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China – time to buy?

China – time to buy?

From its peak in early February 2021, China’s share market went through a grinding three-year decline of 40 per cent, while over the same period the MSCI World index was up 20 per cent. When one of the world’s largest stock markets underperforms by 60 per cent it makes sense to see if there’s a bargain to be had.

Chart 1: there’s real money going into IT spending in the US

What’s happened to China?

The fabled China growth miracle hit a couple of huge speed bumps in the form of COVID and a serious shakeout in the property sector.

In the six years to the end of 2019, China’s annualised GDP growth rate declined in a very smooth, if not controlled, path from a ridiculously high 7.5 per cent to a still astonishing 5.8 per cent. Then COVID wreaked havoc. Between stringent lockdowns and the government’s refusal to make similar fiscal injections as western governments, the Chinese economy didn’t bounce out of COVID in the same way Australia and the US.

Chart 2: the S&P 500’s PE ratio with and without the MegaCap 8

The COVID slowdown triggered an almighty reckoning in the property market, which accounted for a whopping 30 per cent of China’s GDP in 2022. The government finally tried to deflate a classic speculative property bubble, which led to two of the biggest property developers in China, Evergrande and Country Gardens, which between them had more than USD520 billion of debt, spiralling toward oblivion.

Recent data showed housing starts in China fell 30 per cent year on year and completions were down 20 per cent, while sales dropped 21 per cent and property values got crunched by 29 per cent.

While those numbers are very messy, the government was determined to avoid the banking catastrophe the US experienced in 2008. Dr Joseph Lai, of Ox Capital, reckons that although there will be significant bad debts, they appear to have already peaked and the banking system has proven to be resilient.

Positive signs?

There was general surprise when China’s 2023 GDP growth came in a bit better than expected at 5.2 per cent, and Citibank notes the February data contained some positive signals, with industrial production rising 7 per cent year on year, in stark contrast to the US where it was slightly negative over 12 months.

Investment was also “way higher than consensus”, with manufacturing investment up an impressive 9 per cent for the first two months of the year and infrastructure 6 per cent, much of it actively encouraged by Beijing as a way of reducing the economy’s dependence on property.

The government is actively promoting decarbonisation industries, with the usual head spinning results you get when China puts its mind to something. For example, electric vehicle production has risen about seven-fold from pre-COVID levels, and now China produces about one-quarter of the world’s EVs and accounts for more than half of registered EVs worldwide. Similarly, solar battery production has risen more than three-fold and it accounts for more than 80 per cent of global solar cell exports and 50 per cent of lithium batteries.

The santa claus rally

Although the critical consumer sector is still not as optimistic as it was pre-COVID, retail sales rose a healthy 5.5 per cent compared to a year ago.

The share market

If share markets directly reflected economic growth, the Chinese share market would have been the world’s biggest a long time ago. The fact is, economic growth can be generated by government spending that doesn’t necessarily benefit private companies, or come from sectors that aren’t represented in the index.

Having said that, the Chinese market does look cheap. After that 40 per cent crash and bottoming in early February, the CSI 300 bounced more than 13 per cent in seven weeks, but at a time when markets across the world are hitting new all-time highs, China is still 38 per cent away from theirs. That bounce caught the attention of a lot of technical analysts, but consensus is that it’s still early days given there have been false starts over the past couple of years.

Aggregate weekly payrolls deflated by PCE inflation

China’s price to earnings ratio for the next year snuck below 10x and is still about half the US’s and way below Australia’s 17x, while earnings growth over the next year is forecast to be about 14 per cent, compared to Australia’s very pedestrian 0-3 per cent.

All eyes will be watching for signs the Chinese government will increase its support for either the economy, or the share market, or both. There had been hopes the government would repeat the massive spending package of 2008 that helped drag the world out of the GFC, but it never came. There has been some easing of borrowing rates and ham-fisted restrictions on selling Chinese stocks by local financial institutions, but no killer package.

There is no telling if the Chinese stock market crash is over, but smart investors know that in carnage can lie opportunity. For those looking to access China, VanEck has two ETFs listed on the ASX: CETF invests in the 50 largest mainland companies, and CNEW uses an algorithm to invest in 120 quality companies across IT, healthcare, consumer staples and consumer discretionary.

Is the US share market uninvestable?

