Family Office
Review and outlook: Season of hope and despair

Whispers, routines and the rites of spring: a statiscal analysis.
Gordon Fowler Jr. is CIO of Glenmede Trust Company, an
independent wealth advisory based in Philadelphia.
Summary
Quarterly earnings season is almost upon us again. A successful
earnings season is measured by whether companies provide more
positive than negative surprises.
Glenmede’s proprietary Whisper Signal Model for earnings
surprises anticipates that we will have another good season;
leading, we hope, to higher market levels.
It should also be noted, however, that the number of negative
surprises is expected to increase and will influence the
headlines.
This week’s commentary concludes with a rigorous analysis of the
risk-return of being a Philadelphia sports fan.
Review and outlook
The first quarter is over. That means we are approaching earnings
season once again. Earnings season is the quarterly ritual that
drives the investment news cycle for a three-to-five-week period.
During this time, hopes are either justified by management
reports on corporate earnings conditions, or they are dashed by
disappointing news. Our guess – bolstered by our forecasting
models – is that this will be another good quarter for earnings
announcements. It is expected, however, to be “less good” than
prior periods.
The market didn’t trade last week with any sense of joyous
expectation. The broad stock market, as measured by the S&P
500, fell by 0.3%, led by declines in utilities (down 1.8%) and
materials (down 0.7%). The gainers for the week were telecoms (up
0.8%) and energy (up 0.3%). Small-cap companies, as measured by
the Russell 2000, had a good week, rising by 1.1%. Foreign
investments declined in value by 0.2%, as measured by the MSCI
EAFE index. The decline was entirely attributable to a stronger
dollar; local markets actually rose in value by 1.1%.
Selected Asset Class ReturnsWeekly and Year to Date
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Google was added to the S&P 500; otherwise there was very
little coprporate news last week. The most interesting economic
data were the housing numbers. Existing home re-sales rose in
February by 5.2%, while new home sales fell by 10.5%. There may
be some timing differences that explain this odd result. This
mixed result, however, might also be symptomatic of a market that
is going through an adjustment rather than a collapse.
Housing prices simply have risen too much and now buyers are
resisting the current price levels. Somewhat higher long-term
rates and significantly higher short-term rates have made
purchase prices less affordable for the marginal buyer. But are
people going to stop buying and selling houses forever? Probably
not: but housing prices or, to be more exact, land prices, will
need to go through a period of downward adjustments to bring
prices back into line. The correction in many geographic areas
does not need to be severe. In may be just as simple as a
narrowing of the spread between the existing bid and ask.
Demographics and decent employment growth may well partially
offset a portion of this decline in demand.
The vagaries of the housing market will likely take a back seat
over the next few weeks to the three-monthly show that regularly
grips the attention of all long-term investors – I mean, of
course, the quarterly earnings results.
Season of hope
Earnings seasons seem to follow a pattern. It starts when a few
significant companies pre-announce disappointing results. This is
followed by public hand-wringing about corporate America’s period
of strong earnings growth having come to an end. Toward the end
of earnings season, however, the results are tallied, and things
turn out not so bad. The measure of success or failure of an
earnings season is whether analysts are pleasantly surprised by
the results that they see and subsequently revise their forecasts
up a bit for the following quarters and years.
Getting a feel for the rough number of positive surprises is a
good way to predict if we will have a good earnings season. One
tool that Glenmede uses to judge the earnings environment is our
proprietary Whisper Signal Model. This looks at the
earnings forecasts for individual stocks made by individual
analysts on Wall Street. Some analysts are better than others at
anticipating the direction of future earnings. The Whisper
Signal Model figures out who those analysts are and uses the
direction of their forecast changes and other factors to forecast
whether a stock is going to produce a surprisingly strong upward
revision in the next quarter or a surprisingly poor number. This
information can be useful when buying and selling individual
stocks.
It is also useful to look at the total number of stocks in the
S&P 500 where we expect strong upward surprises and compare
it to the number of stocks where we anticipate downward
surprises. This ratio can give us an idea as to whether we should
expect a strong or weak earnings season.
And what do the numbers tell us? As shown in the chart below the
number of stocks in the S&P 500 that are strong candidates
for positive surprises exceeds the number of strong negative
candidates by a two to one margin. This bodes well for the
upcoming earnings season. There is a small caveat to be mentioned
here. This ratio of good to bad has declined over the past year.
