Mar 2, 2017

Theory of the day: The stock market won't be kind to President Trump

Christopher Matthews

Stock markets have gone bananas since election day, with the S&P 500 rising almost 11% — investors are loving Donald Trump's mostly business-friendly vision for the country.

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Data: The Leuthold Group; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

But according to Douglas Ramsay, Chief Investment Officer of The Leuthold Group, Trump Administration officials will come to regret gloating about the market's performance. That's because Trump enters the White House during one of the most richly valued stock markets in U.S. history. The last president to come in at such valuations was George W. Bush, and the dot-com bubble burst soon afterward. Bill Clinton began his second term in a more overvalued stock market in 1997, and exited unscathed. But if his timing were different by just a year, he would have been blamed for the early-aughts market crash.

(First sentence corrected to say stocks have risen almost 11%.)

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AMD's hot 2020 start could lead to another S&P record

Data: Investing.com; Chart: Axios Visuals

AMD was the best-performing stock on the S&P 500 in both 2018 and 2019, and it got off to a hot start in 2020, rising 7.1% on Thursday to touch a fresh all-time high.

The state of play: The stock rose nearly 80% in 2018, despite falling 40% during that year's disastrous fourth quarter, and it gained 148% in 2019, according to MarketWatch. The company's previous record high stock price was set June 21, 2000.

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Powell and the risk-off bull market

Jerome Powell. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Fed’s 180-degree turn was the story of 2019, asset managers and market analysts say.

What happened: Chairman Jerome Powell and the U.S. central bank went from raising interest rates for a fourth time at the close of 2018 and giving market watchers the explicit expectation this would continue in 2019, to doing the opposite. The Fed cut rates thrice and even began re-padding its balance sheet in the last quarter of the year, bringing it back above $4 trillion.

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Investors jump on the emerging markets bandwagon

Reproduced from TCW Group; Chart: Axios Visuals

A growing chorus of U.S.-based fund managers is betting that emerging market stocks and bonds are poised to outperform U.S. assets this year. The momentum for emerging markets has grown so strong that it has become almost a consensus trade, with investors even urging clients to buy EM junk bonds.

What's happening: Following 2019's blowout returns for U.S. stocks and strong performance for high yield, government and even municipal bonds, investors expect U.S. assets to fall to earth in 2020 and are positioning in emerging markets.

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