{"id":5025,"date":"2015-08-01T18:08:38","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T18:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/?p=5025"},"modified":"2015-08-01T18:08:38","modified_gmt":"2015-08-01T18:08:38","slug":"weekly-earnings-update-is-the-sp-500-in-the-process-of-topping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/?p=5025","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Earnings Update: Is the SP 500 in the Process of Topping ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Each week, clients are emailed a&#8221;stat of the week&#8221; or &#8220;chart of the week&#8221;, or &#8220;graph of the week&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This week, the chart of the week will be shared with blog readers first, before going to clients. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2015\/07\/27\/until-this-happens-keep-buying-stocks-technician.html\">This<\/a> CNBC clip of the 200-day moving average is pretty significant.<\/p>\n<p>There is an old saw or maxim in investing: the more often a support or resistance level is tested, the more likely it is to fail. The 200-day moving average has been tested a few times in the last year:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>October &#8217;14, where the SP 500 actually traded through the SP 500 and then rallied right back above with Q3 &#8217;14 earnings.<\/li>\n<li>June 29 &#8217;15 was another test.<\/li>\n<li>July 8th &#8211; 9th: the SP 500 traded through again based on Greece and Grexit, but with Q2 &#8217;15 earnings, the SP 500 rallied again.<\/li>\n<li>July 27th: another test of the SP 500, as China&#8217;s stock market plummets and Energy, Gold, and Basic Materials sectors continue to trade lower.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One thing that worries me is that the 200-day moving-average &#8220;tests&#8221; are becoming more frequent.<\/p>\n<p>The SP 500 hasn&#8217;t seen a 20% correction since the April &#8211; October, 2011, so technically it has been 4 years or roughly 1,400 days since the market has seen a feel-it-in-your-toes correction.<\/p>\n<p>What bothers me greatly about the financial media is that pundits and such rarely distinguish between corrections and longer-term bear markets. The decade of 2000 &#8211; 2009 was a permanent loss of capital for some, with two vicious bear markets interrupting what was an other wise flat period of SP 500 returns, much like the 1930&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>The likelihood of a longer-term bear market occurring today in the SP 500, absent some enormous &#8220;exogenous shock&#8221; seems extremely remote. The period from 2000 to 2009 was a &#8220;colon-blow&#8221; for excesses that had built up in the bull market in Technology and Financials (the two sectors that led the SP 500 for the entire 1980&#8217;s and 1990&#8217;s bull market), from 1982 to 2000. And even then, Financials didn&#8217;t finally tip until 2007, thanks to a 60 year bull market in housing coming to an end.<\/p>\n<p>Seasonally, August and September are usually the two worst months of the year for SP 500 returns. Maybe it is time for a decent flush.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Earnings data per Thomson Reuters &#8220;This Week in Earnings&#8221;:\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Forward 4-quarter estimate:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0$124.90, versus last week&#8217;s $125.10.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>P.E ratio:<\/strong> <\/em>16.6(x)<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>PEG ratio:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0still negative based on forward growth rate, but Ex-Energy and looking at<a href=\"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/?p=5021\"> yesterday&#8217;s blog post<\/a>, the adjusted PEG continues to hover around 2(x).<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>SP 500 earnings yield:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a05.94%, down from last week&#8217;s 6.02%. Contrast this with the Q1, 2000&#8217;s earnings yield of 2%, and the 10-year Treasury of 5.5%.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Forward 4-quarter growth rate: <\/strong><\/em>-1.50% versus last week&#8217;s -1.42%. This trend continues to make me uneasy. With the importance of Exxon-Mobil in terms of the SP 500&#8217;s market cap, Friday morning&#8217;s Q2 &#8217;15 earnings release by XOM will likely drag forward Energy estimates lower, which was written about recently on this blog <a href=\"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/?p=5006\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Analysis \/ conclusion: <\/strong><\/em>John Butters of Factset noted in their July 31 &#8220;Earnings Insight&#8221; that there are &#8220;smaller cuts to SP 500 earnings estimates than average for Q3 &#8217;15 to date.&#8221; In English, this means that revisions for Q3 &#8217;15 earnings are less severe than average.<\/p>\n<p>Here is the data from Factset:<\/p>\n<p>July &#8217;15: -1.5% is the decline in the &#8220;bottom up estimate&#8221; for the first month of the quarter.<\/p>\n<p>4 quarter average: -3.2%<\/p>\n<p>20 quarter average: -1.6%<\/p>\n<p>40 quarter average: -2.0%<\/p>\n<p>The SP 500 rose a little better than 2% in July. Per the AAII data, pessimism on the part of individual investors rose to its highest level in 2 years this week.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Each week, clients are emailed a&#8221;stat of the week&#8221; or &#8220;chart of the week&#8221;, or &#8220;graph of the week&#8221;. This&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,134,157,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-factset","category-factset-earnings-data","category-sp-500-200-day-moving-average","category-stock-market-sentiment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5025"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5040,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions\/5040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}