The Upside: Themes driving global markets in October 2025
Denise Chisholm is a student of history who uses historical probability analysis when looking at the markets in her role as Director of Quantitative Market Strategy. On this episode of The Upside, Denise will share the sectors, trends and underlying indicators moving markets in October 2025 that investors should be looking at to evaluate the strength of the market.
Transcript
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Subtitles are AI-Generated.
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Hello and welcome to The Upside. I'm Jordan Chevalier.
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US equities continue to hold strong amid the ongoing US federal government
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shutdown. And with earnings season around the corner, what might the end
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of 2025 and Q1 2026 have in store
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for the markets? Joining us today to share her thoughts on the US government
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shutdown, interest rates, and the latest in the valuation story is
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Fidelity Director of Quantitative Market Strategy, Denise Chisholm.
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Denise, it's great to see you.
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Hey, it's great to be back Jordan.
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Let's start with the government shutdown in the U.S.
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We've got a couple questions coming in.
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What exactly does that mean? A federal U.
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S. Government shutdown.
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Yeah, it means all non-essential government work essentially halts,
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and many people are sent home from their jobs,
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and like furloughed is the coin of the phrase, which
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means that a lot of government employees are going without pay right now.
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Usually what happens, in fact 100% of the time this has happened in the past,
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you do get back pay as a government employee.
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I was actually part of the government shutdown when I worked as a government
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contractor in the 90s and I did in fact receive back pay during
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that time. But this has happened around 20 times when you go with
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the data back to the 1970s.
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And the interesting part is most of them last just hours.
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And then we're about five or so instances, which if you sort of couple them
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together, have lasted 15 days or longer.
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Now, you would think that that is a long time to shut down a government and
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that must have an impact on earnings or the economy.
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But when you study the historical trend, it really doesn't.
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It doesn't impact industrial production.
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It doesn't impact GDP and it doesn't impact earnings and because
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of that, from a long-term perspective, you see very little impact on
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stock markets, which is essentially what you're seeing right now.
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So you think, is there anything different about this time, anything different
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this period, or maybe if the length is different, do you see that changing?
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Or you think there's the data that suggests that this is sort of similar to
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what's happened in the past.
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Yeah, the length is always very variable, right?
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The longest we've seen historically is about 35 days, which again, over a
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month, that seems like a long time.
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Length in and of itself hasn't been enough of a shock to the U.S.
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Economy to matter that much to, again, GDP earnings or
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anything that drives the equity market.
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What could be different this time is that this administration has said,
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well, maybe instead of giving back pay this time, we won't.
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Or maybe instead, of hiring workers back, we want.
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Now, again, we'll see how this all plays out if these are just political
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threats, which is something of what you see in a government
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shutdown. But even if you look at that in terms of the federal
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workforce, we can go back to those austerity measures we saw in 2012,
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where the federal workforce shrank by five percent.
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Which was an epic amount relative to history.
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I mean, we saw something like it in the 1990s.
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And even that seems like a whole lot and it would have a lot of impact.
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But when you add it all up, as much as there's idiosyncratic problems for
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certainly all those workers involved, it's usually not enough to move the
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needle as it relates to the economy.
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And therefore, while it seems slightly insensitive, stocks
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tend to look through the noise to the bigger driver, which tends
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to be earnings, which right now are going up.
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And another driver that we're seeing is, of course, interest rates.
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Can you talk about your view overall about the Fed's direction
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with interest rates right now in the U.S.?
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Yes, let's go to the data. I think that there's two debates about the Fed.
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One is that the Fed should have been lowering interest rates already,
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has committed a policy mistake because of the soft labour market.
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So we'll take that as sort of one side of the argument.
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The other side of argument is look, we just entered GDP of 3.9%
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on a quarter on quarter basis, the economy is still strong.
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To the extent that the fed reduces interest rates too much, that might reignite
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inflation. So let's take those two and look at the historical data and
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see if we can make sense out of either argument.
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The interesting part from my vantage point is that when I look at the
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historical data about real interest rates, the higher real interest rates have
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been, the more likely GDP is to grow over the next
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year. So as much as we think all else equal that there are these lagged impacts
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to monetary policy, what I see in the data is more often
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than not, which is not to say every time, the Fed actually follows the
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cycle rather than creates it.
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So if you tell me this time the Fed seems like they're a little bit late and
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that employment has been a little soft and they should have been cutting
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earlier, I don't see that particularly different from history
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and I don t see it particularly problematic right now because we
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have a whole lot of leading indicators like corporate profits that I was just
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talking about that do suggest that the soft patch we're seeing in employment
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might actually be better as we go through the course of the year.
