The Dividend Cafe - Market Outlook w/David L. Bahnsen - June 21, 2022

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Volatility continues and certain market sectors are reeling, along with investors. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello, it's been a little while since we've joined you in this format. We're back to just sort of using these video conversations here at the Bonson Group when there's a sort of market warranted event, something that is kind of extraordinary enough in circumstance that might be useful to have a little deeper dive of discussion. We've been in a couple weeks of such a moment in the market. And so the first person I reached out to was Scott Gamm, who, of course, has led us through any of these conversations in the past through COVID and for quite a good long time after that. And here we are again.

I'm going to turn over the microphone to Scott. I'm recording from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I'm going to break right now between sessions. I'm at an economic symposium this week for the Acton Institute, and we'll be speaking a couple times tomorrow. But today I'm speaking to you all. And so hopefully this Tuesday, even though it's the first market day of the week because of markets being closed yesterday, Monday, but for this Tuesday moment, at least, Scott and I are going to try to wrap about everything happening in the world here over the last few days, weeks, months, what have you. Scott, I'll turn it over to you.

Well, David, thank you. As always, great to be with you. And it's definitely been a very interesting year for markets as we approach the first half, or at least the end of the first half of the year. And, you know, we mentioned we've been doing these calls for a couple of years. It's funny because we would do these typically on up market days, not, you know, staging that or timing that, obviously, but it just so happened. And here we are today with another pretty significant rally today, markets up more than 2% across the board. And I figured that would be a good place to start.

When we see a rally like that, you know, given the volatility we've seen over the past couple of months, what does that tell you? And maybe even more importantly, what does that not tell you? It's actually a great question. I'll reiterate the caveat you gave so that people fully know. Back during the COVID days, and you're right, there was this really quite impressive streak of, I think we were doing it every other Monday, if I remember correctly, and where it just so happened that we were doing it on days that ended up being really robust rally days. 10 times or something, you know, that it was like that. And yet we had proof that we didn't tee it up that way because we were sending out email announcements about our video sessions, which we were doing live and we were announcing it days in advance. So no one could have accused us of orchestrating it. But you and our production crew behind the scenes might be the only ones who know

that's also the case for this here. I think I sent out the email to you all about doing this on Friday. It may have been Saturday or something over the weekend, but the point is it was well before this morning or even last night's futures when we could see that maybe markets were going to stage a bit of a comeback. You know, I shouldn't even be saying that, Scott, because even now we have three hours till the market closes. And there have been a few days that markets may have in the pre-market futures, even intraday, looked like they were ready to kind of reverse a bit and then not being able to close with

that. And so perhaps if the market gives up this rally by the end of today, we'll know that I jinxed things further. But I guess we can start with that. What does a bit of a comeback here today mean? And I think it's really important to answer that it means nothing. There is a 50-50 chance that whatever the market's up today, right now it is up 605. And there's a very good chance that tomorrow it's down 605. We are in a volatile time. There is not a tremendous amount of conviction. There has not been a tremendous amount of follow through. And then as far as that notion of markets becoming

really viable because they washed out, they had a kind of just blowout sell-off that really represents what we call a capitulation. I know it may have felt that way to some people, and I certainly know it could have felt that way with some of the real shiny object investings. But just from some of the normal indicators we'd look at, credit spreads, they haven't widened that much. The VIX hasn't gotten that high. The put-call ratio has not got up to the 99th percentile it normally does. So the sentiment has gotten as negative as could be. But I don't know. I mean, you look at one of the hottest innovation tech ETFs on the planet, I'm not going to say the name, that was sort of the prototype, the manager of this strategy has

become a celebrity. She's a brilliant portfolio mind, but she's on financial media virtually every day. She had raised something like $40 billion in the fund in her heyday a couple years back. It's down about 80% from its high. They're positive inflows on the year. Now, their assets under management are way down because the strategy value is way down. But they have more money that's come in than gone out on the year. So a lot of those things don't sound to me like a total surrender. And so I would just caution people about reading too much into it.

