Weekly Thoughts on The Market - Countercyclical Investment Opportunity?
Hello everyone 👋🏻
This week there was a very interesting wall street betting podcast with a community known trader. (Callout @monchella
https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/mauerstrassenwetten/id1572657389?i=1000533215197 )
One of his statements that was surprising to me was that we were currently in a sideways market. Huh? Everything is going to the moon right now, every index is chasing from ATH to ATH. How can that be?
The answer is relatively simple. As a trader, he is always looking for momentum, for big daily percentages, post-volatile stocks. And so sooner or later ends up with small cap stocks. A look at the small cap index 🐘2000 shows that they are actually going sideways since February. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5ERUT?p=^RUT&.tsrc=fin-srch This is hardly surprising after a breathtaking rally last fall/winter.
It's an interesting development. And for investors/traders, with an intermediate time horizon of months or quarters (as is also the case for me, as I am mainly interested in Earnings, Macro Movements, Political Events etc. & in this area quarters are a natural rhythm) will consider if there is a way to generate alpha here by investing countercyclically.
I once compiled the YTD performance of various baskets using python.
As expected, gold had a 0 correlation with the market and bonds had a slightly negative correlation with the market. This is relieving for now, as it still looks for a "normal" investing environment.
I find it interesting that the steel thesis of Arcelor Mittal $MT and Cleveland-Cliffs $CLF correlates so strongly with the overall market. My subjective impression so far has been that steel is responding more strongly to Jpow's "inflation is transitory". Semiconductor manufacturers are reacting more strongly to inflation.
The small caps correlated strongly negatively with the S&P500 in 2021. However, I have added $ARKK and $ARKG to the basket at ⛵️. This brings the whole basket closer to the volatile growth stocks of the traders, but also makes the negative correlation look more extreme, since they have run negative YTD.
I conclude that the steel gang (or value/dividend investors) can hedge their portfolio well with chip makers or small cap growth stocks in the current market environment. Steel benefits from inflation, chips & small caps benefit from passing.
Now might be a good time to rebalance into more small caps to frontrun a reversion-to-the-mean over the next 6 months. Or maybe not - stocks go up, down, sideways or in fucking loops. No one can see into the future.
Have a nice Saturday you 🤠
