Latest from BCA Research
The market’s pricing of a soft landing means that geopolitical risks are becoming more, not less, relevant in 2024. US domestic divisions will invite challenges as foreign powers rightly fear that US policy will turn more hawkish after the election.
A low multiplier effect of stimulus will reduce the magnitude of the rebound in China's business activities in 2024. The housing market downturn will likely persist, and the ongoing household deleveraging also poses a significant challenge to China’s economic recovery.
The Santa Claus rally has been fueled by investors optimism about a soft landing which is the least likely macro outcome in 2024. A pullback in the market is imminent as the probability of "too hot" or "too cold" will get priced in. We are downgrading Software and Services on a tactical basis to take profits but maintaining a strategic overweight in the same trade.
Despite the blah opening to the year, we do not think stocks have reached an inflection point. We expect that incoming data will continue to flatter the soft-landing narrative for another couple of months, helping the S&P 500 to establish a new all-time high before the rally runs out of steam.
The USHQ SMID outperformed its benchmark by 1.2% and the USHQ Large Cap portfolio moderately underperformed. We also show in the intro that US stocks are overbought from a technical and sentiment standpoint, suggesting caution in January.
Following today’s US jobs data release, the Joshi rule real-time US recession indicator inched up to 0.18 and is now just a whisker from its recession event-horizon of 0.20.
The sector model continues to favor IT and Consumer Discretionary stocks and downgraded Industrials. We also take a deeper look into the exceptional performance of our Value L/S factor and find weakness in small-to-mid cap growth stocks.
A soft landing can be achieved but not maintained. We are cutting our tactical recommendation on stocks from overweight to neutral and scaling back our long-duration stance.
MacroQuant has upgraded equities to overweight at the expense of bonds. Cash remains neutral.