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Welcome to The Observatory. The Observatory is how we at Prometheus monitor the evolution of the economy and financial markets in real time. The insights provided here are slivers of our research process that are integrated algorithmically into our systems to create rules-based portfolios. We also just released our latest Month In Macro note, which over 45 pages, explains our current assessment of economic and market conditions. You can read it here:
Today, we offer our assessment of recent equity market price action. Markets have been propelled higher by liquidity improvements and modest improvements in earnings expectations. These factors have resulted in an equity trend that our systems have exploited in our Prometheus ETF Portfolio. We discuss all this and more.
At a macroeconomic level, we can decompose equity returns into their constituent drivers of growth, inflation, liquidity, and discount rates using our proprietary measures. Over the last year, equities have been primarily driven by liquidity, with inflation dragging on returns:
To further contextualize these returns, we show the cumulative returns attributable to our growth, inflation, liquidity, and discount rate factors. In the most recent month, growth, inflation, liquidity, and discount rates have contributed 1.62%, 3.04%, -2.2%, & 0.5%, respectively. We show the cumulative contributions to total returns over the last year below:
In addition to these macroeconomic decompositions, we can decompose equity returns into those coming from changes in earnings expectations and valuations. Over June, the S&P 500 rose 4.66%, primarily driven by valuations. Earnings expectations and valuations contributed 0.16% & 4.5% to the 4.66% rise in markets. Below, we show the sequential evolution of market prices, along with our decomposition of returns:
As we can see above, in line with recent gains from liquidity, valuations have expanded. Over the last year, the S&P 500 has been dominantly driven by valuations, with total returns rising by 14.45%. We show cumulative returns on the S&P 500 over the last year, decomposed into earnings expectations (-1.73%) and valuations (-1.73%):
We further decompose these yearly returns into their sector contributions. We begin by showing the primary drivers of the S&P 500. We show the top three drivers in blue (Technology, Financials, Industrials) and the bottom three in red (Real Estate, Utilities, Materials):
We drill down into these total returns by isolating the changes in earnings expectations. We show the top three drivers in blue (Consumer Staples, Utilities, Industrials) and the bottom three in red (Financials, Consumer Discretionary, Technology):
Finally, we examine the contributions of sectors to valuations changes. We show the top three drivers in blue (Technology, Consumer Discretionary, Industrials) and the bottom three in red (Communications, Utilities, Energy):
Zooming back into the most recent month, we show the composition of the most recent strength in equity markets. We show the sector-wise composition of the most recent months’ returns, changes in earnings expectations, and changes in valuations below:
As we can see above, the increase in equity prices is consistent with a broad-based increase in both earnings expectations (consistent with growth) and valuations (consistent with liquidity). However, we think it is also important to keep in mind the big-picture context here, i.e., earnings remain cyclically weak across the board. We show earnings expectations and our sector diffusion index to illustrate the same:
While earnings dynamics point to weakness, the strength in liquidity conditions continues to contribute to a robust equity trend, which continues to be flagged by our systems:
As shown above, our equity trend signal continues to generate extremely strong trend readings. In line with these measures, our non-linear trend process continues to flag long prospective positions in equities:
Liquidity conditions continue to support valuations, and earnings expectations have marginally improved. These are macro conditions that active investors can exploit. At the same time, fundamental growth risks remain as business conditions remain weak. We continue to manage the risk and reward here carefully. Until next time.