No News is good News

It’s been a while since I looked at markets, as I am busily trying to finish the second chapter of my new demographics project—see here—but peering across my portfolio, I haven’t missed much. Granted, the straight-line rise in green and clean energy stocks—a theme that I am invested in—has petered out, but otherwise, most of what I own keep going up, and the number at the bottom of the column keeps getting bigger. Investing in a pandemic-stricken world, it seems, isn’t too bad.  When I haven’t looked at markets for a while, I tend to go back to the basics. The first chart below plots the six-month stock-to-bond return ratio in the US, which has been locked at +20% since the beginning of the fourth quarter. This is punchy, even unprecedented, but I am loath to second guess this trend at the moment. Sustained positive stock-to-bond returns tend to be associated with resilient bull markets, and let’s be honest; that’s what we have, for now. I worry, as I suspect does everyone else, that investors have bought too aggressively into the rumor of a post-virus recovery, implying that they will sell the fact. If that’s true, conditions will become more difficult over the summer, and in the second half of the year, though I am inclined to believe that any swoon will a familiar case of BTFD™.

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