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No matter how you slice it, there is no denying that 2022 was the worst year for US equity investors since 2008, and the magnitude of the damage is even more staggering, if you consider it in market value terms. trillion in marketcapitalization, but for balance, it is also worth noting that US equities are still holding on to a gain of $6.9
In my third post at the start of 2023, I looked at US treasuries, the long-touted haven of safety for investors. In 2022, they were in the eye on the storm, with the ten-year US treasury bond depreciating in price by more than 19% during the year, the worst year for US treasury returns in a century. that was lost last year.
In a post at the start of 2021 , I argued that while stocks entered the year at elevated levels, especially on historic metrics (such as PE ratios), they were priced to deliver reasonable returns, relative to very low risk free rates (with the treasury bond rate at 0.93% at the start of 2021).
That positive result notwithstanding, the recovery was uneven, with a big chunk of the increase in marketcapitalization coming from seven companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, NVidia and Tesla) and wide divergences in performance across stocks, in performance. increase in marketcapitalization.
Put simply, no central bank, no matter how powerful, can force market interest rates down, if inflation expectations stay low, or up, if investor are anticipating high inflation. Note that the decrease in default spreads, at least for the lower ratings, mirrors the drop in the implied equity riskpremium during the course of 2021.
Regional Breakdown My data sample for 2022 includes every publicly traded firm that is traded anywhere in the world, with a marketcapitalization that exceeds zero. For debt markets, it takes the form of default spreads, and I report the latest estimates of these corporate bond spreads at this link.
The overriding message in all of this data is that Russia/Ukraine war has unleashed fears in the bond market, and once unleashed that fear has pushed up worries about default and default risk premia across the board.
While the universe of companies is diverse, with approximately half of all firms from emerging markets, it is more concentrated in marketcapitalization, with the US accounting for 40% of global marketcapitalization at the start of the year.
The first quarter of 2021 has been, for the most part, a good time for equity markets, but there have been surprises. The first has been the steep rise in treasury rates in the last twelve weeks, as investors reassess expected economic growth over the rest of the year and worry about inflation. Riskfree rate will rise.
In my last post , I noted that the US has extended its dominance of global equities in recent years, increasing its share of marketcapitalization from 42% in at the start of 2023 to 44% at the start of 2024 to 49% at the start of 2025.
Thus, as you peruse my historical data on implied equity riskpremiums or PE ratios for the S&P 500 over time, you may be tempted to compute averages and use them in your investment strategies, or use my industry averages for debt ratios and pricing multiples as the target for every company in the peer group, but you should hold back.
In the first five posts, I have looked at the macro numbers that drive global markets, from interest rates to riskpremiums, but it is not my preferred habitat. The second set of inputs are prices of risk, in both the equity and debt markets, with the former measured by equity riskpremiums , and the latter by default spreads.
It is for this reason that I chose to compute returns differently, using the following constructs: I included all publicly traded stocks in each market, or at least those with a marketcapitalization available for them. I converted all of the marketcapitalizations into US dollars , just to make them comparable.
Thus, my estimates of equity riskpremiums, updated every month, are not designed to make big statements about markets but more to get inputs I need to value companies. The first is i nterest rates, across the maturity spectrum , since their gyrations will play out across the market.
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