Is the US share market uninvestable?

Last week I was at a conference about alternative investments, and I cannot tell you how many people I spoke to who had decided the US share market is nuts. They were piling all kinds of arguments behind that view:

  • The S&P 500 has jumped 24% in just four months, but without the top tech stocks that return would be closer to 8%
  • Nvidia alone has gone up 95% over the same time, but it’s risen 420% since Chat GPT was announced in November 2022
  • Market concentration has never been greater with the MegaCap 8 stocks (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia and Tesla) now accounting for 28% of the S&P 500
  • The MegaCap 8’s combined market cap would make it the second largest country stock exchange in the world
  • The S&P 500’s PE ratio is 28x, compared to a 30-year average of 17x
  • The Goldilocks US economy could crack any moment

Without digging any deeper, that’s a bunch of statistics that would be enough to have anyone wondering if the market’s gone a little mad.

So, let’s dig a little deeper.

Bears always sound smarter

First, before you go believing the people arguing everything’s turning to custard, just remember, the lizard part of your brain that’s hard wired to make sure you survived the thrills and spills of the savannah biases you to thinking what those people are saying is smarter and more trustworthy. It’s the survival instinct, designed to make us think twice and stop us from being reckless.

Then there’s what behavioural economists call second level thinking, where you take a breath and think for a moment, that can prevent you from just swallowing what people say without giving it some thought.

It’s the fundamentals

There have been lots of calls that the current AI boom is reminiscent of the dotcom bubble that popped in 2000, and it took the S&P 500 seven years to get back to that level.

But is it? The dotcom bubble was largely hypes and dreams, with almost no actual earnings to back it all up.

Compare that to Nvidia, which recently reported its fourth quarter results that smashed analysts’ forecasts:

  • Revenue up 265.3% to US$22.1 billion, 8.2% ahead of consensus
  • Data centre revenue up 408.8% to US$18.4 billion, 6.9% ahead of consensus
  • Gross margin up 1,064 bps to 76.7%, 128 bps ahead of consensus
  • Earnings per share up 486.4% to $5.16, 3.6% ahead of consensus

From the start of 2022 to 21 February this year, Nvidia’s earnings have grown 231%, but the stock price had risen only 130%, because the PE multiple, which is a measure of how much sentiment is driving the share price, actually detracted by 102%. In other words, there’s less hype in the share price over that time.

AI has certainly captured the market’s imagination, but it’s no fairytale, there’s real money behind it. Of course, we don’t know if the earnings and revenue growth are going to keep going, but check chart 1: spending by US companies on computers and electronic stuff had already got a big boost from Biden’s CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, both passed in August 2022. But you can see the huge jump after Chat GPT was launched in November 2022 – US companies are clearly spending up in a race to incorporate AI into their businesses.

Chart 1: there’s real money going into IT spending in the US

Anyone who’s witnessed the magic of AI through Chat GPT or Google’s Gemini has to admit it’s a mind-bending experience, and those consumer-oriented models are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There’s a website called Hugging Face, which calls itself “The AI community building the future” that has more than 520,000 AI models available.

AI is definitely here to stay. It’s definitely going to have far reaching impacts. And it’s only going to get bigger and better (and possibly scarier).

Market concentration ain’t all it’s cracked up to be

There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 have never represented such a high proportion of the overall index, usually followed by dark warnings about concentration risk.

Here’s a bit of context: the top 10 stocks in the US account for 34% of the S&P 500; in Australia, it’s 47% of the ASX 200; in the UK it’s 49%; Germany and France it’s 58% and in Italy it’s 66%.

In other words, it’s not a big deal. Yes, if the bigger companies fall hard it will impact the index by more, but clearly that’s not unique to the US.

There are two other important indicators for the broader US market. First, the industrials index, which represents old fashioned companies that manufacture stuff, has hit an all-time high, and the S&P 500 equal weighted index, which ignores market caps so all companies carry the same weight and influence (so it neutralises the MegaCap 8), is also close to an all-time high. They are both indicators telling us the rally is gradually becoming broad based.

How representative is the PE ratio?

Yardeni Research says the S&P 500’s PE ratio for the next 12 months was 20.4x on 15 February. For the MegaCap 8 it was 28.0x and for the other 492 stocks in the index it was 18.2x – see chart 2.

