SCHA News and Press, Schwab U.S. Small-Cap From 01/09/23

Summary Top-down and bottom-up forecasts are increasingly diverging, and we think 2023 will be largely about how these divergences resolve themselves. In commodities, after a major spike in 2022, top-down commentators point to slowing growth and inflation, and the historical pattern of ...

Summary When valuing or analyzing a company, I find myself looking for and using macro data (risk premiums, default spreads, tax rates) and industry-level data on profitability, risk and leverage. Much of my focus, when it comes to data, is on company-specific variables, rather than mac...

Summary Investors continue to remain optimistic that the Fed will pivot and lower rates in 2023. Friday's rally was fueled by hopes that the economy was weakening per the December employment report. The Fed's own projections communicate their expectations and what they will tolerate...

Summary This is not an article about the airline industry, it is about this false notion that transitioning to the cloud, is a luxury. This is about enterprises cutting their IT development budgets, this is tantamount to an enterprise cutting its own throat, and it is not just Southwest...

Summary The Household report had been significantly lower than the Headline Report going back to April of this year. Looking at the quarterly Birth/Death data shows that 41% of Q3 jobs were made up of the Birth/Death assumptions. The underlying weakness in the data is getting missed...

Summary 5 out of 10 leading indicators suggest the economy is not heading for a recession. However, 3 out of 10 of these leading indicators suggest the economy is heading for a recession. 2 out of these 10 leading indicators provide a neutral outlook of the economy. Overall, the...

Summary Avoiding growth last year paid enormous dividends, but I didn’t predict that growth stocks would fall in 2022, just that I couldn’t own them and fulfill our fiduciary duty. Near-term stock market performance is negatively correlated with economic growth. Commod...

Summary The stock market needs to fall around 20% to be at parity with lower-rated investment-grade bonds. The US corporate bond market is still more attractive than the US stock market. Be ready for the stock market to fall further after the Fed stops tightening, when the recession...

Summary Last year marked an inflection point for myriad historic global Bubbles. Attempts to gauge the status of market financial conditions will be obscured by ongoing market instability. Market structure will make the Fed’s job only more challenging. Bubble: A sel...

Summary The December CPI report is critical to the current market narrative. After back-to-back cooler-than-expected CPI readings, markets have gotten very optimistic about disinflation in 2023. All it will take is one misstep along the way to kill the market's hope of inflation mel...