And then I'll stop my answer here. The best thing to say is not that, yes, we are at a bottom or no, we are not. It is that it does not matter. That is the most useful thing an investor can hear, is to be assured that whether the bottom is in a week, a month, six months, or was a week ago, well, we know it wasn't a week ago, but three days ago, is irrelevant. One's goals are not tied to what happens in the first 5, 10, and 180 days after a particular activity. Buying and selling in a portfolio towards a position structure, towards a portfolio allocation is not done for what the mark-to-market pricing will be in the immediate aftermath. It's done for what the long-term rates of return will be.

And it's only psychological. It is only entertainment to suggest that we somehow need to be entering into a position at the exact bottom moment. We just do not know. Obviously, all things being equal, if someone did know that from where they buy, they will have a chance to buy it 20% cheaper, then they would probably just rather wait to further purchase and buy 20% cheaper. But we don't know. And anyone who claims that they have any even resemblance of evidence of such a thing is a charlatan. So the best thing to do is to construct a proper allocation and be as agnostic as could be about timing, especially timing a bottom. And we should talk about that portfolio construction and that asset allocation

in a moment. But just on this point about timing, because the other thing folks are trying to time, in addition to the market bottom, is the recession, right? And that has become just sort of the central topic right now. Folks trying to figure out when it will start, when it will end, how deep it will be. And something you've talked a lot about is the sort of idea that you can't even know not just the timing, but also what's priced into markets in terms of a recession risk. So how do you view all of that timing just on the recession point? with the foolishness of trying to time a market bottom because with a recession, not only do you have to try to time what the recession is, when it starts, when it ends, but then you have to time second, third, and fourth order effects from the initial event you're trying to time. Because then

in addition to timing the recession, you have to time the market's response to the recession and the magnitude of the recession and the magnitude of the response in markets to the recession. And so you invite three or four extra layers of opportunity to be wrong, most of which will be freely granted to you. You will bat a thousand at the opportunities to be wrong. And so I think recession calling is even more dangerous than market bottom calling. The arguments for a recession are different than the arguments for going into one. In other words, there is right now a school of thought saying, oh, no, we're in it right now. This is recession. And the MBR is going to confirm it in a few months, but the Q2 number will end up being negative. The Q1 number already was, that's going to be recession and everyone's going to realize we're in one now.

And so they're making a prediction that data in the future will validate what they're saying about the present, which in the future, the present will be the past. OK, so they're saying something that is not verifiable until it doesn't matter. And it is less than 50 percent odds, I'd say, that they are right. I would actually suggest much less than 50. odds, I'd say that they are right. I would actually suggest much less than 50. But then we're talking about a lot of other people that say, okay, yeah, we're probably not in recession right now, but there's a lot of things that are not great. Some things that are okay. The employment picture's okay. Industrial production's okay. The consumer confidence is starting to slow down, though. And we're forecasting that we will go into a recession. And maybe it's going to be Q4 of this year.

Maybe it's going to be Q2 of next year. But there's some call of entering a recession within a year. And I think the argument there is that if they believe that the Fed thinks they have to continue raising interest rates until they see inflation blink, and inflation proves to be more stubborn than some believe. And then the Fed really does just hold the pedal to the metal at trying to tighten monetary policy that something has to break. And that would break not only stock market and inflation potentially. Ironically, the one thing I don't think would break if they did that is inflation, because I don't think the inflation is that connected to the Fed funds rate to begin with.

But, yeah, if they were to continue 75 basis points at a time, raising rates to a four, four and a half, five percent Fed funds rate, it's very hard to see how that would not create a recession. The amount of liquidity it would take out of the corporate economy and the increase it would create in unemployment, I think, would be a classic cyclical recession. But I don't know why anyone would want to place that bet either. Now, maybe some people want to place the bet because they think it should happen. Maybe they think a recession is a good way to purge inflation. Maybe they think that the Fed should really aggressively tighten rates, bring back the ghost of Paul Volcker. And so they predict it not because they really believe it will happen, but because they believe it should happen.

