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Stockchase Insights A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert A Commentary COMMENT Jan 20, 2025
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These past 6 weeks remind him of a quote from Lenin: "There are decades when nothing happens, and then weeks when decades happen." Between tariff announcements and then reversals, and sudden intraday shocks and moves in the stock market and in currencies, it's been an extremely volatile time. It's very cloudy and confusing. His ETF research desk has been inundated with questions.
On the whole, he's not seeing the market retrench entirely out of equities. Money flows are split almost evenly between fixed income and equities. 2024 was a year of bull markets all the way, a record year for ETF flows both in Canada and in the US, driven mainly by demand for the Mag 7 and the S&P 500.
There's still a lingering desire and wish for those growth stocks to continue driving as the engine for the economy. But we're starting to see branches of flows moving into low volatility equities and certain aspects of fixed income, as well as buffers and other strategies for capital preservation.
They're highly efficient, giving you incredibly diversified exposure to sometimes thousands of stocks all at once. Enormous liquidity. Market makers stand ready throughout the day to execute huge orders. Primary and favoured vehicle for large institutions that want to turn over billions of dollars on a dime.
Incredibly low fees and very tight spreads benefit investors as a whole. Smaller investors can piggyback onto this world-class institutional liquidity built around the ETF ecosystem. People who've just sold their stocks often move into ETFs so that they can maintain some type of market exposure.
Definitely could get worse. We're seeing the early effects of a once in a thousand years president of the US and all its repercussions.
If you look at Q1 numbers for US companies and what they were projecting for the second half of the year, auto companies all pulled guidance. Same thing with the airlines. Other companies, while not pulling guidance, have said it's really murky for the second half.
We're slowly seeing the US walk back on all the extreme reciprocal tariffs that they announced on "liberation day". Now we're getting discussions with other countries such as the UK and China. That leaves about 193 countries to go. A long road, but going in the right direction.
From here we should, hopefully, see some stability in the markets.
Critical thing is going to be what the impact is for the consumer. There's going to be a pass-through of tariffs, and it depends on who bears the brunt -- manufacturer, importer, or consumer. Inflation's going to be coming through. Layoffs may tick up.
Then it's up to the Fed whether to tolerate the inflation as a one-off, or to focus on labour, when it decides whether to guide down or not. Jerome Powell really differentiates between his role and that of the government; he sees it as his job to ensure full employment with inflation around 2%. He's not anticipating, but is waiting for hard data, and it's difficult with tariffs in flux. To lower rates now would be putting fuel on the fire, exactly what you don't want.
People will change their stripes as they get affected by different things. Current US president is blowing everything up from defunding research to challenging universities.
His firm hasn't changed its approach. They look at everything from a bottom-up perspective. They have target prices on all stocks in a concentrated portfolio of 32-33 names. They also have target position sizes; if a stock drops, the team debates whether to buy it up to a full position. The macro is changing; but their method remains consistent, and that's served them well through current and past crises.
Upcoming mid-term elections plus lawsuits challenging tariffs should work in investors' favour. We have to hope that rules will fall into place and we can all move forward.
Headlines will have a minimal impact, because it takes YEARS to negotiate a trade deal. Trump will reduce tariffs on China to 80%--still high. And America dealing with 10% tariffs: that's still a big deal because our economy was still slowing. Don't buy false comfort ahead of the trade talks. Near term, we're okay, but he expects a recession ahead.
The problem calling recessions: All data are backward-looking
To call a recession, economists need to look at the data they have in hand. Sure, data points such as consumer confidence are more leading indicators, but all the actual data that economists use tend to be in the past. With recessions and with investments, past performance is no guarantee of the future. The impact of backward-looking data tend to drive a “bad news is good news” mentality at times. Essentially, when all the news is bad it can be a very good time for investors to start buying. That’s because, simply, when you are at the bottom there is nowhere to go but up. When the data are so bad and sentiment is so horrible any good news can have an amplified positive impact. This of course is hard to call, but it is important to remember that once a recession is officially called, it is often already over.
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Advantages of ETF's for Investors:
They are a great tool for investors transitioning from passive to DIY
In investing, there is no need to choose between being an exclusively passive ETF investor or a DIY stock investor. There’s certainly room for investors to do both and create their own hybrid strategy. Investors who want to make the gradual switch to DIY stock investing can also take a hybrid approach by starting with broader market exposure through ETFs as core holdings, then selecting individual stocks as “satellite” holdings. As one gets more comfortable with the risks and concentration of owning individual names and develops a more refined strategy, an investor can slowly sell off units of core ETF holdings (or take new cash that come into the portfolio) and move more towards individual names.
There are many ETFs with niche exposures that allow you to differentiate from the market
There are enough ETFs and variety out there for an investor to create a portfolio of ETFs that he or she views as more optimal than the broad market. An example we often use is owning a TSX ETF which would be overweight in financials, materials and energy. A more optimal allocation may include increased exposure to technology, industrials and other cyclicals for investors looking for growth or utilities and REITs if one is looking for a higher yield than TSX. These adjustments can be achieved via specific sector ETFs. One can also tilt their portfolio towards smaller market cap ETFs that may have higher growth potential and are not well represented in market-cap weighted indices.
Why buy one or two stocks when you can buy the sector?
While this sounds like a rhetorical question, there is an actual reason for this: superior returns by being concentrated in a winning stock of course! But the trick is getting to a level of conviction where one can believe the particular stock is a winner in a specific indsutry. Of course, this can require a lot of time and energy researching a company and its competitors. Meanwhile, one may want exposure to this sector until deciding which name(s) to be more concentrated in. The solution: ETFs. For example, you want exposure to the cybersecurity space and are bullish on the sector in general. To not rush the decision of which cybersecurity stock(s) to pick while getting exposure one can purchase an ETF like the First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (ticker: CIBR) or ETFMG Prime Cyber Security ETF (ticker: HACK) to benefit from industry tailwinds and ultimately let the market decide which individual companies get a higher weighting in the ETF (assuming a market-cap weighting).
Low knowledge areas
Related to the point above, another benefit to ETFs is that they give investors access to instant diversification in areas that are far out of an investor’s realm of knowledge. For example, an investor may want emerging market exposure in their portfolio for geographic diversification. If one knows barely anything about emerging markets, it can be a daunting task to learn the ins and outs of companies in foreign countries that have very different economic cycles, regulatory and competitive. Many investors may not even want to own individual securities outside of North America and this is understandable. Again, ETFs offer a solution to gain this exposure of broader regions or specific countries. Of course, low knowledge areas for an investor can also be specific sectors in local or North American markets.
Final Thoughts
ETFs have many other uses that we can on and on about such as hedging a portfolio’s broad market exposure through inverse ETFs, getting exposure to commodities, currencies and precious metals or even using as a proxy for exposure for the 30-day period one needs to wait before buying back a stock sold as part of a tax-loss selling strategy. The point is, given how easy ETF make it for an investor to customize a portfolio and quickly gain diversified exposure, ETFs can find a place even the most active investor’s portfolio.
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