Sectors

Closing & Rolling SPY Synthetic Long Closing & Rolling SPY Synthetic Long On the January 12 Insight we recommended investors put on a synthetic long SPY position using March 19th, 2021 long SPY $390/$410 call spread financed by a $340 put for a total debit of $0.8/contract, with a max payout of $20/contract. This options structure enabled us to participate on the melt up and concurrently not deploy a significant amount of capital. Today, this 3-legged option strategy has run a long way to the $6.21/contract mark for a 676% return since inception. Given that these gains accrued in just under a month, we are compelled to monetize them and roll the position over to the June expiry. This time, we are buying June 18th, 2021 long SPY $400/$420 call spread and financing it with a $340 put for a total debit of $0.3/contract. Once again this is a covered position recommendation, meaning that we postpone deploying capital today at $390 on the SPY and would rather go long by June at $340. Were the SPY to continue galloping higher in the next few months we would also participate in the mania via the long call spread segment of this option strategy. Bottom Line: Book healthy gains of $5.41/contract or 676% since inception in our synthetic SPY long position and roll it to June via a $400/$420 call spread financed by a short $340 put for an outflow of $0.3/contract and max payout $20/contract.

Two Portfolio Changes And A Stop Buy Order Two Portfolio Changes And A Stop Buy Order Today we close two high-conviction trades and place a stop buy order for the June 2021 expiry VIX futures as a hedge to the remaining positions. Homebuilders have proven to be more resilient than we expected, especially given the selloff in the bond market. Clearly the US consumer is not concerned about a rebound in rates, at least not yet. Moreover, the looming fiscal stimulus will only facilitate more excesses, even in the residential housing market, as a fresh wave of liquidity will likely more than offset the tightening in monetary conditions. Thus, we have lost confidence in our high-conviction underweight stance in this niche consumer discretionary group and are taking a loss of 11% since inception. The S&P consumer staples sector was a natural high-conviction underweight given our end-2021 4,000 SPX target that we arrived at on the November 9 Special Report. Now that the market is within spitting distance of our target, the risk reward is no longer as favorable as it used to be for this defensive sector. Thus, we are closing this high-conviction trade today for a gain of 8% since inception. Finally, we successfully capitalized on our long VIX futures hedge to the tune of 19% recently, but given that volatility is settling down, it pays to institute a stop buy order for the June 2021 expiry VIX futures near the 25 mark. Bottom Line: Close the S&P consumer staples and the S&P homebuilding high-conviction underweights for 8% and -11% returns, respectively since the December 7 inception; and place a stop buy order for the June 2021 VIX futures at the 25 level.

Overweight The Software Juggernaut Is Intact The Software Juggernaut Is Intact We remain on the sidelines with regard to the broad S&P technology sector, but we continue to recommend a barbell portfolio approach preferring defensive software and services stocks to aggressive hardware and equipment equities. In that light, we reiterate our overweight stance in the key S&P software sub-industry that still commands the highest market cap weight in the tech sector, just shy of 33%. While the overall capex data is sluggish, software capital outlays have recovered smartly and according to national accounts are growing at a 10%/annum pace. Stock market-reported capex confirms that software capital expenditures are on an absolute tear and remain a key pillar of our secular preference for this defensive tech group (see chart). True, there is an element of stealing revenues from the future, but as long-time readers of our publication know we do not believe that SaaS is a fad and the adoption of cloud services remains in the early innings, which will continue to underpin the S&P software index. Bottom Line: Continue to overweight the S&P software index. The ticker symbols for the stocks in this index are: BLBG: S5SOFT – MSFT, ADBE, CRM, ORCL, INTU, NOW, ADSK, ANSS, SNPS, CDNS, FTNT, PAYC, CTXS, NLOK, TYL. For more details, please refer to this Monday’s Strategy Report. ​​​​​​​