And there's a lot of confusion in our business between people's prescriptive and descriptive orientations. That's fine. prescriptive and descriptive orientations. That's fine. However, if you're just looking at kind of an empirical basis for why one would believe the Fed will do that, I don't know what they're looking to. What has given them the impression that the Fed is not deeply affected by the impacts they have in a recessionary or deflationary or contractionary or market sensitive way. Every Fed at every moment of my adult lifetime has panicked when things they have done have started to break some aspect of economic activity or financial markets.

And I don't think that's right either. But I am describing it. I'm not prescribing it. I'm simply pointing out that if I was going to make a future prediction on past activity from the Fed, it's that the Fed has been more prone to blink than to double down. So I recognize the unknown territory here. And obviously, you can read the transcripts of the Fed. I don't get that either. People say like, oh, this time is different. Listen to what Powell said. He said that they're going to really stick to trying to take down inflation.

Well, I don't think he's actually said that. I've heard him over and over and over and over and over again talk about how once they see the trajectory of inflation going down, that that's when they'll start to kind of rethink things. And the trajectory of inflation going down could be imminent because going from 8.6 to 8.4 is still a downward trajectory of the rate of growth of inflation. And so it may possibly be that people are hearing something the PAL is not saying. But I would also just point out, Scott, and you've seen this over the years, they also say a lot of things, and then it becomes different in three months or in six months. Like in 2018, when they said they were going to raise rates four times in 2019. And

instead, they cut rates four times in 2019. Or like in 2015, when they said they were going to raise rates four times in 16. And they didn't raise rates at all in 16. And so there's plenty of precedent for the opposite. It could be different. I'm not making a prediction that this Fed will behave the way the Fed has more or less continuously behaved since 1987 with Alan Greenspan. Perhaps it will be different. But I'm not going to make a prediction that it is more likely to be different. I think that strikes me as an odd way to view things. And then so that talk is in in extra in extricably linked to recession talk. More than likely, what would have to create a recession out of an environment with millions of job positions unfilled, and 3.6% unemployment, what would have to create a

recession is the Fed breaking something. And the most likely candidate for that, in my opinion, would be in credit markets. And yet, I think the most likely thing that would get the Fed to blink would be in credit markets. They created this monster. And I, for one, will still be quite surprised if the Fed were willing to go through and cause that kind of a financial earthquake throughout credit markets. Especially also, David, because, you know, we talk about this hot inflation, the pandemic and everything we've seen over the past two years. But you also talk a lot about sort of the secular story long term of a slow monetary period. So how do we think about that as well? Or how should the Fed maybe even be thinking about that as well? Yeah, I, like most people with a extra day in the weekend, spent a good portion of my weekend rereading Irving Fisher's thesis on debt deflation theory.

And so for all of you out there who read the same thing this weekend, we could have had a party and done it together and it would have been pretty wild. But in reading it, and I've read it probably, I don't know, 10, 12 times, it struck me how prophetic a lot of what Fisher was writing about in the 1930s is to this day. And not in predicting something, but in describing the economic sequence that takes place. a society of excessive indebtedness, that you end up with the paradox of paying down debt, creating more debt because of the deflationary impact of the price level dropping, and you're scrambling to go liquidate debts, and in so doing, lowering net worths of your business, and in so doing, lowering profits and revenues and wages. And so there ends up being this kind of cyclical feedback loop. That's the classic debt deflation cycle. And so in a period like that, in a society

that has excessive indebtedness, there's just simply no rule against there being periods of cyclical inflation. And they can be supply driven, which I think is the most common culprit for the inflation we have now. There could be periods of excess liquidity that has to kind of get worked through the system. But fundamentally, the secular cycle that is caused by a downward trajectory and velocity of money, and how much that money turns over through an economy, that is what the most natural and historical and economically cogent response is to excessive indebtedness. And that's the period I think that we're in in history from a secular and structural standpoint. So I don't view the Fed as

having an easy job here, largely because I think that they made some mistakes and the mistakes that they created, that they committed, caused something different than what they're being blamed for. And now they have to go about the tricky process of doing something to solve for what everyone's upset about, which is inflation, when in reality, they're probably not going to be able to raise the Fed funds rate very effectively as a mechanism of breaking inflation. And yet, they do need to raise the Fed funds rate because they left it too low for too long and created a lot of asset bubbles. There would have been no $68,000 Bitcoin apart from Fed monetary policy. There's obviously a lot more leverage that built up in the whole crypto world than anybody knew about, which would not have happened apart from

