Half-Full Or Half-Empty?
There are a number of lenses through which one can view the ongoing equity rally following another banner quarter for stocks.
One such lens shows you a bifurcated market defined, like society, by "haves" and "have-nots." The haves are big corporates and specifically big "tech," with the scare quotes to denote that I'm referring here to "tech" in the informal, colloquial sense that we typically employ to capture mega-caps that aren't formally classified as Tech, capitalized. The have-nots are al
Maybe I’m missing something, but the have-nots seem to have this in the bag: A partial list of companies that just hit 52-week highs includes: Citigroup (C), Celanese (CE), Coinbase (COIN), ConocoPhillips (COP), Discover Financial (DFS), Disney (DIS), Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), General Electric (GE), General Motors (GM), Huntington Bancshares (HBAN), Hartford Financial Group (HIG), MicroStrategy (MSTR), PNC Financial (PNC), Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD), Spotify (SPOT), Target (TGT), Truist Financial (TFC), Western Digital (WDC).
Companies that recently hit or are near their 52-week highs include: Aflac (AFL), Cleveland Cliffs (CLF), Robinhood (HOOD), and WestRock Co. (WRK).
Companies that have made powerful moves off their 52-week lows include: Broadcom (AVGO), Chipotle (CMG), CrowdStrike (CRWD), JP Morgan (JPM), Lowe’s (LOW), Micron (MU), Qualcomm (QCOM), Taiwan Semi (TSM), and Uber (UBER).
And this is far from an exhaustive list.
Yup – broadening market, lots of targets for stock picking. I’ve been trying to figure out if stock action looks like early cycle, mid cycle, or late cycle? Or it is everything cycle – which would be alarming?
Trying to explain an end-of-quarter as having to do with changing earnings expectations rather than simple, old-fashioned qtr-end window dressing seems like a reach to me.
(Generated by an AI algo)
That’s fair, but what PM feels compelled to window-dress in regional banks, legacy auto OEMs, insurance, copper miners, etc? These are names miniscule in indicies, unknown to clients, un-meme’d.
“We gotta buy something but Nvidia is too rich for us… “
Plenty of stocks deep under water, just look at most of the gold mining stocks. Some of those are trading at historically low multiples. It’s a tough environment from some PMs in my opinion. I and others were already positioning portfolios on a more conservative footing last year by cutting exposure to the overvalued AI stocks.