FidelityConnects: Jurrien Timmer – The global macro view April 27, 2026
Start your week with leading analysis in your corner. Join Jurrien Timmer, Fidelity’s Director of Global Macro, to better understand what’s moving the markets around the world and to be better prepared for what may be next.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to Fidelity Connects.
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I'm Pamela Richie. As the world adjusts to the new realities of a more
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multi-polar world countries like Canada lay the foundation for further
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fiscal spending and a sovereign wealth fund we learned today.
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For investors the rest of the world fiscal spend, along with
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the US tech propulsion, appear to pave the path for an unstoppable equity
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market. Or does it? Tech earnings this week may either confirm or
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deny the continued acceleration thesis.
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If vigorous spending by both tech CapEx and governments can
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provide investment opportunities through even the most jagged of geopolitical
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resets, can it spell a bullish second half for 2026?
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Joining us here today to help you see how far the needle could move with the
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wind at corporations' backs is Fidelity Director of Global Macro,
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Jurrien Timmer. Warm welcome to you, Jurrien.
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There is lots of fascinating information that you need to guide us through here
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but there's some bright lights out there.
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Welcome.
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Good morning.
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So we kick off the week here ...
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we'll invite everyone to join you and send their questions in, first of all,
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but do tell us what we make, first of all, of the rate story
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with, it looks like, Kevin Warsh right in through the door now, and
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also the earnings. I wonder which piece you want to take first because they're
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both central to this week.
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Why don't we start with earnings, and maybe we could pull up slide
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1 just to show you just a very high frequency chart of the
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S&P on a tick-by-tick basis.
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This is what we wake up to every morning to
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see where it is, it just highlights that low on March
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30th or March 31st, I can't remember exactly which one it
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was, but down 9.8% at the low and has now obviously
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rallied to new highs.
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When we look at that compared to, for instance, slide 3
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which is the 1990 Gulf War analog you
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can see that the market is following that script.
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The bottom panel shows the drawdown in the P/E, and we talked about this last
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week, that the P/E fell twice as much as the P,
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as the price, because of the topic you just raised, which
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is earnings, which we'll get into.
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The market has sort of moved on as if the oil spike will
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be short-lived and will be completely reversed as it was
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back in 1990.
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Of course, that hasn't happened yet.
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Oil is at $97 for WTI.
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The market has sort of moved on and it is embracing
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the earnings boom.
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We can see slide 7, earnings season is underway now
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and about a third of the companies have reported.
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Typical 78% are beating but they're beating by
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a thousand basis points, which is a lot.
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We can see that those incoming waves, if you think about
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this as a surfing metaphor, usually those
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waves crest early and start to decelerate
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as you get closer to earnings season.
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We're seeing the opposite, the waves are getting bigger and they're rising
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further. That shows very strong earnings
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momentum, not only for the current quarter, the last four
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quarters but the incoming quarters as well.
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There's really something big going on.
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It's easy to say in slide
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5 that this is all AI.
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Of course, the AI boom has certainly a big part to do with that.
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We see the various themes, memory, data centres,
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semiconductors, all breaking out very handsomely from
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essentially what were trading ranges.
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It goes to the old market adage that if a stock
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refuses to go down it's
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destined to go up.
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These stocks basically didn't really go down during the
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Iran conflict. I mean, they went down a little bit but they didn't even break
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their holding patterns, and then as soon as the conflict ends, or is
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perceived to have ended, these stocks accelerate again.
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Earnings are really driving the bus here.
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I think the Fed is a little bit on background for now now that the
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market is not expecting any rate cuts anytime soon.
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With Kevin Warsh now clear to come in now that Tom Tillis,
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Senator of North Carolina.
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has backed off from his blocking, now that
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DOJ probe has ended, Warsh will be
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confirmed, I'm sure, or I presume, and
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we'll have the Warsh-Bessent Treasury Fed.
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This will be a new era.
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So just explain, I mean, so much of this ...
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we kind of think that Scott Bessent had a
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view on how this would all work ultimately, knowing when he came into the
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position that time would be ultimately for the Powell Fed in
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his term.