Fed policy. There clearly would not have been the level of margin buying and speculative stock buying from your meme stocks and SPACs and shiny objects. So the Fed did a lot to boost asset prices, particularly in long duration assets, growth stocks, tech stocks, things like that. And there is a need to normalize monetary policy. But then I think they can do it. Markets go down. Economy is not great. Maybe unemployment goes higher. And you still have the inflation because the interest rates didn't have much to do with inflation to begin with. So it's kind of a thankless job at the central bank. And yet that's the position I think that they're in. Well, what happens then? Ultimately, I don't believe our society has ever had a tolerance for deflation.

In periods of the COVID shutdown, obviously the great financial crisis, those of us who studied history know the Great Depression, other periods along the way where there is the biggest revolt from the masses is in periods of the price level dropping of wages, dropping of job opportunities, dropping of recessions. These sort of deflationary moments are what the Fed exists to go against. And inflationary bursts like we're seeing now have not been very common going all the way back to the 1970s. And I think that what they'll end up having to do is tighten monetary policy to a point where it creates some kind of backlash. And then they have to go the other way. And so that exacerbation of booms and busts will continue.

And I think it's awful. And yet it feeds right into the debt deflation super cycle. And as we've seen in Japan, and I think we're living through in earlier innings in America and in the European Union, there's no easy way out of it. There's no pain-free way out of it. And so that's, to me, a kind of good description of where we stand in the historical moment. Yeah, very well said, David. And, you know, earlier you mentioned portfolio construction for asset allocation. Let's talk more about that because I know, you know, obviously you've been a longtime investor in many high yielding and dividend growth oriented energy stocks.

That's obviously the place to be this year. And certainly I would think you're bullish on it for, you know, the indefinite future. Right. Let's talk more about your views on energy and then particularly your views on the midstream area of the energy sector. Yeah, I'll start with midstream because I remain incredibly bullish and optimistic there. And unlike some of the names that we've done so well with in upstream, I don't believe that we're at the later inning of price expansion on midstream. I think we're in mid-innings at best, no pun intended. And after a week like last expansion on midstream. I think we're in mid innings at best, no pun intended. And after a week like last week, where midstream basically had its fourth worst week ever,

and it was the worst week ever for midstream that wasn't in COVID or the financial crisis. And yet for really no fundamental reason at all, I just think when you have a market sell-off that gets that deep, stuff that has gone up the most ends up having to get sold off because people can't keep selling off stuff that has already dropped 60, 70, 90%. And so it starts to make sense

to sell things that are up 40% like midstream energy. So I think the sell-off in midstream last week was much more technical and much less fundamental. And we remain very optimistic about the cash flows, about the health of the overall sector, about the secular story, the narrative behind the growth opportunity, which is a better way of transporting oil and gas, both domestically and globally, a better way of transporting oil and gas, both domestically and globally. The need for Europe to democratize its access to fossil fuels,

particularly in the form of liquefied natural gas that gets exported from an ally country like the United States. We like all of that aspect of midstream. And we like that the whole sector itself underwent a sort of therapeutic rebuilding over the last five, six, seven years with greater balance sheets, greater fiscal discipline, greater management, greater shareholder alignment and governance. And so a lot of good things have gone on there. Look, on the days that the upstream names sell off, like they did a couple of days last week, which there really hasn't been that many days this year where they've done so. The gains have been extraordinary in energy. On the days that they do sell off, I think, okay, we were really astute in having trimmed some of our profits that we did at our last rebalance. We kind of took a little off the table, but kept a very bullish and high conviction thesis in the upstream side of energy and the integrated oil and gas companies. But then candidly, there's been more days actually

