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The ASX200 slipped another -0.3% last week but in our opinion, it felt like a solid performance as equities shrugged off short-term bond yields continuing their unrelenting march to multi-month/year highs i.e. The Australian 3-year closed above 3.6% as they edged ever closer to fresh 20-year highs around 3.8% while the US 2-years did scale fresh 15 year highs above 4.9%. As we often say markets that don’t fall on “bad news” are strong:
A broad-based rally helped recover some of the losses seen on the index earlier in the week. The banks found some buying to round out the week after a few softer sessions, while the resource heavyweights continued their march higher. Real Estate was the only area of the market still struggling today with the market still concerned about interest rates and their impact on property valuations. Despite the bounce today, the index closed -23pts/-0.32% lower for the week.
Fund managers appear to be very comfortable switching between stocks and sectors but there’s not a great deal of appetite towards increasing/decreasing overall market exposure – the latest Bank of America Fund Managers Survey showed cash levels remained at 5.2%, down from 5.3% in January. Although we suspect these levels might have again edged higher following the latest strong US economic data which sent bond yields higher.
While the index was largely unchanged, there were some big swings from a sector point of view. Both Materials & Energy was strong, but that’s where the good news ended. The remaining nine sectors closed lower, albeit dividends weighing on some areas more than others as a total of 9 shares in the index traded ex-dividend today.
February saw short-dated bond yields test multi-month/year highs but their longer dated peers have been fairly subdued remaining well below levels reached in 2022. We have a bearish bias towards these longer dated yields due to our view that the domestic economy is weaker than the RBA believe – yesterdays data implies we may be proved correct sooner rather than later.
It was a soggy start to the session today, but buyers came to life mid-morning when some local data prints landed. Inflation (CPI) for January came in below expectations at 7.4%, below the 8% expected by the market while GDP Growth for the 4th quarter was 0.5% vs 0.7% expected. The data took some heat out of bond yields and helped support shares today, while China’s Caixin PMI was also above expectations which supported resource names into the afternoon.
January saw investors become overly optimistic that central bank pivots were close at hand and rate cuts would add some cheer for mortgage holders into Christmas, the net result was the ASX200 roared +9.6% in less than 6 weeks i.e. more than the market average annual gain over the last 20-years. However, as we all know following some surprisingly strong economic data the RBA & Fed have stamped aggressively on any dovish outlook and suddenly markets are looking for official interest rates to peak at 4.4% in Australia and 5.4% in the US.
The market ended a tough month on the front foot with the material sector seeing some rare buying, while Energy & Property also chimed in. Over the course of the 28 days of February, resources were the biggest drag on the index which fell by ~3% overall, clearly a weak period for stocks but against the backdrop of January’s ~6% advance, it’s no disaster, particularly given bond yield find themselves back testing multi-year highs.
We are making a number of changes to the International Equities Portfolio today
The correlation between the US S&P500 and its Telco Sector doesn’t reveal any standout information even though the telcos are often described as defensive investments i.e. a “top-down” approach to the telcos in today’s uncertain times would have many investors allocating funds to the defensives but as the chart below illustrates at this stage its all about stock selection as opposed playing the sector per se – we used the US because the ASX Telco Sector is dominated by Telstra (TLS).
