit dense what what you’d be able to see everything. This first chart is just the S&P 500. So far this year, if you look right here, the last four bars, because this is a short week, with the holiday on Monday, really, we just gone sideways this week, which I see is really kind of a victory altogether. Since we had such a big run, if you see that low point that’s right here off of my hand, all the way up to the high that we had a close of Friday, that’s over 9% Run, that’s a really big run in a very short period of time. And that’s why, you know, we want to stay invested in these markets at this point in time. Just because these runs can happen so fast. If you’re trying to get in and out, you can easily miss out on lots of them. This week has been very interesting, in the sense that we’ve had what I consider some fairly good numbers, but the market has reacted all over the place about them. And the articles that are out there kind of all over, give me an example. So the the number of job openings report came out this week. And it was down from the all time high. And not a lot, but a little and the direction is really important in my opinion. And the job openings is one of the things the Federal Reserve’s really focusing on, because they feel like there’s too many job openings, versus how many people are unemployed, it’s almost two to one, there’s 11 point 5 million jobs open. Now it was 11.9. So things have come down.
But there’s one set of side of the market that thinks that hasn’t come down enough that that means the Federal Reserve is going to have to get more aggressive, and another side of the market that says, Wow, that’s coming down, things might be slowing down too much, etc. I think you need to have a slowing of the economy, and a slowing in certain areas. And this week, we saw a lot of things, I think, show some slowing, but not too much. And that’s exactly what I’m looking for. So we saw the wage increase the hourly wage increase actually slowed down, which I think is important, because you can’t have wages go up and up and up and up, because that creates inflationary environment, because they’ll eventually pass that along to us in terms of cost. We saw the the number of new jobs created that came out today. 390,000 was higher than expected, but quite a bit lower than last month. And so the markets down today, because it was higher than expected. And the markets afraid that that means the Federal Reserve is going to have to get more aggressive. But I’m looking more at the trend. And everything that I’m looking for in terms of pieces slowing down, and I think at reasonable rates are is happening between, you know, may in April and March, we’re starting to see peaks and inflation and all of these different areas. It’s exactly what we need to see, I would assume right now, the Federal Reserve is pretty happy with what’s happened. Because most of what happens for the Federal Reserve is they do something and six months later, the economy kind of finally react. So what we’re looking at right now is what’s been done in November, which is when they really started talking about raising interest rates. And so as we go, they started raising interest rates in March. And so maybe that’ll be impact in September, etc, there’s a lag. And I think they’d be satisfied to see what has happened so far as far as that goes. So again, market is hanging in there.
Is this going to be a recovery, or a short term bounce when we get back down to these lows and maybe even lower? That’s the big question. I do think that this week, I’m very satisfied with at least a sideways motion after a 9% run back, we didn’t give it all back, we didn’t continue to run up and stretch the rubber band too much. A pause here I think is very positive. It’s also a holiday week, be super careful of trying to, you know, analyze what’s happening during a holiday week, because the volume can be very low. And you can have a lot of different weird things pushing the market. As far as that goes. I do want to present some of the indicators that I’m using to look forward at what at a recession. And I have three here that have demonstrated in the past some very good predictive ability on future recessions. And I think that’s the difference if this market kind of is able to hang in there because the economy doesn’t go into recession, you know, we might have already set our lows or be very close to them. If we have a recession, the market could go down a lot farther. So the focus in my opinion right now is recession or not. And so one of the key indicators I use, I’ve presented this multiple times. I won’t spend too much time on this, but as a leading economic index, this is a basket of 10 different indicators. And you can see the gray lines are recessions. It’s had a very good predictive ability 18 months before 11 months before 21 months before the Big recessions that we’ve had here, you know, in the last several 20 years or so. And so, right now, it peaked in March came down a little bit in April. But it has to come down more before we can call that a peak, as far as that goes. So still no signal here of early of a recession from an early basis.