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On the other side of the argument, I think, is this potentially
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re-ignition of inflation on the other side if they lower interest rates too
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much. For me, when you look at the core CPI and you strip out shelter,
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which is its own lagged component, our core CPIX shelter has
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been running around 2%.
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This is even with the tariff impact that we've seen.
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So you're not seeing a broad-based rise in the generalised
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price level. You are certainly seeing some rises in some good prices that
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have tariffs accompanied with them, but you're not seeing broad-base inflation.
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Inflation, when I look through history, is just a whole lot harder to get
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than you would think. I mean, look at Japan all these years later.
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So it's not just stimulative monetary policy that ignites inflation.
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In fact, there's not a historical relationship between interest
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rates and inflation, ironically speaking.
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So I don't think that the Fed is in policy mistake territory right
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now, and I don't think that we're in danger of reigniting inflation,
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which puts us in the sweet spot for equity market returns.
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Denise, you briefly mentioned tariffs there, I'd like to spend a little more
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time on that. When you were on the show last month, we talked about how much or
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how little the market has priced in these tariffs.
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Has there been anything that you've seen since the last time we spoke that
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would indicate a shift in that tariff pricing?
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Yeah, not really. I mean, I think that the irony of it all is that peak
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uncertainty was in fact a buying opportunity as it suggests
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in the data, meaning that, yes, it was uncertain.
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Things are still uncertain in terms of how it will play out.
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People are still arguing about who is bearing the brunt of the tariff
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increases. And there are some arguments, you know, 60% is borne by the
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consumer, maybe it's only 40%.
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Does the foreign producer to bear some.
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We're still not sure and we'll have to sort of sift through all the data on
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that, but what is very clear is that it's being absorbed,
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right? And we are most of the way through of the impact of terrorists.
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It's been dragged out longer than we thought.
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Which means it's less of a shock to income than I think the Fed thought and
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less of a shock, to CPI than the Fed though, which is sort of back to
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the Fed. One of the reasons I think that they're lowering interest rates is
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because they can, not because they must, because employment is so weak,
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because despite tariffs, inflation is still coming in about
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in line or potentially even a little bit lower than they expected, especially
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when we started the year with the tariff announcements.
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So, that gets to this renormalization of monetary policy
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at the same time that tariffs appear to be absorbed without
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a shock to the U.S. Consumer.
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The real consumption growth is hanging in pretty well.
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Real income growth is also hanging in well, which means that the consumer is
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in good shape in aggregate despite the impact of the tariffs.
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Looking now to valuations, is there anything to suggest that these
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higher valuations continuing long term, is that just a
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net positive when you look at overall markets in the investors or is there a
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little bit of nuance there within that valuation story?
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I'll just generally be the naysayer on valuations in the sense that
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when you just study the data, I really have a hard time finding anything
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predictive about it. So when you quartile it out, you say from the cheapest
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quartile to the most expensive quartile, what are my go-forward odds of a
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market advance? The market goes up 75% of the time regardless of valuation.
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Right, so we can think about, you know, valuation.
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It makes sense to say that it should impact your risk reward.
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But when I look at long-term history, I can't prove it at all.
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And in fact, sometimes you prove the opposite, meaning that if the stock market
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goes up a lot, you can see in your crystal ball that once the market goes
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up, it usually goes up, right? A ball in motion stays in motion.
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This is why momentum is actually a factor.
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So you say, okay, well, wait a minute. What if your starting point is really
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expensive? Well, then it would make sense that you go up less, right.
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Wrong. You actually go up more and more often.
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So what you find is valuation, as much as we think it might mitigate your
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future returns, what you'll find is it's almost a measure of confidence and
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almost like stocks get it right because the valuation expands ahead
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of time. It usually means that mid cycle earnings are actually
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just stronger than you think because stocks move in advance of earnings.
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So as Tom Thoms valuation is just an expression of confidence in those earnings
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that you see are more durable. And I think that there's a real reason for that
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this cycle and it's around the tax that we've seen in the U.S.
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Which total about 700 basis points of effective tax cuts between
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sort of bonus depreciation and R&D expensing.
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You add that on top of the fact that the Federal Reserve is re-normalising
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rates because they can, not because they have to, and all of a sudden median
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earnings growth which is now starting to inflect higher looks That's a whole
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lot more door. So the stock market isn't going to wait for that
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durability to be evidence.
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It's actually going to price it in ahead of time, which is usually what the
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stock market does. So hence you're seeing this valuation expansion, which
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to me, again, quantitatively, I don't find it problematic.