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Take us to the fiscal backdrop of how this is going to work and
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kind of why it needs to work for the US economy, not just for
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the stock markets, which is also important to what you're talking about, but
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for the economy of the US.
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Let's go to slide 14.
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Actually, let's go to Slide 15 first.
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A big narrative, and it's not unique to the
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Republicans, it was a big narrative under the Democrats, any kind of
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populist administration which, of course, the Biden administration was as well,
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has focused on this wealth inequality,
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Wall Street versus Main Street, and the stock market may
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be doing well but most people don't feel that good.
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It's called the K-shaped recovery or the K-shaped economy.
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You can see it very clear. I even put a K in that.
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If you look at GDP versus potential GDP,
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which is the line in the yellow at the top, and you look at
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the difference between those two it shows you that the economy
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continues to grow above potential.
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The economy is growing really nicely.
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We're in mid-cycle. We just talked about earnings.
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At the surface level everything looks really, really good.
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Then you look at consumer confidence, the University of Michigan in the purple
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there, and it is basically at an all-time low.
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That shows the disconnect between Wall
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Street and Main Street. There are a number of reasons for it.
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It's the political polarity, of course, the [indecipherable]
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separates the results by political affiliation.
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As you might imagine, the Republicans are feeling a lot better
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about the economy than the Democrats right now.
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The opposite will be true under a different administration.
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I think what's mostly driving this is the fact that the CPI index
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is up about 30% since 2020.
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The growth rate may only be 3% down from 9
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but that's cold comfort for the average American who is living paycheque to
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paycheque, who is literally paying 30% more than he
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or she did six years ago.
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This is part of the broader political narrative.
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The other part of this, of course, is the deficit, the debt, which
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is now close to $40 trillion, about
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112% of GDP.
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Scott Bessent, and if we pull up slide 14, knows as well as anyone,
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or better than anyone, that can
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become unsustainable if the economy does not grow
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fast enough. When we look at the 10-year
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yield, which is there in that triangle, it's been very, very quiet.
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That, I think, in part shows you how much respect Bessent gets in the market
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because nobody wants to bet against them, and if Bessent wants
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4 1/2% or lower long rates then he's going to figure out a way to get
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that done. You can do that with debt management and things like that.
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I think the Warsh Fed will want to cut rates at the short end,
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steepen the yield curve and then incentivize the banks to
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essentially take over part of the Fed's bloated balance
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sheet. Remember that QE, and we can go to slide 16 here, remember
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QE was a byproduct of the zero lower bound days, the
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financial crisis, COVID.
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When you can't push rates any lower because they're at zero
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Bernanke back then, and Powell more recently, relied
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on the balance sheet to try to stimulate, but it's
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really only when that happens that it's necessary.
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When you look at the Fed's balance sheet now
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it's 6 1/2 trillion. Warsh would argue that nothing good happens when the Fed
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has such a big thumb on the market that you get
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price discovery signals going awry and, again,
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the Wall Street versus Main Street, that if the banks were to own that
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debt they could multiply it, because those are then reserves
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that go into lending, and then Main Street would benefit
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from more credit availability rather than
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Wall Street because the asset owners tend to be wealthier
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in this country. If the Fed is pushing down risk premia
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in the bond market it's the rich that supposedly benefit the
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most.
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I think that's the broader narrative here.
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There will be coordination between the Fed and the Treasury.
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Then the question is how much is too much?
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If Warsh and Bessent really get
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politicized, which I'm not expecting and I hope it doesn't happen,
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and let's say the Fed pushes rates to 2
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1/2 under the rationalization that R-star is much lower than we all think, and
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the bond market says no, that's not justified then the curve will bear
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steepen and you get that 5% yield and then you have problems.
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Fascinating. You did an incredible heat map that so
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many of the pieces that you just talked about now sort of correlate to things
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going on. I wonder if we can ... I think it's slide 2 in the order that you
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have things. Everyone needs to get out their spectacles here to take a
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look. In any case there's there's some fascinating pieces.
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I would just pick out the discussion of equity vol,
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how it has returned back to ...
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it's been a very volatile month and a half ...
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but it's returned back to its averages right now which, again, people
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sort of have recency bias, you kind of can't believe that.
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What else would you point out here that is our reality today?
