After a period of mostly downbeat action, a risk-on mood has taken shape Tuesday, after Goldman and other big corporate names sprinkled around some earnings cheer.
Some investors may still be rattled by last week’s mini meltdown. Perhaps in a bid to calm any uneasy future retirees, Charles Schwab SCHW, -0.80% has been steering clients to a chart from earlier in the year, which shows how three types of investors fared during the past four decades of investing.
There is the stalwart, who stayed the course on his investments no matter what; the reactor who pulled out money in 2008 and stayed out (depicted in red) and the waffler (blue), who moved money out after any downbeat year. The latter two kept saving 10% of their salary. Guess who came out ahead? Yep, the stalwart:
Schwab The stalwart wins out
More of that keep-calm-and-invest-on advice comes from our call of the day, provided by Urban Carmel, the writer behind the Fat Pitch blog and ex-president of UBS Securities in Asia.
“This might feel like the start of a bear market, but that is the least likely outcome,” says Carmel, who suggests investors get ready for higher prices in the weeks and months ahead.
Supporting that perspective, he points to a still-robust U.S. economic expansion and macroeconomic data that have historically weakened before a final equity top, contrary to what many investors might think. Based on that, he doesn’t believe that the stock market will hit a peak (implying a pronounced downturn is imminent) before the end of 2018.
Carmel backs up his view by pointing to momentum in the S&P 500, breadth and sentiment washing out, the latter of which has seen investors flooding into ETFs that bet on equity falls. He says this chart from Dana Lyons at J. Lyons Fund Management as evidence of that:
Still, Carmel says investors should stay alert as the recent selloff hasn’t entirely run its course.
Although, he believes that stocks are set to rise, a “topping pattern” under way for the S&P 500, in which prices weaken before they reverse, is one piece of evidence that Carmel references to support his call for near-term caution. That the broad-market index has just logged a three straight weeks of declines—something that has happened 20 times since 2003—also underscores the market’s fragility, he said. As the following chart shows, in past times that the S&P 500 suffered such a losing streak, the low was eventually retested within the following seven weeks:
Urban Carmel
Check out |Carmel’s full blog here.
Back in May, he was cautioning against seasonal selling, warning that investors could be buying back at higher prices in November. That’s a call that proved to be spot on, with the S&P 500 up by about 4.6% since that point.
Read: Wall Street pundits say recent stock pullback isn’t quite finished
The market
A hefty rally is underway, with the Nasdaq COMP, +0.93% S&P SPX, +0.67% and Dow DJIA, +0.69% well in the black.
Gold US:GCU8 is up a little, while crude US:CLU8 is off and the dollar DXY, -0.18% has dropped against the euro EURUSD, +0.1727% and the pound GBPUSD, +0.5095% .
Check out the Market Snapshot column for the latest action.
Europe SXXP, +1.17% is moving higher and Asian markets ADOW, +0.73% had a mixed session.
The chart
Our chart of the day comes from the latest Bank of America Merrill Lynch fund manager survey (from Oct. 5 to 11), which shows that global growth expectations among money managers has slumped to the lowest levels since November of 2008.
Now, how can growth optimism be so gloomy when the U.S. is on a boom? As BAML analysts explain, the Fed is causing some hopes over U.S. growth to “wane.”
The buzz
Walmart WMT, +1.31% is dipping after cutting its 2019 adjusted earnings outlook. But Goldman Sachs GS, +0.99% and Morgan Stanley MS, +2.51% after both banks topped estimates, Domino’s Pizza DPZ, -4.11% is down after a revenue miss. UnitedHealth UNH, +3.40% BlackRock BLK, -5.30% Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +2.43% results are all rolling in this morning, with Netflix (preview here) NFLX, +0.73% due after the close.
Adobe ADBE, +7.50% is up after reaffirming profit targets.
Read: Bank earnings match forecasts, but fail to light a fire under stocks
U.S. Sec. of State Mike Pompeo has just arrived in Riyadh to discuss the disappearance of missing dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Some suspect the Saudis will say Khashoggi died of an interrogation that went badly wrong, or “rogue killers,” as suggested by POTUS on Monday.
Read: Here’s why oil isn’t rallying despite U.S-Saudi tensions
Tossing shade at big tech rivals, Amazon.com AMZN, +0.80% CEO Jeff Bezos told a Wired audience that he’s not going to turn down working with the Pentagon. At the same conference, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said his company needs to work on filter bubbles, and Google’s GOOGL, +1.77% chief executive Sundar Pichai defended his company’s plan to explore a search engine tailored for users in China.
Microsoft MSFT, +1.78% co-founder Paul Allen is dead at 65 after battling cancer a second time.
Industrial production, job openings and a home builders’ index are all on tap this morning on the data front.
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know, (but were afraid to ask) about investing in pot stocks. Heard of Canopy Growth WEED, -0.96% ? It is the industry’s $4 billion gorilla. Plus, Tilray’s TLRY, -2.40% global ambitions and red flags around IGC.
The quote
Bloomberg News
Kevin Systrom, co-founder and chief executive officer of Instagram Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., on Monday, June 20, 2016
“No one ever leaves a job because everything’s awesome.”—That was Instagram co-founder and former chief executive Kevin Systrom, who made the comments at that Wired conference weeks after he and his partner Mike Krieger abruptly left Facebook FB, +1.38%
The stat
13 million—that is how many civilians in Yemen are at risk of starving to death over the next three months, in what the United Nations has warned could be the “worst famine in a century.” Yemen has been locked in civil war for three years after Iran-backed Houthi rebels took control of a swath of the country. A blockade by the Saudis, which back the government, is keeping most aid out.
Some are also using the fact it’s #WorldFoodDay to drive home the starvation in Yemen:
'We live in agony'
Starving families in Yemen are eating boiled tree leaves to survive. #WorldFoodDay pic.twitter.com/ka8bNELSz1
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 16, 2018
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