John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
Through the recurrent bubbles and collapses of recent decades, I’ve often discussed what I call the Iron Law of Finance: Every long-term security is nothing more than a claim on some expected future stream of cash that will be delivered into the hands of investors over time. For a given stream of expected future cash payments, the higher the price investors pay today for that stream of cash, the lower the long-term return they will achieve on their investment over time.
The past several years of quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy have not bent that Iron Law at all. As prices have advanced, prospective future returns have declined, and the “risk premiums” priced into risky securities have become compressed. Based on the valuation measures most strongly correlated with actual subsequent total returns (and those correlations are near or above 90%), we continue to estimate that the S&P 500 will achieve zero or negative nominal total returns over horizons of 8 years or less, and only about 2% annually over the coming decade. See Ockham’s Razor and The Market Cycle to review some of these measures and the associated arithmetic.
Fund Managers' Current Asset Allocation - August
Every month, we review the latest BAML survey of global fund managers. Among the various ways of measuring investor sentiment, this is one of the better ones as the results reflect how managers are allocated in various asset classes. These managers oversee a combined $700b in assets.
You can see from the data that it should mostly be looked at from a contrarian perspective. Fund managers were underweight EEM more than any other market at the start of 2013, and it was the worst performer in the following year. In comparison, they were 20% underweight Japan in December 2012 and it was the best equity market in 2013. Now, the underweights are the US, defensive sectors and bonds.
DYI Comment: Excellent article along with impressive charts, well worth your time.
DYI
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