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Obviously, it's a little hard to read but this is essentially what I,
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again, wake up to every morning because when the markets are
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in a state of stress or dislocation when big
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events happen ...
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I did the same thing during COVID, obviously with Iran, there
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could be other episodes as well ...
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one service I try to do for my colleagues,
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the PMs including the ones who are running the Canadian assets, I'm
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trying to figure out what are the important moving parts
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and how are they getting better or worse.
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That's why I do these heat maps, if something is getting worse it
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gets more red, if something is getting better it gets more green or less red.
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We're not going to trade off of these things, that's not how we make
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portfolio decisions, but it helps kind of get a
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sense of are things getting worse or better?
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Are they becoming more stressful or less stressful?
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Down the middle of that chart, as you just mentioned, are various
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volatility indices, the VIX, the MOVE which is the volatility
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for bonds, you've got the CIVX which is volatility on the
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dollar, and you've got OVX which is volatility on oil.
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Usually markets will bottom
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when things start getting less bad, not when things get
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good because then the signal's already passed, but when they
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get less bad. Usually when that second derivative reaches
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an extreme that's when the market starts to behave better.
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For my colleagues here, if they're looking to rebalance
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those are important signals.
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I'm also highlighting this recently just on stage, if you're going to be
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in Scottsdale next week you'll
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see it on the big screen. It's also a way to
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help, not calm investors but to let them know that we're
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looking at all the things and therefore they don't need to
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panic, basically. We have their back, basically, that's kind of
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the reason we do this. On a normal week I'm not looking at heat maps
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but at times of dislocation we do.
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Let's go into earnings a bit further. You mentioned it there off the top.
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One of the things I thought was fascinating in some of the work that you've
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done is that it is a global trend, the strength of earnings, which I
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think we knew that three months ago but it was almost we were left a
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little bit in the wilderness there as the Iran War took hold
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of the global narrative.
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But yet EM, it is a global story on the earnings front.
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Do you want to just take us to that and remind us that the whole world is
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taking part? It doesn't mean it can't be interrupted, I guess, but at the
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moment it's looking good.
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We'll pull off slide 10 which I think is a cool visual ...
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not because I made the chart but just because it shows--
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It usually is because you made the chart.
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--it shows different assets. You've got the Mag-7 on the top, the S&P in the
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black, EAFE which is developed non-US in the green, and
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EM in the pink.
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What's cool about it is because they're all measured on the same logarithmic
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scale. That allows you to look at the slopes on an
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apples to apples basis.
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You can clearly see that, of course, over the past five years
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or so the Mag-7 was completely dominating.
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You can see that EM especially is really coming
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to life in the last couple of quarters.
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It helps explain that this is not
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just about AI or the One Big Beautiful
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Bill Act, this really is a global story and it's no longer
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dominated by the US.
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It's not even dominated by the Mag-7 anymore.
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My sense is on the EM side is that
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part of this narrative, I think, is that commodities have
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become a strategic asset.
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Actually, those positive squiggles remind me
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of kind of the post-financial crisis days.
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Remember in 2008 during the GFC it really
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was China that pulled the global economy kind of
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out of the dumps.
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It was the Fed with QE, it was a cycle that went so extreme
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that it had kind of weeded out all the bad credit,
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or it weeded out all the leverage, let me put it that way, but it was China
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that did this monster infrastructure stimulus.
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Back then it was the reflation trade.
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So China stimulates, it builds a lot of stuff, commodities go up,
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the dollar goes down, the world booms.
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Those days are long gone because China built everything and now has
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a deflated housing bubble to show for it.
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Now with Iran and with tariffs and de-globalization
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and with Russia and its oil, and
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Venezuela, that story there, you could tell that commodities have become
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strategic assets again.
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Even now we're hearing stories, you know, we're talking about, of course, the
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Strait of Hormuz and whether Iran can collect tolls on the ships,
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but we're hearing stories out of Indonesia with the Malacca
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Straits, whether it's looking at that and say, well, why don't we do that?
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You can see a fragmented economy with
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fragmented shipping and strategic significance
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to commodities. Maybe we're back into that mindset
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for emerging markets and the countries that have the commodities,
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including Canada, of course. That's why I think Canada is looking better
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than it has in a long time.
