(Bloomberg) — A pattern has persisted in stocks the past year. A downdraft steepens, sellers get the selling out of their systems, and the market is left poised for an often-powerful jump.
Friday’s surge, which spared the S&P 500 from a fifth straight down week, bore all the hallmarks of that routine, coming amid a boatload of evidence that investor risk appetite had been cut to the bone. A measure of equity exposure among hedge fund clients fell to a five-year low, while retail pessimism was also intensifying, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. data.
Those trends would explain two things. One, last month’s uncharacteristically awful returns, a consequence of across-the-board selling that pushed the S&P 500 to its worst December in four years. And two, Friday’s ebullient reaction to news showing higher-than-forecast payroll additions in the US economy, when seven of the prior eight employment reports spurred losses.
“If you look at a broad array of sentiment indicators, they universally suggest investors are a lot more cautious than they were a year ago,” said Dan Suzuki, deputy chief investment officer at Richard Bernstein Advisors. “That could very well be laying the groundwork for another short-term rally, as we seem to get every several months.”
Stocks ended the longest streak of weekly declines since last May as the S&P 500 climbed during the holiday-shortened period. The benchmark gauge, which finished 2022 with the worst annual slide since the financial crisis, rose 1.5% over the four days, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced for a second week in three.
Boom-bust cycles in equities last year generally correlated with changes in institutional and retail positioning. Gains occurred after investors slashed bullish bets, and declines followed buying sprees. The incessant up-down motion made gleaning an economic signal from the market — never an exact science to begin with — particularly futile, with trends in the market proving temporary. Friday’s runup in the S&P 500 also came after a sharp drop in risk-appetites.
Another major contour of last year’s investment landscape repeated this week: value vastly outperformed growth, with an index tracking cheaper stocks beating that of fast growers by 2 percentage points. One takeaway from that might be a slightly less-dour economic message than has generally been taken from markets as a whole. Growth companies are part of the economy, obviously, but the battering those stocks took was primarily driven by shrinking valuations. Value shares had far less bloat to correct and as a result their relatively tame losses could be framed as a purer and cheerier signal on future activity.
Sessions when monthly payrolls data were released have not been kind to stocks of late. Among jobs days last year, all but three saw the S&P 500 falling as the economy mostly added more jobs than expected, clearing the path for the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy as it battled inflation. The ominous pattern, along with the specter of a serious downturn, prompted investors of all stripes to hunker down after a brutal year that saw stocks and Treasuries suffer the worst annual loss in more than a century.
Hedge funds that make both bullish and bearish equity wagers boosted their short positions in December, with their average leverage falling to the lowest level since 2017, data compiled by JPMorgan’s prime brokerage unit show. A similar trend was on display at Morgan Stanley, where gross leverage among the firm’s hedge fund clients sat near a five-year low.
While nonfarm payrolls again beat forecasts in December, traders found comfort in cooling wage gains. The S&P 500 jumped 2.3% for the best reaction to a jobs report in more than two years.
“Lower weekly hours will bias the real labor income proxy lower, which would imply weaker spending going forward,” said Dennis DeBusschere, founder of 22V Research. “This shouldn’t change the Fed outlook much near-term but lowers the odds they need to crush things.”
The first signs of a rally were enough to lure a few bulls back after a $13 trillion wipeout last year had pros and even once die-hard retail bulls retreating en mass. Individual traders, who bought the dip in early 2022 only to be burned time and again by the yearlong slump, dumped more than $3 billion of shares in the week through Tuesday, the third-biggest selling in the history of JPMorgan’s data.
While year-end tax selling played a role in the exodus, the heavy outflow also reflected growing bearishness among the crowd, according to Peng Cheng, the firm’s strategist who derived the estimate from public data on exchanges.
All the defensive posturing likely set the stage for a market bounce, as happened repeatedly during 2022, when prolonged selloffs gave way to rapid snapbacks before the selling resumed. In a year where the S&P 500 lost about one fifth of its value, the index managed to rally more than 10% from a trough three times.
From peak inflation to a speculation about a Fed pivot, investors latched on to numerous catalysts to bid up stocks. Each rally eventually faded. Stocks have made little headways since June, with the S&P 500 largely trapped in a 700-point range.
However short-lived those bounces proved, there’s evidence they bothered Fed officials. Minutes of their last policy meeting released this week showed some members cautioning against “an unwarranted easing in financial conditions” that could undermine efforts to slow the economy and tame inflation.
With banks kicking off earnings season next week, investors may be content to await more clarity on corporate America’s strength, according to Christophe Barraud, chief economist and strategist at Market Securities LLP.
“Last year, the mood changed a lot because every time people bought, the market sold even more,” he said. “People right now will probably prefer buying after being sure that there will be some strong force behind equities.”
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.