But his thinking is always interesting.
From Raymond James' Investment Strategy:
“I‘ll Be Back”
November 19, 2012
Just like the line from the movie The Terminator, “I’ll be back,” I am back from a two-week jaunt to Europe. During that sojourn I saw more than 100 portfolio managers (PMs) in seven countries, spoke at a few conferences, spoke to a number of the print media, and co-hosted two TV shows. As always, traveling internationally provides interesting insights often not available in “the states,” which was especially true this trip since I was traveling during our presidential election. Most of the accounts I spoke to were pretty bearish, except for one particularly clever organization in Edinburgh that completely sold out of European stocks three years ago and over-weighted American equities. Obviously, they are outperforming their benchmark. At one of my meetings I asked one PM, who has been bearish for all of the 15 years I have known him, “How do you invest in stocks when you have been this bearish?!” His response was, “We don’t invest in stocks that we think are going to go up, we invest in stocks we think will not go down as much as the overall stock market if it declines.” “Wow,” I gasped, “That’s certainly not the way my father taught me to invest.”
So the mood in Europe was universally bearish, yet my message was fairly constructive on U.S. equities. In fact, I shared with various PMs that the only time I have come to Europe when everyone was universally bullish was in 4Q99 when I was talking about the Dow Theory “sell signal” of 9/23/99 and suggesting that the D-J Industrial Average (INDU/12588.31) was going to go into a wide-swinging trading range affair like it has always done after every secular bull market in history.
At the time I likened it to the wide-swinging environment that follow the secular post WWII “bull run” that ended in 1965 with a Dow Theory “sell signal.” The subsequent sideways market lasted for almost 18 years with the Industrials range-bound between roughly 1000 and 600. Importantly, the nominal price low during that timeframe occurred on December 6, 1974 at 577.60 on the Dow.
However, the valuation low, the cheapest the Industrials would get on a P/E, book value, price to sales, etc. basis didn’t happen until August of 1982. So fast forward to today; in my opinion there is a 20-25% possibility that we are in a new secular bull market and NOBODY believes it! That “call” rests on the premise that the nominal price low was made on March 6, 2009 when the S&P 500 (SPX/1359.88) printed at the “mark of the devil” level of 666. Subsequently, I think the “valuation low” was made on October 4, 2011 where the SPX was trading below 10x its forward earnings estimate, with an earnings yield of over 10%, rendering an equity risk premium above 8% for a valuation low not seen in decades....MORE