As companies enjoy more and more profitability, the bar is
raised, and it gets harder and harder to jump over the bar.
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Why is this? Well, it’s worth looking again at our favorite chart
on earnings. The picture below shows S&P 500 earnings versus
long-term trend growth. Earnings are still anticipated to rise,
but they are now, and will be over the near future, well above
trend line. This reflects the fact that companies are earning
very high profit margins. Earnings may continue to grow from here
as the economy grows, but earnings growth from increasing
profitability (or earning an increasing amount on every
additional dollar of sales) will be difficult.
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At some point, this profitability level will go back to normal,
and earnings will return to trend line. Until then, we suspect
the market will continue to cruise as good earnings news fulfills
the hopes and dreams of long-term investors during quarterly
earnings season.
Season of despair
The first pitch of the Major League Baseball coincides roughly
with the start of earnings season, and I am in the process of
applying for dual citizenship. As a son of New England, I am a
devout partisan of the Boston Red Sox. Please don’t doubt my
level of loyalty to the teams from my birthplace. I maintained
that partisanship through twenty (often painful) years of living
in the suburbs of New York. For a Boston sports fan, it is far
easier to pick up support for Philadelphia teams than New York
teams. There is one important point of commonality: a shared
experience of despair. One concern I have about becoming a
Philadelphia sports fan is that the feeling of despair has gone
to excess. One senses from conversation and from the local media
a feeling of gross injustice. Philadelphia, though it has had
many great and heroic teams over the past forty years, has been
deprived its fair share of champions. The area has had good teams
that get close but never realize greatness and national
acclaim.
I have never really wanted to join a sports community with a
brooding sense of injustice. Spectator sports for me are a way to
escape from life’s problems – not a place to repeat them. I want
teams that I can dream about. I do not want to join a collective
nightmare. So before I signed up as a Philadelphia sports fan, I
decided to do some analytical research and see whether this sense
of inequity had any validity. Specifically, I took a list of the
ten largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. and counted how many
times a professional team in one of the four major professional
spectator sports (baseball, football, basketball and hockey) won
a national championship since 1960 in each of these metropolitan
areas.
As it turns out, Philadelphia has reason to despair. Out of the
top ten metropolitan areas in America, it ranks 8 out of 10 in
terms of number of championship teams. Only Dallas and Houston,
areas that would barely have ranked as metropolises in 1960, come
in below Philadelphia.
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There is an interesting observation that goes with the results of
this table. Market size and number of championship teams is
highly correlated. The correlation coefficient between these two
rankings – size and wins – is 0.76. Just to put that in
perspective, a correlation of 1.0 would mean that the two series
are perfectly correlated.
This makes some sense. Larger markets have more teams and more
money to spend on good players. With that observation in mind,
Philadelphia’s result is far more logical. It is the sixth
largest metropolis in the country, and it ranks eighth in terms
of number of championships. To be fair, Philadelphia still has a
case. The ranking by championships is two below the ranking by
market size. But Chicago and the Washington-Baltimore area which
earned have fewer championships than one would expect given their
sizes, share the same fate. Chicago fans, in particular, love
their Cubbies even if the team seems never even to make the
playoffs. Chicago just shrugs its broad shoulders and doesn’t
moan about its victimization at the hands of hateful sports gods.
In a city where a cup of coffee spilled outside during the winter
can freeze before it hits the ground, the phrase “deal with it”
is not just an empty comment; it is a means of survival.
The table does reveal one disturbing fact. There is one
metropolitan area and fan base that has no right to complain.
Sitting only second to New York in terms of accumulated
championships is a metropolitan area than ranks seventh in terms
of size. Given its size, it has had a disproportionate share of
ticker tape parades. Its fan base has no right to utter a
complaint that the fates have conspired against them. And if
there is any statistical validity to my model, the region should
fail to win anything close to its fair share of championships
over the next thirty years. That city is…um, well… Boston.
–FWR
Review & Outlook is intended to be an unconstrained review of
issues, topics and considerations of possible interest to
Glenmede's clients and is not intended to be applicable to any
one particular client. Actual investment decisions for particular
clients are made in light of applicable considerations and may be
different from the views expressed here. Likewise, actual
portfolio performance may differ from the results discussed.
.