Dear client, Next week instead of our regular Strategy Report we will be sending you a Special Report from BCA’s Equity Analyzer service on Inflation and Factor investing penned by my colleague Lucas Laskey, Senior Quantitative Analyst. Finally, on February 22 we will be hosting our quarterly webcast one at 10am EST for North American and EMEA clients and one at 8pm EST for Asia Pacific, Australian and New Zealand clients “From Alpha To Omega With Anastasios”. Mathieu Savary, who heads our Daily Insights service, will be our special guest in the morning webcast. On March 1 we will resume our regular publication schedule. Kind Regards, Anastasios Highlights Portfolio Strategy China’s engineered economic deceleration, the knee jerk US dollar bounce along with signs of soft US capital expenditures entice us to protect our deep cyclicals versus defensives portfolio gains and institute a 2.5% rolling stop to this share price ratio. Rising relative capital outlays, firming software pricing power and an M&A frenzy more than offset the negative relative profit signal from our models that sell side analysts already anticipate. Continue to overweight the S&P software index.  Recent Changes Last Tuesday we closed out our VIX futures hedge for a gain of 19% since the December 7, 2020 inception. Last Wednesday we re-initiated our long “Back-To-Work”/short “COVID-19 Winners” pair trade. Feature Equity volatility settled down last week following a ferocious ten-day SPX oscillation that sent the VIX soaring to roughly 38 near the peak at the end of January, courtesy of the GME/Wallstreetbets (WSB) saga before collapsing back down near 21 last week. Chart 1 shows that this was likely an equity-only event: both risk off currencies – the yen and the franc – actually fell versus the USD, junk bond spreads barely budged and the vol curve violently inverted, a move that more often than not signals that complacency has morphed into panic. Importantly, when the Fed embarks on active QE the SPX drawdown maxes out at 10% based on empirical evidence, including the recent September/October 10% drawdown. Using the ES futures low hit two Sundays ago, the S&P 500 experienced a 5.3% peak-to-trough pullback well within the range of previous Fed active QE iterations. As a reminder, the 2010 and 2011, 17% and 20% respective drawdowns took root after the Fed had concluded QE1 and QE2 operations. The implication is that for a more significant drawdown to materialize, likely the Fed has to end the current QE operation and reinject some volatility in the bond markets (bottom panel, Chart 1).  Isolating the true signal from all this noise, convinced us to book handsome gains to the tune of 19% in our VIX June futures hedge (conservatively assuming that no leverage was used), reinitiate the long “Back-To-Work”/short “COVID-19 Winners” pair trade and put the small cap size bias on our upgrade watch list. As volatility has slowly died down, investors can start to refocus on profit fundamentals. Similar to the steep fall in EPS that the SPX 35% drawdown predicted in March of 2020, in recent research we showed that were we to hold the SPX at current levels, its 12-month rate-of-change would surpass the 61% mark next month and forecast that profit growth would rise by a similar amount. Indeed, sell side analysts’ bottom up earnings estimates corroborate this analysis as quarterly EPS will peter out roughly at a 48% year-over-year (YOY) growth rate next quarter and vault to all-time highs in quarterly level terms in Q3 following a three-year hiatus (Chart 2). Chart 1Equity-only Event Equity-only Event Equity-only Event Chart 2Joined At The Hip Joined At The Hip Joined At The Hip Importantly, the tech sector no longer commands an earnings weight similar to its market cap weight likely because it’s run ahead of itself and also because the rest of the sectors are playing catch up this year as the US economy is slated to reopen on the back of the herculean inoculation efforts (profit weight and mkt cap weight columns, Table 1). Table 1Sector EPS And Market Cap Weights Re-grossing? Re-grossing? This is most evident on the sector contribution to this year's SPX earnings growth. Historically, the tech sector commanded the lion’s share of profit explanation for the SPX, but not in 2021. In fact, the S&P IT sector is ranked 4th in terms of contribution to overall SPX profits, behind industrials, financials and consumer discretionary (Chart 3).   