Valuations

Barring a dramatic further de-escalation of the trade war, the US and much of the rest of the world will enter a recession over the next few months. Investors should remain defensively positioned for now.

Going into April, MacroQuant recommends a modest underweight on stocks, offset by an overweight on bonds and cash. While MacroQuant is modestly bearish on stocks, we suspect that the downside risks to equities may be greater than what the model assumes.

Going into April, MacroQuant recommends a modest underweight on stocks, offset by an overweight on bonds and cash. While MacroQuant is modestly bearish on stocks, we suspect that the downside risks to equities may be greater than what the model assumes.

In this Second Quarter Strategy Outlook, we explore the major trends that are set to drive financial markets for the rest of 2025 and beyond.

In Section II, Jonathan presents a new indicator that investors can use to track the odds of bubble formation in real time and shows how it fits into a larger framework that accurately explains US bear market severity over the past century. The US equity market is not in a bubble today, but it is meaningfully overvalued. Investors should expect a relatively severe cumulative loss from equities in a recession scenario.

Despite our bearish predisposition towards stocks, we are open-minded to anything that could challenge our thesis. As such, in this report, we review five upside scenarios for equities.

This report is our Part III series on valuation and subsequent returns, where we recalibrate our short-term models to emphasize signals over the next nine-to-twelve months. We will henceforth call these models STTM: Short Term Timing Models.