The Closer – Renewable Rout, ECB, Real Incomes – 10/26/23
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we start out with a look into the latest earnings reports (page 1) followed by a look at the rout in renewable energy names (page 2). We then look at the latest ECB decision and GDP data (page 3) as well as real incomes (page 4). We finish with a recap of today’s solid 7 year note auction (page 5).
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Bespoke’s Weekly Sector Snapshot — 10/26/23
This content is for members onlyNew Lows for S&P and Sentiment
The S&P 500 having made fresh lows in the past week has justified a continued decline in bullish sentiment per the latest AAII survey. As shown below, only 29.3% of respondents reported as bullish this week compared to 34.1% last week. Although sentiment has quickly reversed, the last week of September actually saw an even lower bullish reading of 27.8%.
Bearish sentiment, on the other hand, rose up to 43.2% which was the highest reading since the first week of May. Bearish sentiment rose 8.6 percentage points week over week which was the largest single-week increase since February.
Given the new high in bearish sentiment and drop in bulls, the bull-bear spread tipped deeper into negative territory. Bears now outnumber bulls by 13.9 percentage points. That is the widest margin since May.
While the AAII survey has shown an expressly negative turn, other sentiment surveys are more mixed. For starters, the NAAIM Exposure Index echoed the AAII results. The index tracking equity exposure of fund managers echoed the pessimistic tones of the AAII survey as it dropped to the lowest level since the week of October 12th last year. Meanwhile, the Investors Intelligence survey of newsletter writers has managed to hold onto a more bullish tone. That survey’s bull-bear spread has been more steadily above its historical average over the course of the past couple of months.
Continuing Claims Rising Rapidly
Although much of the morning’s data topped expectations, one of the areas of weakness was jobless claims. Initial jobless claims were slightly higher than expected coming in at 210K versus expectations of 208K. Additionally, last week’s sub-200K print was revised up to 200K. While that doesn’t steal from the fact that jobless claims have pulled back to some of the stronger levels of the year, the past few weeks are now looking a bit more choppy than they were only a week ago.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, claims have begun to tick higher as could be expected for this time of year. At 191.89K, claims are 7.34% higher than they were the comparable week last year. However, that is roughly in line with readings from a couple of years prior to the pandemic.
Albeit higher, initial jobless claims remain at historically healthy levels and are not deteriorating too rapidly. The same cannot be said for continuing claims. Rising to 1.79 million through the week of October 14th (continuing claims are lagged an additional week versus the initial claims number), continuing claims have risen for five straight weeks. That is the longest streak of increases since a 12-week run ending in early December last year, and claims are now at the highest level since May 20th.
It has only been five weeks since the recent low of 1.658 million. In that span, continuing claims have risen almost 8%. As shown below, there are plenty of examples of even larger five-week increases in continuing claims counts, the most recent being in Q4 2022, however, it is still a historically rapid rise. The recent increase ranks in the top 5% of all five-week moves on record. Historically, prior increases of that size have mostly (though not always) occurred in the context of a recession. While not exactly covering like-for-like periods, that makes this recent rise in claims even more unusual when compared with GDP data released at the same time showing an impressive 4.9% QoQ annualized growth rate.
