Transcript:
I do like to start off each week with a summary of what I saw happening in the market. This particular week was interesting, because it’s only a four day week. This is Good Friday. So there’s no market activity happening today, at least here in the US. And so, you know, I want to talk about what has gone on so far. But I really want to focus on a subject that keeps coming up, people keep asking me, you know, is this a good time to be buying into the market? Should we be you know, selling out of the market or should be holding, right, so, and I’ll talk about kind of things I, in my opinion on what you might want to be doing right now as far as that goes. So we’ll start off with just taking a look here quickly at what’s happening with the another prop Oh, there it is. What’s happening here with the S&P 500. So this is the S&P 500 year to date chart, you can see the blue line is the 200 day moving average. And so the high point was really the second day of the year. And the low point was the 24th of February when Ukraine was invaded. And so interestingly enough, that differential between those is 14.6%. On the S&P 500. We’re currently down 7.8. So we’ve actually come up, interestingly enough, since the invasion started, we had that great run up at the end of March that you can see there, and then we pulled back and we pulled back about halfway back. And the last four bars there are this week, and you can tell really not a lot happened this week, actually, up and down quite a bit, but didn’t go anywhere. So one of the key things that I look at when I’m looking at these things is just from a technical standpoint, we have a big run up like we had in March, I was talking about how we should have some type of pullback. The most common buy point on pull backs is about a 50% retracement. And so and that’s exactly where we are right now. So terms of buy, sell and hold. This is a point where a lot of people that look at technical analysis are actually buying into the market because of this pullback. Right. So that’s one piece. The second piece to really look at here is just earnings, because that’s what’s happening right now.
This is earning season, we had the big financial institutions a Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley’s Wells Fargo, Citibank, all report earnings this week, they did well all together, right. So good stuff. But this particular chart, I think, is very important. Earnings are the key for what drives the stock market in total. So those expectations for continuing growth and earnings will drive the stock market forward. And you can see here in this chart, the blue line is the S&P 500. And the black line is the earnings and pretty strongly correlated. And I think there’s a couple of things there that I look at number one is the earnings are on a tear, since the bottom of that pandemic, that slope is very strongly up, and has a lot to do with this money that was pushed out by the government in order to try to support the economy and the unemployed. And all of these different situations during this pandemic, especially when we closed everything. So very, very interesting period of time, earnings have been fantastic seven quarters in a row, we have exceeded expectations for earnings on the S&P 500. So let’s see what happens here in the first quarter. But earnings have been very good. And really, when you look at the profit margins that are coming from companies, this is one of the big issues that people are talking about, when you have high inflation costs are going up, does that squeeze profit margins and bring earnings down. And so this particular chart shows the profit margins as a percentage for the S&P 500. By quarter, the dark blue lines there are, you know, the past the gray lines are this year, first, second, third, fourth quarter. So notice that little red arrow there you can see actually earn the profit margins have been coming down. And the expectation is 12.1%. For this first quarter, you know, maybe it’ll be higher by the time we’re done. We’ll see as far as that goes.
But the thing to keep in mind here is that the profit margins are astronomically high prior to this. And you can kind of see that if you look back before 2021, you really see more of an average. So we’re way above average. And in fact, this next chart kind of shows by industry. So the most profitable industry here in the S&P 500 is real estate, second is technology etc. And the dark blue line is the projection for the first quarter. The green line is the five year average. So the expectations are we’re going to be at or a little bit below or a little bit above average earnings. So that’s a good thing. And so as long as they continue to grow, the stock market will continue to grow. Also, earnings are critical. I mean, we talked about all of these things with the Federal Reserve and you can Rain and China’s zero COVID policy and supply chain issues. All of that is how do they impact earnings. That’s what that’s what we’re talking about. And so earning season like we’re in right now is very critical. The last several quarters, we’ve had the market dive down based on the numbers for inflation that came out, and then earnings came out and the market came back up, because earnings were quite good. Although it does seem to be the second half of earnings season, especially when the big tech companies report and such where that happens, but so this will be very interesting to watch as far as that goes. Looking forward to that. And then just getting back to this, buy, sell or hold. I’ve done a tremendous amount of research looking at different things. And one of the pieces that I look at is, if the S&P 500, the 200, day moving average is still going up. Okay, so that’s the blue line here still going up. And the leading economic indicators have not curled over and started to fall. That is a point that I’m not going to sell, I’m not going to sell until both of those are going down the 200 day moving average and, and the you know, leading indicator. So this particular chart is a basket, showing a basket of 10 different indicators. It’s called the leading economic indicator, the gray bars are recessions. And the blue line is the is the indicator. And if you look closely all the way back to 1960. There in almost every single situation, the indicator curved over first before that recession started. So I’m at least at a hold here. But we have been using some of these points in time we to rebalance. So we rebalanced the portfolios on Tuesday, when the market came down a bit after the inflation number, we hit that 50% retracement. And so rebalancing is kind of like in between a buy and hold in a way. Because we’re still have the same portfolio. We’re just rebalancing, sell little bits of something that did quite well versus everything else, and buy little bits of something that didn’t do as well. And as long as you have great confidence in all of the parts of the portfolio rebalancing in this environment is I think, a really good idea. And so we’ve had some good results with that so far. So that’s what we’re going to be doing.
So at this point, we’re not in a sell position. I know that a lot of people are worried about things that are happening and most of the news is negative and talking about recessions and talking about Ukraine and those types of things. But at the moment, we’re not seeing recession on the immediate horizon here. The market does look forward six to 18 months, we’re not seeing recession really even in that timeframe either could happen we’ll respond to it and deal with it. But at the moment definitely you know a buy and or hold depending on the situation. So that’s what’s happening.