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And launching a sovereign wealth fund because you might as well make some money
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on all that.
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You look at the sectors themselves, it
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seems like if you were to go to the US for sure tech is right at the top, and
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we understand why, why aren't the commodity producers a little higher
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up on the ranks there?
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The AI boom has, of course, gone a very, very long way.
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Actually, why don't we pull up slide 8.
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The AI boom has come a long way.
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You can argue it's priced in or whether it's not priced in but commodities
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were left for dead for a long, long time.
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Actually, instead of this chart let's go to, where
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are you, slide 17.
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Commodities were in the dumps for years.
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They moved up in 2022 because we had
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the inflation spike during Covid.
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They fell again and now they're up again because copper
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is strong, gold was strong, is now kind of treading water a
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little bit, and, of course, the oil trade.
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If we look at this on a longer term basis, on slide 18,
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we can see that the super cycle or the secular bull remains
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intact.
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I think this is just a matter of the last
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10+ years it was large-cap growth
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that dominated and anything that was value did not.
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Energy stocks, especially, but really any commodity stocks, whether it
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was industrial metals or what have you, I think had a bad
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track record. An oil company, whenever oil prices
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would go up, you know, you talk to one of our PMs here in equities
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they'll say, well, if oil prices go up and you make a higher margin send me
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that back via a special dividend or a buyback.
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Don't go spend that on drilling new
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wells, that's not capital discipline.
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For decades oil companies would do that and now
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the big ones are much more savvy because it's people like Will Danoff
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telling them just give it back to us,
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earn the royalties and let us keep the money.
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I think that's part of the story as well.
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If we go to slide 19, commodities, and
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I'm not talking about the actual commodities, not the stocks,
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they are powerful diversifiers.
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They don't always work.
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Over the very, very long time they are not a great diversifier
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because they earn the inflation rate but they're very
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volatile so the Sharpe ratios are not that good, but when they
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work they work well. In this chart I'm showing the 50-day correlation
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over time during the Iran episode here.
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On the vertical axis is the correlation to the S&P, on the horizontal
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axis from left to right is the correlation to bonds.
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You can see on the right are all the bond type asset classes, at the top
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are the equity asset classes, in the middle in that yellow oval are
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the diversifiers, managed futures, the US dollar,
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gold, Bitcoin, et cetera.
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The BCOM, which is the Bloomberg Commodity Index, is towards the lower left.
[00:20:47.212]
It's interesting that the BCOM is over time becoming
[00:20:51.183]
more and more negatively correlated to
[00:20:55.387]
both stocks and bonds.
[00:20:57.422]
Now, to me, that's the holy grail because bonds
[00:21:01.627]
are just as likely to cause trouble, I think, in the next five years than
[00:21:05.864]
equities might so you want stuff that is uncorrelated to
[00:21:10.135]
both of those. There are not many assets that do that but commodities
[00:21:14.106]
is one of them.
[00:21:15.073]
Let's go to Bitcoin because Bitcoin's had a very interesting and hard to read,
[00:21:18.844]
in some ways, story over the last, well, maybe forever.
[00:21:22.781]
More recently it was all about, oh, yeah, going into a second
[00:21:26.752]
winter, for sure.
[00:21:29.121]
Take us through the rationale of how that could be true but it might also not
[00:21:32.557]
be. You have some interesting work here.
[00:21:35.394]
Let's start with slide 20.
[00:21:38.063]
Bitcoin is really fascinating right now.
[00:21:42.334]
This is my 60/20/20, just a model portfolio on the top.
[00:21:46.972]
You've got these [audio cuts out] curves at the bottom and you can see that the
[00:21:50.842]
big outlier is Bitcoin going from really bad to less bad.
[00:21:55.247]
Again, as I said earlier, that's when you want to pay attention.
[00:22:00.152]
If we go to slide 23,
[00:22:04.856]
this is my Bitcoin chart that shows the power law curve at the
[00:22:08.960]
top. The Bitcoin maxis will tell you you
[00:22:12.931]
buy, you never sell, diamond hands, blah, blah.
