Making sense of the markets this week: October 9
[ad_1] Kyle Prevost, editor of Million Dollar Journey and founder of the Canadian Financial Summit, shares financial headlines and offers context for Canadian investors. Bad news is good news for Canadian investors Possible central bank moves continued to dominate the investment news cycle this week. In the (weird) market universe investors created for themselves, bad economic news is a great sign for the value of companies within that bad economy. Let me explain… Shouldn’t bad economic news mean companies make less money? As a group, investors are making decisions that affect the markets. The belief that bad economic news means share prices go up seems to be self-fulfilling. It appears the vast majority of share prices are now in lockstep and are moving to the beat of inflation-rate data and interest-rate moves. It doesn’t matter if you’re a giant company with a successful quarterly earnings report (read what I wrote about Nike last week), investors only have eyes for the Fed. While waiting on the U.S. jobs report on Friday, the Fed speculators were focusing on the data from the Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index and the U.S. JOLTs Job Openings earlier in the week. Clearly, stock investors are hoping to see evidence that the increased interest rates advocated by inflation hawks are having their desired effect on inflation. Consequently, if we hear news about lost jobs and crushing worldwide recessions, that’s viewed positively. If everyone still has a job and people are making more money, then the dominant thought appears to be that the Fed will be forced to continue to raise interest rates. Raised rates will not only reduce borrowing, depress the current value of equities, give Canadian and U.S. investors better fixed-income options relative to stocks and make life really difficult for developing economies—it will also feed the increasingly alarmist headlines that a recession is inevitable. For those of you trying to calibrate expectations, the Manufacturers Purchasing Index and the preliminary jobs data seemed to indicate that the economy was indeed heading in a negative direction. That means good news for stocks. Of course, this type of speculative momentum could all be reversed by a few sentences from Fed Chair Jerome Powell at any time. Your future portfolio will almost assuredly thank you if you choose to ignore all this noise and stick to a long-term investing plan. Note: You can hear my in-depth thoughts on the current bear market at the 2022 virtual Canadian Financial Summit, October 12 to 15. I’m joined by esteemed MoneySense colleagues Jonathan Chevreau, Lisa Hannam, Justin Dallaire and Dale Roberts, as well as 30-plus other Canadian financial experts. It’s free to view as a MoneySense.ca reader. But there are limited spaces, so don’t delay in reserving your spot. Read more about the MoneySense sessions. Get your FREE ticket to the Canadian Financial Summit Book now Booze a better bet than breeches With Constellation Brands (STZ/NYSE) and Levi Strauss LEVI/NYSE) reporting earnings this week, investors got another look at the current mixed environment for consumer goods. For those not familiar with the Constellation Brands, it’s one of the bigger producers of beer, wine and spirits in the world. It also has a stake in Canopy Growth, a marijuana company. On Thursday, Constellation reported a massive earnings beat of USD$3.17 per share (versus a predicted USD$2.81). That’s up from USD$2.38 a year ago. Net sales were also up, with the beer product vertical leading the way. In a sign of generally negative market sentiment, shares of Constellation dropped 1.45% on Thursday despite the positive news. Meanwhile, Canopy Growth (CGC/Nasdaq) rose 22% after Joe Biden called for a review on how marijuana is classified under federal law. Levi Strauss’s earnings report focused on inventory and cost pressure challenges, as well as negative headwinds generated by the strong U.S. dollar. This has been a theme from all of the clothing retailers over the last few months. While the iconic American jeans company did post an earnings beat of USD$0.40 per share (versus USD$0.37 predicted), it revised its long-term predictions for both profits and revenues downward. Investors punished the company with a drop of more than 6% in after hours trading on Thursday. Monstrous returns for index investors Here’s something interesting, courtesy of the Big Picture blog and @CharlieBilello. Check out the best performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last couple of decades. Source: Found on Ritholtz.com, original to @CharlieBiello. The obvious names are right where you’d expect them to be. We weren’t surprised to see these four tech leaders on the list: Netflix (NFLX/NASDAQ) up 8,725% over 15 years Tesla (TSLA/NASDAQ) dominate the last five years to the tune of a 1,164% gain Apple (AAPL/NASDAQ) realize growth of 70,357% over the last 20 years Amazon (AMZN/NASDAQ) up 16,859% over the last two decades That said, we certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the returns of all these heavyweights from the tech world would pale in comparison to the beast that is Monster Beverage Corp. The only thing higher than its energy drinks’ caffeine levels are their year-over-year price gains. If you invested USD$1,000 in Monster Beverage (MNST/NASDAQ) about 20 years ago, you would have a cool USD$1.34 million today. Anecdotally, I can tell you that 1.34 million is also roughly the number of high school teachers driven to an early retirement by Monster-consuming students. However, Monster wasn’t the only unexpected name on this list. We would never have guessed that old-school “boring” companies—like Old Dominion Freight (ODFL/NASDAQ), Domino’s Pizza (DPZ/NYSE), Tractor Supply Co. (TSCO/NASDAQ) and Extra Space Storage (EXR/NYSE)—would have generated higher returns than Microsoft (MSFT/NASDAQ) or Walmart (WMT/NYSE). While one can fantasize about what it would have been like to pick these outliers before they started their rapid ascents, the long-term results of Monster should instead prove just how difficult it is to predict companies’ growth rates. Consequently, it reinforces the idea from Vanguard founder Jack Bogle that owning the whole haystack (buying the whole market) is a much better bet for the
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