Chart 2: the S&P 500’s PE ratio with and without the MegaCap 8

First, I wrote an article for the AFR about this a few weeks ago, explaining how the US index has a much higher proportion of high growth tech companies than any other index in the world, so comparing the PE for the US to, say, Australia, where more than half our market is taken up by low growth banks and resources companies, is like comparing the proverbial apples and oranges.

For a bit more context, a company’s PE ratio is determined by a combination of how much the earnings are expected to grow and how positive or negative sentiment toward the company is. Forecasting earnings growth is hard enough, but forecasting sentiment is, well, impossible.

Suffice to say though, Yardeni reckons the 3-5 year earnings growth for the MegaCap 8 is forecast to be 38.9%. That’s really high, and if they can pull it off (admittedly a big if), maybe a 28x PE ain’t so bad after all.

The second part to this argument is that paying 18x for the rest of the US market might not be so bad either. It’s a smidge over the 20-year average PE of 17x, but, again, the US index has changed enormously over those 20 years. In 2003 financials was the biggest sector in the US at 20% and technology was 17%, but now financials is only 13% and tech is 30%. So, to suggest that the index should be trading on the same PE as it was when the composition was very different doesn’t make sense.

Looking into the almanac

There’s a group in the US called Carson Investment Research, and they trawl through data about the US share markets to spot trends and patterns, something I call almanac investing. I’ve highlighted two out of the many positive points they’ve raised about the S&P 500.

The santa claus rally
Zweig Breadth Thrust (ZBT)

You could understandably dismiss both of these observations as not much more than coincidences and say precedents like these are just made to be broken.

However, the reason I highlighted them is that I think they reflect a pattern of investor behaviour, which in large part is the all important swing factor of sentiment.

The US economy is still strong

The US economy defied a hugely overwhelming consensus that there was going to be a nasty recession last year. Whilst now consensus is that there will be a “soft-landing” (a soft way of saying they were wrong), there are still some bears holding out for a downturn.

Look, they may turn out to be right, if there’s one lesson we all should have learned by now it’s that forecasting the macro economy (things like inflation, unemployment, etc) is really difficult, but there are a few indicators of what’s happening in the real economy that I find persuasive.

First, real wages have grown steadily since COVID, and people having more money to spend is an unequivocal positive.

Aggregate weekly payrolls deflated by PCE inflation

Importantly, most of the growth in wages is going to the lowest paid workers, who are far more likely to spend it.

Graph: Average hourly earnings delated by PCE price index

Inflation in the US looks like it’s now well within the Fed’s target range of 2-3%, especially if you exclude housing (which they call shelter).

CPI Changes

Why would you do that? Because the Bureau of Labour Statistics, which calculates the CPI, uses a reading for shelter which every man and his dog knows is about 12 months behind the real market. The Fed knows it too, so why they persist remains a mystery.

The chart below shows the Zillow (the US equivalent of realestate.com) rental index advanced by 12 months. In other words, the Zillow index peaked in the middle of 2022 and has been declining ever since. Price increases on apartment rentals have fallen so much they’ve gone negative, meaning rents are dropping. Overall, real world evidence suggests housing costs are way below where the Fed is presuming they are, and they’re still going down.

Graph: rent measures year over year % change

And why is it important? Because shelter accounts for about 30% of the CPI number, and 40% of the so-called “Core CPI”, which excludes food and energy costs and which the Fed says it watches more closely.

In turn, the critical follow on from that is interest rates do not need to stay so high if inflation is back in the target zone. The prospect of the Fed eventually lowering interest rates is a big part of what’s got the share market excited.

Finally, another bit of real-world evidence that the economy is pretty strong is shown in the incredible rise of manufacturing construction spending, which has taken off in response to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which throws a bunch of different subsidies at anything that resembles an energy transition project.

Graph: Real manufacturing construction spending

The bottom line

It’s true the US share market has notched up some strong returns and has hit a new all-time high, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s on the verge of falling again. There’s plenty of anecdotal, technical and fundamental evidence to back the move.

Nor does it mean the index can’t go through a serious correction. On average, the US market experiences a 14% intra-year decline every year.

At the end of the day, trying to time a market by selling and buying back again is really, really difficult. Take comfort that the bears have been wrong since the market bottomed in October 2022, why should they necessarily start being right now?