I’ll show you a couple of others that I use. This is actually done by the New York Fed, and they take the 10 year Treasury yield, and the three month treasury bill yield. And what they’re looking for, and the three months is actually a special, it’s a secondary market, the 10 years the constant rate. So I won’t get into the weeds as far as that goes. But essentially, what they’re looking for here is when the three month pays more than the 10 year, the bond market is signaling a recession. And it’s very, very accurate, especially if that negative scenario lasts for three months or longer. And if you look back at this, you can see where it proceeds through zero quite a few times. Right? Before you know, within 12 months a recession happens. So a very good indicator to use a very popular indicator. As far as that goes. If we look at it right now it’s going straight up, what that means is is not going to zero, we’re actually going away from inflationary pressures when that line is going up. Now, one of the things that the New York Fed does, which I really like is this chart here. And this is the probability of a US recession over the next 12 months, looking at the three month and tenure yield. So what they’ve done is they’ve gone back to 1959. And they said, Okay, whenever the yield is at a certain spot, what the differential between those yields, what is the problem? What how often did a recession happen. And you can, you can see this right over my shoulder, oops, wrong way, right over my shoulder here, we’re actually down to a 3.7% probabilities of recession right now. So actually, it’s the end of April, but it’s didn’t change much for May, we’ll see what happens when they come out the new numbers, but nonetheless, very low probability of recession is being indicated by this very accurate historical yield spread.
So consider that the leading indicators aren’t showing a recession yet, three to 10 months, three months to 10 year yield, not really showing a recession yet either. And this is a lot of data here. But this is from a company called ClearBridge. This has 12 different indicators that they’ve identified. And I really liked this breakdown, they do a little green arrow, if the indicator is still not showing any recession in 12 months, a little yellow circle, if there’s some, you know, caution, it might, you know, be getting closer to showing or red X if it’s basically that particular piece. And, you know, they have housing permits and jobs sentiment, jobless claims, retail sales, growth in wages, price of commodities. ITSM new orders has to do with manufacturing new orders, profit margins, truck shipments, credit spreads money supply, and they have the yield curve in there. So that’s, you know, again, you’ll see that a lot of these, but I do like these baskets, and they have a green arrow here at the bottom for their overall signal. And you can see it by month. So for example, in March, we had just one red X and one, you know, yellow circle. And now we have three yellow circles and one red X. So we’re closer to a recession in this particular indicator, I’m still pretty far away. And one of the things they do that’s really nice, is they do this chart where they do what they call a comparison. So current is the farthest one over that we just looked at. And then they’ve got all the different recessions, 2022,2008 , 2000, 1990, 1981, 1980, 1973, 1975 and 1969/70.
If you look closely at these, you can see how many red X’s and yellow circles there were prior 12 months prior to the recessions that happened historically, we’re nowhere near that right now at all, this would be a very unusual recession. It’s possible. It’s a very unusual timeframe. But at least this indicator is also showing similar to what we saw with the Treasury yields similar to what we saw with the leading economic indicator, we’re not seeing big, you know, pushes right now on the early indicators towards recession. And so that’s why you gotta be careful about jumping in and out of the market or shorting it or going inverse, because the average downturn for the S&P 500 since World War Two without a recession is 15%. And the average downturn with a recession is 36%. I mentioned those numbers a lot. And so really, the core thing now is are we heading towards a recession or not? That could happen. I could be saying something different a month or two months from now, but that’s not what we’re seeing right now. We are seeing a slowing, but that’s what we need to see. It’s just a matter of the pace of that slowing down. Does it kick us into recession? Or just bring us down enough to kind of fight inflation? Right? So that’s what we’re looking at. At the moment. Things are okay. I know that, you know, there’s a lot of different opinions out there. And there’s certainly a lot of articles talking about the impending recession. But that’s because partly because those get a lot of clicks. And so, anyway, if you’re looking at the real data, and some of the indicators that are leading, I think it’s worth you know, noting that there’s an awful lot of them that show that there’s not a recession coming in the next 12 months at this point. So something to watch as far as that goes. So, nonetheless, I want to thank everybody for watching the summary to this week and I look forward to talking to you know again about it next week.