[00:22:16.668]
I'm an asset allocator, if we could pull up slide 22
[00:22:21.006]
for a second, different assets
[00:22:25.410]
have different values at different times, why would I treat Bitcoin
[00:22:29.648]
any different than I would any other asset?
[00:22:32.551]
For me, this is the menu.
[00:22:34.419]
I like to cook, as you know, I like a big menu with things to choose from.
[00:22:38.957]
Commodities are on the top right now, Bitcoin is at the bottom,
[00:22:43.095]
everything else is in between.
[00:22:47.065]
We go back to slide 23 here, Bitcoin peaked at 126,000.
[00:22:51.903]
It went to 60,000 very briefly for a second and it
[00:22:56.441]
kind of was trading around 65, 70.
[00:22:58.610]
It's now in the higher 70s.
[00:23:01.880]
To me, that could very well have completed a
[00:23:06.952]
mild winter, let me put it that way. Previous winters would take it down
[00:23:10.989]
80%, 90%, but as Bitcoin becomes more mature,
[00:23:15.394]
as that curve in the top starts to flatten,
[00:23:19.431]
the rally should become less pronounced and so should the winters.
[00:23:24.236]
When I look at the bottom panel, the deep trended spread between
[00:23:28.273]
gold, and because I do think they are like-minded assets
[00:23:32.377]
that kind of take turns, just like gold and silver might take turns, we're
[00:23:37.215]
at sort of the point where in the past
[00:23:42.053]
Bitcoin would bottom relative to gold.
[00:23:44.790]
At the same time you look at the detrended spread, or just the
[00:23:48.894]
spread between that power law curve, and Bitcoin's
[00:23:53.198]
price it shows the exact same signal.
[00:23:56.735]
Whether I'm premature or whether it goes to 55 or sits
[00:24:00.672]
around for six months before it goes up, doesn't really matter.
[00:24:04.142]
This is a long term asset not a trading asset.
[00:24:07.312]
To me this is a good area and I could see easily Bitcoin
[00:24:11.483]
sort of taking some of the oomph out of gold here
[00:24:15.520]
for a while because gold
[00:24:19.758]
had a very big run as well.
[00:24:22.727]
If another wave does come into play like the last five waves,
[00:24:26.898]
again, if we could pull it up just one second more, you can see that
[00:24:31.403]
obviously you go from lower left to upper right so that is an uptrend, but
[00:24:35.440]
within that you have very clear up and down cycles.
[00:24:39.411]
If we are finishing another down cycle, based on the math of
[00:24:43.482]
those other waves my math shows we could go to
[00:24:47.586]
300,000 from 60,000.
[00:24:49.521]
That's worth playing for.
[00:24:52.090]
In the meantime, slide 25, there's a daily
[00:24:56.161]
chart here that shows that Bitcoin is
[00:25:01.032]
forming what looks to be a bear flag, which would be bearish, that
[00:25:05.403]
would not confirm what I just said.
[00:25:08.139]
It should start to fall here.
[00:25:10.408]
If it doesn't, if it breaks up above this bear flag then it's not a
[00:25:14.412]
bear flag, then it's a new bull market.
[00:25:16.715]
That's what I'm looking for in sort of the high frequency terms right now.
[00:25:20.852]
That's fascinating. Within the story of the secular bull market
[00:25:24.990]
for equities it sounds like ...
[00:25:28.326]
we've obviously had these rotations within and there's been turnover and
[00:25:32.397]
different things that are going on right now in a role for commodity producers
[00:25:37.002]
perhaps within that, what are you looking to for earnings this week
[00:25:41.072]
and maybe more of the outlook story to confirm either
[00:25:45.243]
where we are in the secular bull market, how much strength it has?
[00:25:49.347]
Tell us how you're looking at earnings to fit into the story of the secular
[00:25:52.350]
bull market.
[00:25:54.753]
There's the earnings part and then there's the valuation part.
[00:25:58.757]
Price is at the intersection of the two.
[00:26:00.825]
Maybe we could pull up slide 11 here.
[00:26:04.729]
Price is just at the intersect of those two.
[00:26:08.099]
We know that earnings are growing very fast.
[00:26:11.403]
They're up, I think, 17% year-over-year.
[00:26:16.207]
The 5-year growth rate is about 14%.
