Equities: are US stocks too expensive?

QUESTION: are US stocks too expensive?

ANSWER: Yes, is the conclusion of The Economist, and TurnerStreet.

Equity Risk Premium (“ERP) is a great indicator of whether a market is expensive.  Even with the 0.2% fall in the S&P500 since the article was written a month ago, it isn’t enough to temp TurnerStreet back into equities.  Additionally, annecdotally, we aren’t hearing great things about future earnings.

ACTION PLAN:

  1. Firstly, if you have never heard of ERP before reading this article or understand what it signifies, you are just punting securities, derivatives, etc, rather than investing.  You should get a licensed investment manager.
  2. The most significant means to increasing your wealth is getting the asset allocation correct.  For most people, that means knowing when to put money into equities and when to take it out.  The first thing you need to ask your investment manager (or yourself if you take the DIY route) is what percentage of my portfolio should be equities.
  3. Once you establish how much to allocate to equities, then it is a question of which equities.  For the DIY folks, that will most likely be an index.  For professional investment managers, it will buying individual stocks.
  4. Contact TurnerStreet if you wish to buy our current asset allocation recommendation, and the list of the stocks TurnerStreet would buy for a typical wholesale client, or if you would like TurnerStreet to manage your equities and derivatives portfolio.
IMPORTANT: This Q&A is general product advice for wholesale or sophisticated investors, and NOT suitable for retail investors.  Retail investors should seek advice specific to their circumstances and not rely upon general product advice written for other types of investors.  Retail investors acting like wholesale/sophisticated investor are likely to experience inappropriate and/or excessive risk for their circumstances, and unacceptable losses.

Equities: will the S&P500 fall 27% to 3,000?

QUESTION: Is investing legend and perma-bear, Jeremy Grantham, going to be correct about the S&P500 falling 27% to 3,000 sometime this year?

ANSWER: Maybe.

Almost any asset valuation could be justifiable, mathematically, when interest rates were close to zero.  Hence when interest rates rose, valuations dropped.  It appears that Mr Grantham’s thesis is that that correction hasn’t been strong enough and there are other factors that may impact valuations (e.g. that old-fashion thing called earning per share).

That said, I’m fairly confident risks of the index going up 27% is much lower than the risk it will go down 27?

DAX and SPX: why the difference?

QUESTION: Despite the energy situation in Germany, and Europe, the DAX index has substantially outperformed the S&P500 index, why?

ANSWER:  Yes, the DAX has outperformed but not as substantially as most believe because the indices are differently calculated.

The most obvious difference is that the DAX is an accumulation index (i.e. it adds dividend payments to change in stock prices) while the SPX is a non-accumulation index.  Fundamentally, the DAX has less exposure to tech stocks.

However, we expect more downside risk to the DAX (energy and China exposure) that SPX (continued tech weakness and US political risk).