Data for charts are sourced from FRED, OECD, Eurostat, IMF, BIS, Market Watch, Yahoo/Google Finance, Investing.com, COT, Bloomberg or Quandl unless otherwise stated.
Financial market pundits are a bit like dogs chasing cars; they wouldn’t know what to do if they caught one. And so it is that after trying to figure out whether the economy and markets would achieve a soft landing in the wake of the post-Covid tightening cycle, no one quite knows what to think now that the soft landing appears to have arrived.
Let’s list the key requirements for a soft landing.
Read MoreThis is my third use case for how to do quantitative analysis with Chat GPT 4. The two others, on Eurozone inflation and times series regression with macro data, can be found here and here. I started in the industry as Head of Research for Variant Perception, a research shop that specialises, among other things, in quantitative trading models, asset allocation tools, and trade signalling analysis. One tool that came up again and again in my analyses was binary signals to identify turning points in asset classes, stocks or economic data series. The idea is simple. First, you create a binary indicator which takes the value of 1, if a certain threshold in the data is breached to the upside or downside, and zero otherwise. Secondly, you investigate what happens after such a signal has gone off, either in the original data set or mapped to a separate data set. You can combine signals across datasets to get a rolling series of signals, which can be compared to asset prices or economic data. You can see an example of such an analysis with the Nasdaq here.
Read MoreI am coming into 2024 in a decent position. My MinVar equity portfolio, designed to extract the best from both worlds in the perennial battle between growth and value, has done largely what it is supposed to do. It has offered positive, but below-beta, returns with below-beta volatility, the latter which means that your humble blogging investment analyst has been able to sleep calmly at night. In bonds, I moved my exposure onto the front early in 2023 in line with the yield curve inversion. At this point I see no reason to change that strategy. Why buy negative carry in duration when you don’t have to? There will be a time to take a strong bet on duration, but I can’t really see that point until either the front-end has collapsed under the weight of global central bank easing, or unless the curve rinses everyone by bear-steepening sufficiently to restore a positive roll and carry in the long bond. In other words, I don’t see any reason to buy duration as long as the curve is still deeply inverted.
Read MoreMonetary policymakers have been scrambling in the past week to push back against the dramatic shift in market expectations for rate cuts next year. This is true for Fed officials—despite the clear dovish pivot in the December meeting—and particularly so for the ECB, where Ms. Lagarde and her colleagues have been hard at work to disabuse investors of the notion that the central bank will start cutting rates in the first half of next year. Are central banks right to lean into the prevailing market winds here? It’s all in the eye of the beholder. The chart below plots futures-implied policy rates for the Fed and ECB through 2027. The focus at the moment is on 2024, where markets see 150bp and 120bp worth of cuts from the Fed and ECB, respectively. That sounds like a lot, but then again, inflation is now falling rapidly. The question we need to ask is whether markets will be fed information over the next few months that will drive a shift in pricing. I am not sure, and if they aren’t, talk from policymakers will be cheap.
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