[00:26:20.211]
The estimates for the coming years are also in
[00:26:24.549]
the solid double digits.
[00:26:27.252]
We have a productivity story going on with AI.
[00:26:29.955]
We have the expensing story from the OBBBA.
[00:26:33.892]
We have the commodity story globally.
[00:26:37.062]
There's a lot of good things going on.
[00:26:38.930]
The question is what are we paying for those earnings?
[00:26:43.168]
Remember, again, the Iran episode, assuming for a moment it's
[00:26:47.939]
cresting but we don't know that in real time, the
[00:26:51.943]
valuation drawdown was 19%, the price drawdown was 10%.
[00:26:56.781]
If earnings hadn't been growing at double digits it would have been potentially
[00:27:00.819]
a 20% decline like we saw a year ago.
[00:27:03.355]
That would have gotten people a lot more nervous.
[00:27:06.992]
Valuations are still 10% below their peaks so that's
[00:27:11.396]
a good story. Then the question is, again, over the long term how
[00:27:15.333]
much is too much to pay for earnings?
[00:27:18.503]
We look at the CAPE ratio it's 40, it's at nosebleed levels.
[00:27:23.341]
The trailing P/E is in the 20s, a lot of people will still find
[00:27:27.612]
fault with that.
[00:27:29.581]
I look at the risk premium, the equity risk premium through a
[00:27:33.652]
discounted cash flow model and the risk premium is shown in the bottom
[00:27:37.756]
panel, the blue bars.
[00:27:40.058]
When you regress that risk premium for where
[00:27:44.195]
credit spreads are, which is near all-time lows, and where margins
[00:27:48.500]
are, which is at all-time highs at 15 1/2%,
[00:27:54.272]
the risk premium should be 4%, which is more or less where it is.
[00:27:58.843]
It's a good reminder that the market's not stupid.
[00:28:01.713]
It's pretty efficient, wisdom of the crowds.
[00:28:05.116]
Back in 2000 we had a real bubble where
[00:28:09.087]
the market ignored all the fundamentals but we
[00:28:13.158]
don't have that today.
[00:28:15.627]
For now I think we're in good shape but, again, in a couple of years
[00:28:19.731]
if we find out that companies way overspent on data
[00:28:23.668]
centres, what have you, maybe that'll be a different story but
[00:28:27.605]
right now there's strong momentum.
[00:28:30.341]
Would you have a final comment for market participants, they're
[00:28:35.580]
going to watch Chairman Powell's maybe last meeting, we don't know,
[00:28:39.884]
but just sort of thoughts on the changing of the guard there.
[00:28:44.522]
I think Powell, they made some
[00:28:48.593]
mistakes, most notably staying too accommodative in 2021
[00:28:53.832]
when we obviously were in the post-COVID era.
[00:28:56.000]
There was massive fiscal stimulus going on and the Fed looked
[00:29:00.238]
at policy entirely as a supply shock and
[00:29:04.776]
not appreciating that the fiscal impulse would create
[00:29:08.713]
a demand shock, a positive demand shock.
[00:29:11.850]
His record is not perfect but I think he's an honourable, upstanding
[00:29:16.221]
civil servant who did his best.
[00:29:18.289]
We'll see what Warsh does.
[00:29:22.160]
Warsh has a lot of ideas. He thinks the Fed should be
[00:29:26.331]
run differently, I'm sure he will try.
[00:29:29.100]
He's not a believer in the dot plot and all that transparency.
[00:29:32.604]
We'll see what he does. Market conditions have a tendency
[00:29:36.741]
to force themselves on even the most
[00:29:40.979]
resolute or ideological administrators.
[00:29:45.850]
We'll see if Warsh can actually shape the Fed in
[00:29:49.821]
his image or whether the
[00:29:53.925]
market will just force him to go down the same path as Bernanke, Yellen
[00:29:57.962]
and Powell.
[00:29:58.963]
Yeah, maybe a little bit of both, we'll see.
[00:30:01.633]
Jurrien Timmer, wonderful to have you share your research with us, it
[00:30:05.837]
helps so much to set up the week. I hope you have a great week.
[00:30:09.140]
Thank you very much. You too.
[00:30:10.542]
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