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Tracking the meltdown 
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Downunder Daily : Rhythm of Cruelty




It's trite but true: markets never move in a straight line. More to the point, extended bear markets always have tradable counter-trend rallies. Colleague Bill Smith has noted the current market rhyming with the extended 2000-02 sell-down (Exhibit 1).

Short-term calls are not my forte, but the pre-conditions for some recovery seemed to come into place over the past 2-3 weeks: 1) sentiment indicators were bleak; 2) investor earnings expectations were being slashed; 3) volatility had increased (although the VIX index had not returned to the extremes seen over the prior 18 months); and 4) short interest had sharply increased.

The rise in short interest is particularly noteworthy. It reached record levels for the S&P 500 (Exhibit 2). It was off the chart for financials: according to Bill, short interest in banks stood at 11.2% of shares outstanding at end June. By way of comparison, short interest peaked at around 3% of the IT sector in the midst of the 2000-02 bear market.

Some, but not all, of our strategists are now recommending that investors trade the bounce. Our emerging market equity team has gone overweight equities (see Jonathan Garner, Buy Back: Raising Equities Weighting To 6% OW, 10 July). Likewise, our investment-grade credit team expects a bounce in credit (see Gregory Peters, Tactical Turn, 18 July).

Amidst this tactical finessing, remember the bigger picture point: this is not the end of the bear market, in my view. I continue to think that we are at the early stage of what is effectively the second of two bear markets. The first bear market was centered on western world financials; the second will be driven by a cyclical decline in global growth and earnings.

It is too early in the global growth slowdown cycle to think that markets can look through the bad news to come. In many economies, only the first signs of slowdown are appearing. (For the latest summary of our forecasts, see Richard Berner, Global Forecast Snapshots, 18 July). For the US, the recession isn't expected until later this year. (Our US economics team expects GDP to fall in Q4 2008/Q1 2009).

For markets, there remains a critical difference between now and the conditions that signaled an end to the TMT bear market: the trough in equities in the prior cycle occurred almost 3 years into what proved to be a four-year cycle of monetary policy easing. Now, however, we remain in a tightening cycle. Exhibit 3 shows an unweighted average of policy rates of 47 (non-G7) central banks. A net balance of 20 banks have tightened over the past 13 weeks.

Against that backdrop, I continue to insist that the biggest risk for investors now is value traps. Equities may appear cheap, but earnings can fall a lot further. Even in the US, the market furthest into the earnings decline, profits look high on a long-term view (Exhibit 4). The earnings bubble has a lot more air to release.

What is likely to change in the second bear market is relative sector performance (Exhibit 5). As growth becomes a greater concern than inflation, the sector outperformers of the past year will start to suffer. Our US strategy team has turned cautious on energy and materials, a shift that fits with the prospective global growth slowdown (see Abhijit Chakrabortti, Fracture: Materials Breaking, 15 July).


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END OF RESEARCH ABSTRACT

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629



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