where they've been up. And then on those days, I say, oh, you know, did we trim too early? I mean, the fact of the matter is that it's never a timingoriented thing. It's about valuation and about keeping your risk and reward within the parameters that is our job. The energy sector shows no fundamental reason to be peaking. The demand side is continuing to grow and the supply side is not keeping up with it. And things like tension with Saudi or tension with Russia or inadequate supply in certain parts of the world, all those things are gravy on the story. They're not good stories. They're not good politically. They're not good geopolitically. But from an investment thesis, they probably add a little extra return onto what is already a high return story,

which is an underappreciated sector of the market that's been ignored by investors and shunned by some investors on the ESG side that now all of a sudden is receiving its due attention. And so we remain bullish on energy. And that's been a great story for us this year. I think, Scott, that when you look to the higher quality sides of the market, the thesis that you and I have discussed several times in these calls that I wrote about extensively at the beginning of the year in our white paper, this rotation from growth to value, you know how many times reporters have talked to me about that, and I've laid that position out in the press. When growth goes down

40% and value goes down 16%, that story is still there. It's just that when you're down 16, you're still down big. Until the last few weeks, the story was more or less growth's down 20 to 30 and value's flat. Well, now growth's down more and value's gone further negative. However, on a relative basis, that thesis is still much in play. And I think that that has had a lot more to do with just people needing to risk off and value having been a better performer to access capital from, raise cash, things like that. Financials seem overdone to me. Consumer staples have had a fundamental issue because they've struggled from the higher input prices on the wholesale side and to really pull through and get accretion into profits by passing on that

inflationary pressure from wholesale into the retail sale. That takes a little bit of time. I expect to see that play out in the cycle over the next year or two. So consumer staples had been doing really well and they kind of sold off a bit in the last few weeks. But I just believe that right now we're in a multi-year story that will transition from growth to value. And that does not mean growth has to keep going down. There's a lot of names on the growth side that I look at that I think those are probably viable. If I were a trader, I'm not a trader and I'm not going to go buy stories that I don't believe in just because I think their prices are washed out. We have a conviction around sustainability of cash flows that is how we manage money. And that's what we do. But I would guess that some of the growth names are

oversold. And I would guess some of them aren't. And yet I have no interest in actually guessing anything about which ones are and which ones aren't. What I think as a general high level story that needs to be told is that PE expansion is not going to be a way to generate returns for some time to come. And that speaks to value as a better opportunity set than growth. And David, you know, as we sit here with, you know, five straight months of volatility and still down, at least in the broader markets, about 20% for the year, what do you want people to know? What takeaways would you like to share with folks, I guess, as we look ahead to the back half of the year? Yeah, so I think there's kind of three different lanes people could be in so far this year. If one had a really cool portfolio, real shiny portfolio entering the year late last year,

if people were all in on the hippest stuff, the crypto and the tech and the small cap and the thing and all the things. Look, they would be really happy if they were only down 20. You know, there is stuff that represents a value destruction that is the only way to kind of look at it is as a lesson learned. You know, you don't mathematically come back from down 70 or 80 percent. You know, you have to go up hundreds of percent just to get 50% recovery and things, right? We know how the math of this works. You got to go up 100 to recover 50. It's not good. I don't think that that is a very common thing for people listening to this message. The

types of investors that we work with and that are listening to the type stuff I say are generally not people that would have been in portfolios like that. So there are people that when they're talking about the difficulties in markets, they're not talking about 20, 30, they're talking about 70, 80. And I think that in that case, it almost has to be an educational moment. But then there's another level where it's more traditional. It wasn't all the most speculative stuff. It wasn't all the things down 70, 80, 90,

but there's a lot of really great names in the portfolio that are down over 50. And then there's other index things that are down 20 to 30. And that's a big hit. Hopefully, there's some asset allocation there that's buffered some of it. But I think that those are the cases where people have to learn about rebalancing, they have to learn about diversification, and they have to learn that the contrarian message, that when you love growth because it's beating value, that needs to make you love value. That there has got to be this sense of not falling in love with winners, but