Private credit is redefining fixed income

Private credit is redefining fixed income

Private credit is redefining fixed income as an asset class, with returns as high as 10 per cent plus attracting an explosion of interest. But all that attention has drawn the usual cowboy operators, so smart investors need to be careful.

What is private credit?

Private credit is investing in loans made by non-bank lenders that can cover a broad range of purposes and borrowers.

Normally a private credit lender raises money from investors and doesn’t use debt, so zero gearing. That makes these companies very different to a normal bank, where the loan book will be dozens of times bigger than the bank’s equity.

Taking out a private credit loan is almost invariably much more expensive than borrowing from a commercial bank, with interest rates currently as high as 12 to 13 per cent. So why are borrowers flocking to private credit lenders?

Why the boom in private credit?

After the GFC, banking regulators around the world forced commercial banks to beef up their balance sheets, requiring them to back their loans with more equity to absorb potential losses, especially loans to sectors that had a history of high default rates, like commercial building and property development. That same regulatory crackdown caught up with the Australian banks in 2016, when their regulator, APRA, declared it wanted them to be the best capitalised banks in the world.

After that, it became far more profitable for Australian banks to lend for residential property, because they didn’t have to set aside as much equity on their balance sheets. Consequently, they all but abandoned some parts of the commercial lending market.

Spotting a huge, and growing, opportunity, private credit groups sprang up to fill the gap. Often staffed by the same experienced credit teams from the big banks who were now twiddling their thumbs, they got backing from investors with the prospect of outsized returns relative to the risk.

The result: EY estimates the Australian private credit market grew from $35 billion in 2016 to $109 billion by the end of 2022, a 21 per cent compounded annual growth rate. The global private credit market was estimated to have grown at 15 per cent per year between 2000 to 2022, reaching more than $1 trillion.

As often happens, Australia is a bit behind the US, where Foresight Analytics estimates non-bank lenders control about 50 per cent of the market for commercial real estate loans, and in Europe it’s about 25 per cent, while in Australia it’s around 10 per cent, but growing strongly.

What’s the attraction for investors?

Fixed income plays two roles in a portfolio: first, to provide some income, and second, to have little, if any, correlation to growth assets like shares, in other words, be a defensive asset.

Income-wise, over 2023 there were a number of private credit funds that returned well above 10 per cent, even as high as 12 per cent. For context, the Australian 10-year bond yield peaked at 4.95 per cent.

In terms of low correlation to shares, the word “private” is the critical part. Unlike corporate or government bonds, private loans are not normally traded on public markets, which makes them far less volatile because there is no day-to-day repricing, the fancy name for which is “mark-to-market risk”. In 2022, when bonds and shares both fell heavily, well-managed private credit funds continued to pay their interest and the unit price never changed.

The other attraction is security. For example, a private credit fund that lends to property developers will take a mortgage over the project, including the land, just the same as when a bank lends to a homeowner. Usually, the lenders require a loan to valuation ratio between 60-65 per cent. That means if the deal goes pear-shaped and the private credit manager repossesses the property, it has a 35-40 per cent buffer before investors lose any money.

In addition, the lender will also normally take a charge over other company assets as well as get a directors’ guarantee, meaning their personal assets are on the line as well. Plus, Australian lending rules are tilted very much in favour of the lender, enabling them to impose onerous covenants on the borrower.

There’s a lot to like about investing in private credit, but its popularity has drawn a lot of new operators, not all of which are experienced in credit analysis and some of which are under pressure to get investors’ money to work so are not as fussy about who they lend to. On top of that, some private credit deals will tie up your capital for up to 18 months, or even “semi-liquid” funds will take 2-3 months to get your money back. It pays to do your homework carefully.

Maybe the US share market isn’t as expensive as you think

Maybe the US share market isn’t as expensive as you think

The US share market has just hit a new all-time high and its returns have smashed the rest of the world for the past 15 years. But US shares also trade on valuation multiples that are much higher than the rest of the world, leaving investors who already own US companies wondering if they should lighten off, and those who don’t wondering if they should wait for prices to fall before buying in. But maybe the US market isn’t as outrageously expensive as most commentators would have us think.