Delving deeper into 12-month forward earnings growth figures is instructive. Table 2 shows our universe of coverage ranked first by GICS1 sector growth rates and then re-ranked per sub-group. As an aside the energy sector’s EPS is slated to contract in calendar 2020 and thus any YOY growth rate figures are rendered useless for the broad sector and the energy sub-industries. Chart 3Sector Contribution To 2021 SPX EPS Growth Re-grossing? Re-grossing? Table 2Identifying S&P 500 Sector EPS Growth Leaders And Laggards Re-grossing? Re-grossing? Our portfolio positioning is well aligned with the sector ranking of EPS growth for the coming year. Put differently, given the havoc that COVID-19 wreaked to the US industrial and service bases it is normal that deep cyclical sectors along with financials and the decimated services-heavy parts of the consumer discretionary sector to occupy the top ranks. In contrast, defensives sectors that were largely COVID-19 beneficiaries (especially health care and consumer staples) are near the bottom of the pit. The sole misalignment is the bombed out real estate sector that we remain overweight (Table 2). Netting it all out, our sense is that the market has successfully navigated a tumultuous two-week period and we reiterate our long-held sanguine 9-12 month cyclical view on the prospects of the S&P 500. This week, we update a defensive tech sub-group and put a tight stop in the cyclicals/defensives portfolio bent in order to protect profits. Risks To The Cyclicals Over Defensives Portfolio Bent Last December we highlighted that China’s four year cycle will peter out in the back half of 2021 and could cause some equity market consternation, with stocks likely sniffing out any trouble likely by the end of Q1/2021. It appears that investors have been sleeping at the wheel and largely distracted by the GME/WSB saga. Not only did they neglect the robust SPX profit season, but they also ignored that something is amiss in China as we first showed last week (please refer to Chart 12 here). Importantly, what worries us most is the transition from China being the primary locomotive of global growth to the US taking the reins in coming quarters. Clearly such a handoff is tumultuous, especially given the recent added risk of a reflex rebound in the greenback that we first warned about on January 12 when we set the cyclicals/defensives ratio on downgrade alert. Subsequently, we upgraded the S&P utilities sector to neutral locking in gains of 15% for the portfolio, and today we decide to institute a 2.5% rolling stop in the cyclicals/defensives portfolio bent, in order to participate on further upside but also protect 16% gains for the portfolio since the July 27, 2020 inception in case of a market relapse. Practically, when the rolling stop gets triggered we will move the cyclicals/defensives bent down to neutral via executing the downgrade alert we have in the S&P materials sector. In more detail, China’s slamming on the brakes is the key risk to cyclicals/defensives. Not only are the Chinese authorities trying to engineer a slowdown with the recent reverse repo operations, but also BCA’s China Monetary Indicator, the selloff in the Chinese sovereign bond market and the cresting in the PBOC’s balance sheet are all corroborating the economic deceleration signal (Chart 4). Chinese total social financing has peaked, the 6-month credit impulse is plunging, and the nosedive in Goldman Sachs’ Chinese current activity indicator (CAI) are all firing warning shots that the economy is slated to slowdown (Chart 5).  Chart 4Everywhere… Everywhere… Everywhere… Chart 5…One Looks… …One Looks… …One Looks… Already both the Chinese manufacturing and services PMIs have hooked down with the manufacturing new orders-to-inventories (NOI) in free fall and export orders in outright contraction. Tack on the reversal in the Citi economic surprise index (ESI) for China and the outlook dims further for US cyclicals/defensives (Chart 6). No wonder Chinese demand for loans has turned the corner, infrastructure spending has topped out and railway freight volumes have ticked down as a direct response to the tightening in Chinese monetary conditions (Chart 7). Chart 6…China… …China… …China… Chart 7…Is Slowing… …Is Slowing… …Is Slowing… Chinese imports flirting with the zero line best capture all this softening in Chinese data and also warns that the US cyclicals/defensives ratio is nearing a zenith (Chart 8). Beyond the dual risk of a counter trend rally in the USD and China’s undeniable deceleration, returning to US shores reveals another source of potential trouble for cyclicals/defensives. Chart 8…Down …Down …Down The US Citi ESI has come