recognizing that yesterday's winners are often going to at some point become tomorrow's losers and formulating the portfolio to begin with around a quality orientation, it's so hard for people to sell winners and it's so hard to buy losers. And yet I think that when someone is in that kind of moment and in this market, that might be the best takeaway for them. But then the third bucket are people that I think are probably more clients like ours that, you know, it's been a tough market overall in the year. Maybe they hear their friends talking about how they're down 30, 40, 50, and they realize they're not down anywhere near that much and they feel grateful. But they also, you know, they want to see things go back to the way they were last year and, you know, good gains and good forward movement. And I think that's where people need to be reminded of the

secret sauce going on inside a dividend growing portfolio is that there are all these dividends paying. And some pay the first, fourth, seventh, and 10th month, and some pay the second, fifth, eighth, and 11th month, and so forth. There's different cycles of these dividends, but they're coming in. And a lot of the share prices are lower and they're buying more shares at lower prices. And it isn't real exciting. It isn't a day by day, huge move up, huge move down. But there's this mathematical compounding force of nature that is adding extraordinary wealth to the portfolios of patient and disciplined investors. So I think that, first of all, hopefully there's a certain

degree of gratitude that dividend growth has done well, energy has done very well, value has done well, quality, it's paid to have done the hard work. But then on a go forward basis, you go, okay, well, where's the offense now come from next? And I think it comes from exactly what's happening. If I were being as selfish as I could possibly be, my aspiration would not be for all the portfolio values to recover very quickly. The only reason for me to want that is because it makes clients feel better about things. Selfishly speaking, lower prices and kind of a flatlined market, a choppy market, a sideways market. Sideways markets are very, very good for dividend growth investors. for dividend growth investors. And so I would hope people would utilize this moment to refresh the strategy that is dividend growth. And for those, by the way, that are not accumulators,

that are just withdrawing, thinking about the fact that they don't have to worry about what to sell or what are they selling that's down, What permanent losses are they possibly incurring? That the steady flow and stream of ever positive dividends has not been interrupted by this market. And that's the whole design of the portfolio approach. That's what I'd be focused on. Well, David, some great takeaways today. We didn't really get to talk about the 10-year treasury yield, but maybe if you want to have some quick thoughts on that, we'd love to get your take on that as well. Yeah. I mean, I would argue that both the 10-year and two-year are a pretty big story. I think last year we saw, last week we saw the two-year get very close to 350, and we saw the 10-year was literally, I think, a basis point away from 350.

As I'm talking right now, the 10-year is actually up six basis points on the day, but it's just below 330, and the two-year is at 320. So both of those yields are 20 to 30 basis points off of their highs of last week. those yields are 20 to 30 basis points off of their highs of last week. If 350 ends up being the peak level of the 10 year, then I think that the market is very likely to stabilize. A market stabilizing simply means that it stops going lower and lower and lower. That doesn't speak to when it starts going higher and higher. But usually markets can't go higher and higher until they stop going lower and lower. And the bond yields are a big part of that. So yes, if 350 ends up being what the high level was, 330-ish and 320-ish on the 10 and two year

become pretty bullish indicators, I think, for stabilization. But the other piece to it's the spread. You have right now 10 basis points between the two-year and the 10-year. That is not prophesying recession. That when you talk about the kind of two minutes that the yield curve inverted, that's not what a recessionary call looks like. The yield curve does not invert for five seconds. When it's prophesying recession, it inverts and sometimes stays there for months. And so we'll see where

this goes. But I think ultimately, that's what the Fed would like to see is a bit more slope in the yield curve. And it's probably what equity markets want to see as well. All right, David, I think that's a good place to leave our discussion for now. I know you got to run to the rest of your event, but appreciate your time today. Always great to be with you on an important time for the markets, for sure. Thanks for joining us, Scott, on the short notice. Thank you, clients and friends and listeners for joining and please reach out questions at thebonsongroup.com anytime. I really do try to field every question I get.

And we are working very, very hard at the Bonson Group and we'll continue doing so. Thanks again, Scott. Thanks all of you. And we'll let you go. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, with Hightower Advisors LLC, Thank you. No investment process is free of risk. There is no guarantee that the investment process or investment opportunities referenced herein will be profitable. Past performance is not indicative of current or future performance and is not a guarantee.

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