America: home of the best companies, land of innovation

America is uniquely positioned, making it very difficult to bet against in the long run. Goldman Sachs points out that not only is it the biggest economy in the world, accounting for 26 per cent of global GDP, it is bestowed with an abundance of natural resources. It has the most arable land of any country and is now the world’s largest exporter of agricultural commodities, and, at 20 million barrels per day, it is also the world’s biggest oil and gas producer and exporter, with daylight to Saudi Arabia at number two with 12 million.

It also has the most favourable demographics of any developed country, the most productive labour force, and boasts the deepest capital markets, more than seven times the next biggest.

Since the late nineteenth century, the US has been at the forefront of technical innovation, boosted by some of the best universities in the world. In 2022, it was the global leader in R&D, spending US$879 billion, more than the next five countries combined.

And with exports accounting for only 12 per cent of GDP, the US economy is more resilient than most large economies because it’s less affected by cyclical downturns in its trading partners. By comparison, exports are 21 per cent of China’s GDP, 26 per cent of Australia’s and 51 per cent of Germany’s.

This is not to say the US doesn’t have its problems: it practices a brutal form of capitalism that results in a more limited social safety net, its health outcomes are an embarrassment, and its sclerotic, highly partisan political system is heavily influenced by wealthy lobby groups. Ironically, all of those problems are the result of prioritising making money.

World beating returns

It’s no coincidence that most of the best companies in the past 100 years came out of the US, culminating in today’s mega cap tech monsters.

If a smart investor had sunk $100,000 into the US’s S&P 500 index at the trough of the GFC in March 2009, and reinvested the dividends, it would have grown to be worth $946,000 by the end of 2023. The same investment in the ASX 200 would have been worth $524,000, even after including franking credits. That’s a difference of more than 80 per cent.

However, that incredible run has left the US share market looking expensive compared to the rest of the world. Using the most common valuation measure for shares, the price to earnings (PE) ratio, the S&P 500 trades at 19.5x 2024 forecast earnings, compared to Australia’s 16.4x, Europe’s 12.8x and the emerging markets’ 11.9x – see chart 1.

Chart showing bond yields trended down, resulting in a 40-year bull market, which went into reverse in mid-2020

Understandably, on that basis, almost every analyst and strategist recommends an underweight position in US shares.

However, a simple comparison of PE ratios fails to account for the huge differences in the structure of the US market compared to others. For example, the tech sector has a 29 per cent weighting in the S&P 500, and is on a forward PE ratio of 31x, which looks very pricey, but the index has had compounded annual returns of more than 21 per cent for the past 10 years. The two biggest companies, Apple and Microsoft, have both returned 26 per cent for those 10 years, and the third biggest, Nvidia, an eye popping 63 per cent per year. It’s also worth noting that the technology index doesn’t include other mega caps such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or Meta.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher 
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

By contrast, the biggest sector in the ASX 200 is the financials, at 27 per cent of the index. Its 10-year return has been 8 per cent per year, and it’s on a forward PE of 15x. So that’s 60 per cent lower returns but only a 50 per cent lower PE. If the Australian index had the same sector weightings as the S&P 500, its PE ratio would almost double.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher 
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

J.P. Morgan also argues that because free cash flow margins are 30 per cent higher than they were only 10 years ago, a higher PE is justified, and fund manager, GMO, points out that since 1997, US profits, as measured by the average return on sales, have increased by 40 per cent.

It’s very difficult to mount a case that US shares are cheap, but it helps to have context around why they’ve enjoyed an outstanding 10 years of returns. There’s no way of telling if those returns will continue to be anywhere near as high over the next 10 years, but it’s hard to argue against American exceptionalism when it comes to making a buck.

2024: What just happened and what lies ahead

2024: What just happened and what lies ahead

2023 – the scorecard

2023 started off with all kinds of dire forecasts, there had never been such an overwhelming consensus that the US economy would slump into recession and take share markets with it. But not only did the economy power through, so did share markets, and despite a choppy start to the year, they finished with a powerful rally that saw respectable returns across the board – see chart 1.

As well as a strong performance out of the US, Japan had a storming year on the back of solid earnings growth, finishing at the highest since its legendary boom of the 1980s, and Germany, where the economy continues to flirt with recession, is also trading at all-time highs, as is India.