back down to earth, and the ISM manufacturing PMI cooled off last month with the NOI ratio flashing red (Chart 9). Importantly, Goldman Sachs’ US CAI is sinking like a stone corroborating that, at the margin, US economic data is softening (Chart 10). Moreover, US capex is in the doldrums courtesy of the collapse in EPS last year that dealt a blow to CEO confidence. Worrisomely, the rollover in the latest capex intentions from regional Fed surveys along with the downbeat NFIB survey’s capital outlays in 6-months component underscore that CEOs remain reluctant to invest (Chart 9). Chart 9Even US Trouble… Even US Trouble… Even US Trouble… Finally, relative valuations have surged to all-time highs leaving no cushion in case of a mishap, while relative technicals are in extreme overbought territory near a level that has marked the commencement of prior relative share price drawdowns (Chart 11). Chart 10…Is Brewing …Is Brewing …Is Brewing Netting it all out, China’s engineered economic deceleration, the knee jerk US dollar bounce along with signs of soft US capital expenditures entice us to protect our deep cyclicals versus defensives portfolio gains and institute a 2.5% rolling stop to this share price ratio. Bottom Line: Prepare to move the cyclicals/defensives portfolio bent back down to neutral from currently overweight. Today we recommend investors establish a 2.5% rolling stop to the cyclicals/defensives relative share price ratio as a risk management tool in order to protect profits. Chart 11Overstretched And Pricey Overstretched And Pricey Overstretched And Pricey Software On The Ascend While we remain on the sidelines with regard to the broad S&P technology sector we continue to recommend a barbell portfolio approach preferring defensive software and services stocks to aggressive hardware and equipment equities. In that light, we reiterate our overweight stance in the key S&P software sub-industry that still commands the highest market cap weight in the tech sector just shy of 33%. While overall capex is sluggish as we highlighted above, software capital outlays have recovered smartly and according to national accounts are growing at a 10%/annum pace. Stock market-reported capex confirms that software capital expenditures are on an absolute tear and remain a key pillar of our secular preference for this defensive tech group (Chart 12). On the sales front, COVID-19 accelerated the push to the cloud and 2020 has been a bumper year for industry sales. True there is an element of stealing revenues from the future, but as long-time readers of our publication know we do not believe that SaaS is a fad and the adoption of cloud services remains in the early innings. Impressively, while relative forward top line growth expectations have rolled over, the attempt of the software price deflator to exit deflation suggests that software stocks will easily surpass this lowered revenue bar in coming quarters (Chart 13). Chart 12Primary Capex Beneficiary Primary Capex Beneficiary Primary Capex Beneficiary Amidst the IPO frenzy that has captured investors’ imagination especially given the spectacular increases in both SNOW and PLTR (neither of which is in the SPX yet), software M&A fever remains as high as ever. This constant reduction of software stock supply, coupled with the insatiable appetite of software executives to aggressively retire equity, signals that software equity prices will remain well bid (Chart 14). Chart 13Software Tries To Exit Deflation Software Tries To Exit Deflation Software Tries To Exit Deflation Chart 14Positive Share Price Dynamics Positive Share Price Dynamics Positive Share Price Dynamics Nevertheless, our relative EPS growth models are waving a yellow flag. The SPX is slated to grow profits north of 25% this year, but according to our profit models software will only manage to grow in the single digits, thus trailing the broad market by a wide margin. Encouragingly, this grim relative profit growth backdrop is already reflected in depressed sell side analysts’ forecasts (Chart 15). Finally, while relative valuations are still lofty they recently have corrected back to one standard deviation above the historical mean. Similarly, relative technicals have worked off overbought conditions and have settled down near the recent historical average (Chart 16). Chart 15Risks… Risks… Risks… In sum, rising relative capital outlays, firming software pricing power and an M&A frenzy more than offset the negative relative profit signal from our models that sell side