Hussman Market Comment

There’s no question that Fed-induced speculation encouraged investors to chase extreme valuations, and to accept low returns on every class of investments. Unfortunately, Fed policy does not change the arithmetic that links valuations with subsequent returns. By our estimates, the S&P 500 is likely to lag Treasury bonds, and even Treasury bills, for more than a decade. Now comes the hard part.

What drives investment returns? Can you simply buy stocks at any price and assume you'll enjoy long-term returns on the order of 10% annually? The answer is no. Unfortunately, the financial industry often encourages investors to imagine this is how markets work. Is there some meaningful structure that drives returns? The answer is yes. Understanding it offers clear insights about how we got here, and where we may be going.

Lao Tzu wrote, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In recent months, the financial markets have taken the first step toward normalization. Unfortunately, having taken one step, the most prominent question we hear is “Are we there yet?!?"

Despite the year-to-date decline in the S&P 500, the most reliable valuation measures we monitor remain at levels never observed in market history prior to August 2020. Meanwhile, market internals remain ragged and divergent, suggesting risk-aversion among investors. That combination creates what I've often described as a "trap door" situation. You make friends with bears by understanding them, and by avoiding behavior that will get you eaten.

The most challenging financial event for investors in the coming decade will be the repricing of securities to valuations that imply adequate long-term returns, following more than a decade of reckless and intentional Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation.

Valuations do not provide an environment for “intelligent investment” here, nor do market internals provide an environment for “intelligent speculation.” Aside from very minor tactical shifts, the main opportunity that investors have in the current environment is the opportunity for baseless gambling.

Record stock prices here are the product of a) record valuation multiples that have been inflated by a decade of zero interest rate policy, times b) record earnings that embed distorted profit margins inflated by trillions of dollars of temporary deficit spending. Investors are paying top dollar for top dollar.

By relentlessly depriving investors of risk-free return, the Federal Reserve has spawned an all-asset speculative bubble that we estimate will provide investors little but return-free risk.

There are certain features of valuation, investor psychology, and price behavior that emerge, to one degree or another, when the fear of missing out becomes particularly extreme and the focus of speculation becomes particularly narrow. We’ve suddenly hit a motherlode of those conditions. Emphatically, this is not a forecast. It's a statement about current, observable conditions.

Speculative psychology is the only thing standing between an hypervalued market that continues to advance and a hypervalued market that drops like a rock. Our best gauge of that psychology - the uniformity of market internals - remains divergent enough to keep market conditions in a trap-door situation.