Chart showing bond yields trended down, resulting in a 40-year bull market, which went into reverse in mid-2020

The story of last year was pretty much the mirror image of the previous year: 2022 saw markets fall because of negative sentiment, known as “PE compression”, whereas 2023 was largely about PE expansion, or positive sentiment. What that means is that theoretically share prices should go up (or down) by the same amount as earnings growth + dividends, and anything more or less than that is attributable to sentiment, that is, whether investors are feeling bullish or bearish, which is measured by changes in the price to earnings (PE) ratio that people are willing to pay. The grey bars in chart 2 show just how much of a contribution that positive change in sentiment added to returns in 2023.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

It was all about inflation

The positive change in sentiment was all driven by changes in the outlook for inflation and interest rates, or more specifically, the market’s perception of whether central banks have finished increasing rates and, if so, when will they start cutting them?

Inflation rates across the world have indeed fallen considerably, but how much of that is attributable to central banks increasing interest rates is unclear. It’s pretty conspicuous that, despite the variability in when and how different central banks responded, the cycle we’ve just experienced has played out similarly across the developed world: inflation rates started rising sharply in 2020, peaked for most countries around the middle of 2022, and have been falling at a pretty similar pace since – see chart 3.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

There’s a school of thought that disruptions to the supply chain were a significant contributor to inflationary pressures. The New York Federal Reserve Bank compiles an index that tracks pressure across global supply chains, see chart 4, and it traces a similar path to the inflation chart above. For a little context, the COVID-induced bottlenecks in the supply chain saw the index peak at almost 4.5 standard deviations above the average, which puts it so far out of the norm that the theoretical likelihood of it happening is close to zero. That kind of event is inevitably going to have serious consequences.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

Likewise, raising interest rates aims to control inflation by reducing demand, but in the US, demand has remained very strong, indeed, GDP growth was 5.1% in the September quarter! So with demand going up, it’s hard to argue inflation coming down is because of higher interest rates.

Critically, in its last meeting for 2023, the US Federal Reserve acknowledged they think rates have peaked and the next move will be down. That lit a fire under financial markets, with both share and bond prices jumping, and kicking off furious speculation as to when the first cuts will come and how deep they’ll be.

Here in Australia, speculation is rife as to whether the Reserve Bank has also finished with rate rises, with some economists forecasting rate cuts before the end of 2024.

Lessons from 2023

As always, there are lessons to be learned (and perhaps relearned) from what happened in financial markets last year.

Macroeconomic forecasting is really hard (if not useless): at the end of 2022, there had never been such an overwhelming consensus among economic forecasters, and central bankers, that economies across the developed world were headed for recession. Forecasts for inflation were uniformly high, and for GDP growth, uniformly low. They weren’t even close.

There were dark mutterings from economists and central bankers reaching for the orthodox textbooks that unemployment rates were way too low for inflation to fall, and our new RBA Governor, Michelle Bullock, suggested Australia would need a jobless rate of 4.5% to relieve inflationary pressures, or a lazy 140,000 workers losing their job. Yet inflation rates have come down and unemployment rates remain at multi-decade lows.

The takeaway: the US Fed has hundreds of PhD economists and still can’t guess where inflation, unemployment or GDP growth will be less than a year out, but they continue to dominate headlines. You’re better off ignoring them, and certainly don’t let them influence your financial decisions.

It’s also worth bearing in mind, given markets have rallied on speculation of rate cuts, for that to happen implies not only that central banks believe inflation is under control, but that economic growth is softening to the extent it needs a boost from lower interest costs. There’s no guarantee on that.

Geopolitics is noise: there has been no shortage of geopolitical headwinds for financial markets to negotiate over the past couple of years. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was supposed to crush economic growth because of higher commodity prices, tension between the US and China had the media in a froth, and then another war in the middle east threatens to escalate. Yet markets have gone onwards and upwards.

The fact is, while wars are tragic and terrible and sabre rattling might keep us up at night, markets will only suffer enduring effects if corporate earnings take a hit.

Market concentration is not necessarily a bad thing: by the middle of last year, the US market had risen about 20%, but it had come entirely from the top 10 stocks. Bearish commentators were warning that investors in the US market were taking bigger and bigger risks because the weighting of the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 had never been so high, hitting 32%. By the end of the year, those 10 stocks had risen 62%, while the bottom 490 had gone up by a far more pedestrian 8%.

Australian investors should have no concerns about market concentration, given the top 10 companies in the ASX 200 account for more than 46% of the index.