analysts already anticipate. Bottom Line: Continue to overweight the S&P software index. The ticker symbols for the stocks in this index are: BLBG: S5SOFT – MSFT, ADBE, CRM, ORCL, INTU, NOW, ADSK, ANSS, SNPS, CDNS, FTNT, PAYC, CTXS, NLOK, TYL. Chart 16…To Monitor …To Monitor …To Monitor   Anastasios Avgeriou US Equity Strategist anastasios@bcaresearch.com Current Recommendations Current Trades Strategic (10-Year) Trade Recommendations Overdose? Overdose? Size And Style Views January 12, 2021  Stay neutral small over large caps July 27, 2020 Overweight cyclicals over defensives (2.5% rolling stop) June 11, 2018 Long the BCA Millennial basket  The ticker symbols are: (AAPL, AMZN, UBER, HD, LEN, MSFT, NFLX, SPOT, ABNB, V). January 22, 2018 Favor value over growth

Goldilocks And The Three Bears Goldilocks And The Three Bears The S&P 500 is clawing back its losses after it hiccupped last week correcting approximately 5% from peak-to-trough as the dust from the GME/WSB saga is settling down. As we showed in this Monday’s Strategy Report, there is a natural monetary tightening occurring via the financial markets that is likely to test the Fed’s resolve. Namely, whenever all three assets, the US dollar, the 10-year US Treasury, and crude oil rise together, the SPX suffers a pullback (see chart). Year-to-date, two out of these three variables are firing warning shots, and given rising odds of a US dollar reversal, the tightening trio is signaling at least some equity market indigestion. Bottom Line: The simultaneous rise in the US dollar, the 10-year US Treasury yield, and crude oil all signal that equity investors should stay vigilant.

We recommend investors monetize gains in the hedge we first recommended on December 7, 2020 in the form of VIX June futures, for a gain of 19% since inception, assuming conservatively that no leverage was used in executing this hedge. While the GME/Wallstreetbets saga has yet to fully play out, three reasons underpin our decision. First, this appears to be an equity only event as both USDJPY and USDCHF foreign exchange pairs went up last Wednesday and Friday. In a traditional “risk off” phase, the yen and the franc would spike versus the greenback not selloff. Second, during periods of active Fed QE the broad equity market has never fallen more than 10% from respective peaks. Using the Sunday night low for ES futures results in a 5.3% peak to trough fall for the broad market, well in the range of previous active Fed QE pullbacks. Finally, the spot VIX has jumped from 21 to a recent peak of 38, likely reflecting a lot of negative news. Spot VIX with a current (as we went to press) 33 handle implies that in the next 30 days the S&P 500 will either fall or rise by roughly 10% and vault to all-time highs or sink back to 3400. While the jury is still out on how this short squeeze phase will play out, a steeply inverted vol curve last week also signaled that the worst is likely behind us (see chart). Bottom Line: Crystalize 19% gains since inception in the VIX futures hedge, but stay vigilant. Book Gains In VIX Futures Book Gains In VIX Futures    

In last week’s US Sector Insight we showed how TSLA’s inclusion in the S&P 500 pushed consumer discretionary 5-year forward EPS growth into the stratosphere. We then dove deeper into this GICS1 sectors in this Monday’s Strategy Report and downgraded the S&P automobiles & components index to underweight. On the profit front, a wide gap has opened between relative share prices and relative forward EPS, which suggests that high-flying auto stocks will soon stop defying gravity (Chart 1). At the same time, technicals are also waving a red flag: the S&P autos & components relative annualized 13-week rate of change clocked in at over 250%/annum, steeply diverging from relative net EPS revisions (Chart 2). Chart 1Shy Away From Cult Stocks Shy Away From Cult Stocks Shy Away From Cult Stocks Chart 2Shy Away From Cult Stocks Shy Away From Cult Stocks Shy Away From Cult Stocks   Given that auto manufacturing is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins and that other Japanese, German and Chinese BEV manufacturers are entering the scene (for example VW Group outsold TSLA last year by a factor of over 3-to-1 in Norway, which is the most advanced BEV market), we doubt that prices will sustain their divergence from profits for much longer. Bottom Line: We trimmed the S&P automobiles & components index to underweight. The ticker symbols for the stocks in this index are: BLBG: S5AUCO – TSLA, GM, F, APTV, BWA.