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And in some ways all of those mantras we've seen about higher for longer in
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terms of inflation and the Fed, I think we got to get used to the higher for
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long. Of valuations as well, especially in the U S.
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Denise, let's look now a little more closely on some specific sectors.
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I wanna talk about energy and then gold.
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Let's start with energy. What are your thoughts right now on energy?
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What are you seeing? What is the data supporting there with that sector?
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Yeah, I find energy a problematic sector and it's mainly around the fact that
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fundamentals just aren't in a position to be meaningfully good.
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So energy is a tricky sector in that it is very cyclical, meaning
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that there's not a secular uptrend like you see in technology where companies
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have just gotten more and more profitable cycle to cycle.
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So what you usually just see is this very steady arc towards
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a median profitability. Now, 2022 was the most profitable this sector
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has ever been in my data set going back to the 1960s.
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We're still re-normalising from that.
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Now you add on to that that this means that energy is probably
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still in a low earnings growth situation, especially relative to
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other sectors that are growing like technology, so relative is even worse.
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But energy is one of the only sectors, this little quantity, but hang with me
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for a second, where you get trough multiples on trough earnings.
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A lot of the times when you know stock earnings fall out of bed in a recession
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or at the bottom of the cycle usually get this valuation expansion which makes
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the stocks actually appear oddly expensive but that's just because
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earnings are artificially low well energy is the only cycle where
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investors don't wait for that they don't cushion that blow and you usually get
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multiple so the stocks are valued less on those trough earnings.
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Which makes energy dangerous to play in terms of being
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early because there's more downside in energy statistically than
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most other cyclical sectors.
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So that makes energy, I think, a tricky situation despite the,
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we can debate, you know, excess supply and all of the other geopolitical risk
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premium potentially coming out of it.
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So it's really just the fundamentals I don't think are in good shape to lead
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to outperformance. Gold, on the other hand, is the commodity with
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a much better supply and demand dynamic.
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Now, what you see in the commodity is, again, of all the commodities you look
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at, that is the commodity, both in a long-term uptrend, which is important,
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and two, one of the best supply and demand dynamics because of the buying
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of central banks. Right, you don't see that structural demand
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really anywhere else and you're seeing more buying over this last five-year
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period, then I don't want to say that any other five- year period, but you're
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certainly seeing a secular trend. I think it's a little more complicated to
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make this a function one click down in the equity market to buy the gold
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miners since right now this isn't a problem because gold has gone up so
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much so fast, they have plenty of free cash flow.
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But these are companies that generally cycle to cycle with a lot like energy
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companies Where they usually burn through a lot of that profitability and
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free cash flow because it takes so much money to get it out of the ground So I
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think gold as a commodity looks very interesting still even though it's up a
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lot I'm sure you're likely to see a shakeout, but still looks interesting from
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a supply-demand dynamic But I think that gold miners is a little bit trickier
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when you think about equity relatives I still prefer things like technology
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financials and consumer discretionary versus any of the miners
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Denise, thank you for sharing those insights.
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Gold was the top question that we've received coming in from viewers.
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So very, very happy that you're able to address that.
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Looking now to next year, are there sectors to watch towards sort of the end of
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Q4 here, 2025, or looking to the first half of 2026?
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Things that are on your radar, opportunities or sectors to watched.
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Let's end there.
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Yeah, I think one of the things that I am going to be watching is capex in
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technology. So that is one of big sort of trends that people are talking about
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in AI. Are these capex numbers too big?
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I think that they're eye popping when you think of them on a nominal basis, but
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there is also eye popping free cash flow.
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So you always have to rescale them.
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That's why I look at either CapEx relative to sales or CapEx, relative
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to free cashflow for the technology sector to see if it
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really is impactful or growing above average or in that
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way that looks anomalous.
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Right now, when I look at the data, oddly enough CapEx relative to sale for the
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technology sector is right in the median level of history.
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Meaning that as much as people are saying we are spending so much money
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on AI for this aggregate sector, they have the cash and they have
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sales to be able to spend.
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So I am keeping my eye on that data set for any kind of anomalies, but
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I'm not seeing anything yet.
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Denise, thanks so much again for joining us and sharing your key market
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insights and all the data research.
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We really appreciate it and we'll see you next month.
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Absolutely, great to be here.
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Thanks for watching everyone. Just a quick reminder that Upside webcasts air
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16:52.311 --> 16:55.914
Their values change frequently and past performance may not be repeated.
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Fees, expenses, and commissions are all associated with fund investments.
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Thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next time.
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Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.