It’s entirely possible the top 10 companies in an index could underperform or even fall, but if the rest of the rest of the companies in the index perform strongly, it will generate a good return. If a portfolio was comprised of nothing but the top 10 companies, obviously the risks are different, but some simple diversification can address those problems.

Bonds can be just as volatile as shares: traditional portfolio construction includes an allocation to bonds based on the theory that they reduce portfolio volatility and can act as a counter-correlated airbag to share markets.

While 2023 was nowhere near as bad for bonds as the record losses of 2022, they were still far more volatile over the year than shares, indeed, as chart 5 shows, the intra-year drawdown for US, German and UK 10-year bonds was around 40%, more than four times the drawdown of the S&P 500 and ASX 200 at their worst.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

The outlook for 2024

While there are still a few bears growling about potential recessions, most forecasts are for equity markets to rise in 2024, and it’s even easier to find bond market bulls (though a lot of them are bond fund managers, so you have to be wary).

Australia

Australian company earnings dropped by more than 8% in 2023, having gone up by 16% the year before. One of our asset allocation consultants, farrelly’s, estimates long-term trend earnings growth for Australian companies at 3% per year, so given the recent fluctuations, it’s hardly surprising the current forecast is for about 1.2% earnings growth for 2024.

Of course, Australian shares typically pay a generous dividend by international standards, of about 4.4%, add 1.2% to that and you’d get a 6.6% return, which compares to a 30-year average annual return of 9.2%. We could reach that higher number if the PE ratio continues to expand, or if earnings are better then forecast. Of course, for those who benefit from franking credits, you can add an extra 1.4% to those numbers.

The ASX 200 finished 2023 on a forward PE ratio of 16.4x – see chart 6, which compares to a 20-year average of 14.6x. On that basis, it looks a little expensive, but it could simply be the market factoring in an earnings recovery.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

United States

This is where things get really interesting. As noted above, in 2023 the US market was dominated by a handful of mega-cap tech companies, while the ‘bottom’ 490 stocks were pretty pedestrian by comparison.

The S&P 500 finished 2023 on a PE ratio of 19.5x, a hefty 17% premium to the 30-year average of 16.6x – see chart 7. However, if you break that down, the top 10 companies were on a PE of 27x, while the rest were on 17x. In other words, the ‘rest’ of the market is not expensive by historical standards.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

J.P. Morgan argues the market is not especially expensive given companies reported free cash flow margins 30% higher than they were only 10 years ago, with a lot of that growth coming from the big tech companies. US funds management group, GMO, also points out that US corporate profitability, as measured by return on sales, has averaged 7% since 1997, compared to 5% before that – that’s a whopping 40% higher.

For 2024, the average forecast for the US market across 20 different international financial groups is a gain of 10.2% – for what that’s worth (which isn’t much). Of more relevance, corporate earnings are forecast to grow by 11.5%, plus the S&P typically pays a dividend yield of around 1.5%, which comes to 13%, roughly in line with the last 15 years average return of 13.8%, but comfortably above the 30-year average of 10.1%.

Something that plays on every asset allocator’s mind is chart 8 – which shows how extreme the US’s outperformance compared to the rest of the world has been since the GFC. Not surprisingly, most allocators look at that chart and immediately reduce the weighting to US shares. There are many explanations for the outperformance, not the least of which is that areas like Europe have been mired in an austerity mindset since 2009. There are, of course, two ways the gap could close: the US could fall heavily, or the rest of the world could make huge gains – or the trend could keep going. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

Notably, in terms of valuations, the rest of the world (ex the US), is trading on a PE ratio of 12.9x, compared to a 20-year average of 13.1x, so fractionally on the cheap side. However, that’s a 34% discount to the US, which is the highest in at least 20 years.