Upgrading Utilities Upgrading Utilities Neutral We have been on the right side of the underweight utilities position for the better part of the past two years, but now that the easy money has been made, we are compelled to book handsome gains of 14.8% for the portfolio since inception and move to the sidelines. Extreme euphoria has taken over in the overall equity space and while the vaccine rollout news is a big positive, we doubt the ISM manufacturing survey reading can rise significantly from the current historically stretched level (ISM survey shown inverted, top panel). Similarly, junk yields are at all-time lows confirming that investor complacency is sky-high, and the USD very oversold with positioning stretched to the short dollars side. Any hiccups would cause all three of these macro indicators to reverse course abruptly, which would boost relative utilities share prices (middle & bottom panels). Bottom Line: We booked gains of 14.8% since inception in the S&P utilities sector and upgraded it from underweight to neutral. The ticker symbols for the stocks in this index are: BLBG: S5UTIL – NEE, D, DUK, SO, AEP, EXC, XEL, ES, SRE, WEC, AWK, PEG, ED, DTE, AEE, EIX, ETR, PPL, CMS, FE, AES, LNT, ATO, EVRG, CNP, NI, NRG, PNW. For more details, please refer to this Monday’s Strategy Report. ​​​​​​​

As the economy is transitioning from liquidity to growth, the oil-to-gold price ratio has caught our attention again this year. As a reminder, last year we successfully traded this high-octane pair using the S&P oil & gas exploration & production (O&G E&P) index on the long side and the global gold miners index on the short side. We pocketed gains of 10% in early May of 2020, only to reinstate the trade again and to scoop a further 32% in gains. This year, the latest ISM manufacturing survey release painted a bright picture for this intra-commodity price ratio once again (see chart), and while we are not reinstituting the pair trade just yet, it is now flashing on our radar screen; we are patient and await a better entry point. Reopening of the economy and related energy demand recovery will underpin oil prices and producers going forward, at the same time as rising real yields will weigh on the shiny metal and gold mining stocks. Bottom Line: Put a stop buy on long S&P O&G E&P/short global gold miners via the XOP/GDX exchange traded funds at a ratio of 1.2. From Liquidity To Growth From Liquidity To Growth

Obeying The Stop: Close The Intra-Real Estate Pair Trade Obeying The Stop: Close The Intra-Real Estate Pair Trade In the January 19th Special Report we instituted a long S&P REITs / short S&P homebuilders pair trade with a 10% stop loss. Yesterday, our stop was triggered and we are obeying it and closing this pair trade. Among other reasons, one of the macro drivers that compelled us to put this pair trade on was the 10-year US Treasury yield: historically the correlation between the relative share price ratio and interest rates would snap positive especially following a recession. Hence, a pullback in yields was also a key risk we highlighted for this pair trade. The 10-year US Treasury yield peaked near 1.19% and has continued to correct breaking below 1.04%, which at the margin boosts the allure of homebuilding stocks and consequently put our pair trade offside. While the original reasoning for putting this pair trade on remains intact, we refrain from fighting the trend and opt to move to the sidelines for the time being. We will be on the lookout for a better-timed entry point in the near future. Bottom Line: Obey the trailing stop and close the long S&P REITs / short S&P homebuilders pair trade for a loss of 10%.