Here are a few interesting observations, based on historical return for the US:

  • In late November last year, the S&P 500 made a new high since January 2022, i.e. it had been more than a year, and on the 14 previous occasions that’s happened, the market rose by an average of 14% over the following year and was positive 93% of those times
  • Since 1928, when the S&P has gone up by more than 20% in a calendar year, the average gain the following year was 11.4%, and it was positive 65% of the time
  • Since 1933, the fourth year of the presidential cycle has seen an average return of 6.7%, and is positive around 70% of the time
  • Deposits into money market funds last year were 13x more than what went into equities, taking total deposits to a record US$6 trillion, which on their own are expected to generate US$300 billion in interest income

Emerging markets

With a forward PE ratio of only 11.9x, the emerging markets look cheap compared to developed markets, however, that number is bang on the 25-year average and they’ve looked cheap for years and have underperformed the developed markets badly since the end of the GFC – see chart 9.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

At a 26% weighting in the EM index, China is the 600-pound gorilla in the asset class, and it had a miserable 2023, falling almost 13%. Much of that is because the government refused to inject COVID stimulus at the household level, unlike western governments, forcing families to draw on their savings to get through extended lockdowns, and leaving consumers reluctant to spend once restrictions were lifted.

On top of that, the property sector, which was estimated to have contributed as much as 20% to GDP growth, is in disarray. The government has actively supported the rapid development of the electric vehicle industry, and now China makes more EVs than the rest of the world combined. It is possible that will be a strong new source of growth for the economy over the coming years.

By contrast, India, which is 17% of the index, is shooting the lights out, returning 20.3% in 2023 and hitting a new all-time high, and 15.8% per annum for the last three years. A combination of favourable demographics and a booming tech sector has proven to be a terrific tailwind.

Emerging markets returns tend to go in long cycles and appear to be linked to long-term trends in the US$, and trying to guess where currencies are going is even harder than share markets. The bottom line is that when an asset class is as cheap as EM is at the moment, it makes sense to have at least some weighting.

Real assets

Traditionally one of the more interest rate sensitive sectors, real assets, like property and infrastructure, have been beaten up badly over the course of the current interest rate cycle, but they turned sharply at the first hint that rates have peaked. In late October last year, the VanEck Global REIT ETF (REIT) was down by almost 40% from its peak, but then rallied more than 40% by the end of the year.

Chart 10 shows the relative earnings multiple that global REITs is trading on compared to equities puts them very much on the cheap side relative to the long-term average. The level of EBITDA hasn’t changed significantly, but the multiple it’s trading on has been derated to levels similar to the GFC and the COVID sell off, which is all sentiment-driven.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment
Small cap companies

Small cap companies is another asset class that has been brutalised over the past couple of years, both in Australia and internationally, to the point where they are now trading at multi-decade lows relative to large caps – see chart 11.

Chart showing the Australian government bond, GSBG33, has experienced higher<br />
volatility than what many would associate with a defensive investment

Notably, the US small cap index, the Russell 2000, jumped 26% from its lows at the end of October. Once again, since the index’s inception in 1979, there have been 21 previous occasions where it has rallied more than 20% in 50 days, and the average increase one year later was 16.5%, and it has never been lower. That compares to the average 12 month return of 10.5%.

Again, given how relatively cheap small caps are, it makes sense to have at least some allocation.

Fixed income

One of most popular sayings in financial markets recently has been, “Bonds are back!” The argument is that investors are now receiving a yield to invest in government bonds, unlike a few years ago where yields were approaching zero and, in many cases, actually went negative!

The prospects for bonds depends entirely on what happens with interest rates and inflation. Being paid to hold them is a start, but bond prices can be quite volatile – as discussed above.

Private credit continues to grow its share of the commercial lending market in the US, Europe and Australia. We remain strong supporters of well managed private credit backed by strong levels of security and low LVRs, with returns comfortably above those offered by bonds and, typically, zero volatility in the underlying unit price.

Conclusion

Financial markets have a knack for surprising, and 2023 was a great example of that. The headwinds that caused mayhem a couple of years ago have dissipated, but whether they become the tailwinds the market is hoping for is yet to be seen.

After what turned out to be a year of good returns in 2023, there are sound fundamental arguments to support a positive view on share markets for 2024, and there are certainly asset classes and sub-sectors that look relatively cheap.

Interview with Partners Group co-founder Urs Wietlisbach

Interview with Partners Group co-founder Urs Wietlisbach

Urs Wietlisbach is one of the three founders of Swiss private equity firm, Partners Group, which has grown to manage more than US$130 billion. James Weir interviewed Urs on the outlook for private equity and whether higher interest rates changes the outlook for returns. Watch until the end to get Urs’s view on the prospects for the Global Value Fund as it prepares to sell more than 20 mature assets.