See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium.  CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.

“I wouldn’t sell the Yankees for anything. Owning the Yankees is like owning the Mona Lisa. You don’t sell it.” – George Steinbrenner

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Futures are trading higher this morning, but based on the last few days of trading that hasn’t meant much as the S&P 500 has had trouble holding on to early gains. Since Christmas, the S&P 500 has traded down for five straight trading days. Losing streaks of five or more trading days straddling the new year are extremely uncommon. The only other time that the S&P 500 has had a five or more day losing streak that started in one year and went on to the next was in 2014/2015 when it also traded down five days in a row from 12/31/14 through 1/6/15. Two big events today that could determine whether the losing streak continues are the ISM Manufacturing report at 10 AM and the House Speaker vote. While the speaker vote is not necessarily a crucial event, if Johnson can get voted in, it could suggest that the GOP will act in a more unified front in the legislative season ahead.

Yesterday was a relatively volatile day for the S&P 500. The ETF that tracks the index (SPY) traded up about 0.90% early in the session before trading down as much as 0.95% later in the session and ultimately before finishing with a marginal decline of 0.22%. It was a noisy day with little to show for the bulls or bears by the end of the day!

As far as regular investments go, equities have provided among the best returns to investors over the long term.  Let’s look at how the S&P 500 has performed during the last 51 years. Had you invested $10,000,000 in the S&P 500 at the start of 1973, you’d have $2.15 billion including dividends. Talk about the power of compounding!

Against at least one asset class, though, equity returns have been pedestrian. That asset class is professional sports and more specifically, the New York Yankees. 52 years ago today, an investor group led by George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS for $10 million. According to Forbes, the New York Yankees are currently worth $7.55 billion. By all accounts, $10 million turning to over $2 billion in just over 50 years is great, just not when you compare it to the Yankees. While we don’t have annual team values, when you overlay a point-to-point change in the valuation of the Yankees on the S&P 500, the move for equities doesn’t look quite as impressive.

Does this mean equities are a bad investment? Hardly. The increase in the value of professional sports teams over the last 50 years has been a unique situation that an average investor would have never had access to. Equities, meanwhile, are one of the most accessible and liquid investments available. Also, no matter how good the results of any investment turn out, the grass is always greener somewhere else. After all, while Steinbrenner and his heirs have had an annualized gain of just under 14% from their investment in the Yankees, since its IPO in the early 1980s, Apple (AAPL) has had a total annualized return of closer to 20%, and forget about Bitcoin! That’s why investors are always chasing shiny objects.

See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium.  CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” – Isaac Asimov

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Happy New Year! After the terrible end of the year for equities, US stocks are on pace to start the year on the right foot. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were indicating gaps up of over 1%, which would have put the S&P 500 on pace for its best opening day since 2013, but they have since pulled back a bit and are both up just under 1%.  While US stocks are on pace to start positively, the same can’t be said for international markets.  Chinese stocks traded down over 2% after the Manufacturing PMI reading for the world’s second-largest economy came in weaker than expected and just barely in expansionary territory. That decline was the worst opening day for Chinese stocks since 2016.

In Europe, the tone isn’t nearly as weak, but equities in the region are mixed as the STOXX 600 trades modestly lower. The Eurozone Manufacturing PMI decelerated slightly from 45.2 to 45.1. Meanwhile, concerning inflation, ECB President Lagarde commented “We have made significant progress in 2024 in bringing down inflation and hopefully 2025 is the year when we are on target.”

In the US, the only economic reports on the calendar are jobless claims at 8:30 (better than expected on both an initial and continuing basis), the final Manufacturing PMI from S&P for December at 9:45, and then Construction Spending at 10 AM. The ISM Manufacturing Index will be released tomorrow.

December wasn’t a good month for bulls, and the last several days were bad to a historic degree. The chart below shows the performance of the S&P 500 from the close before Christmas to year-end with the S&P 500 down 2.6%. As shown in the chart below, that ranks as the worst performance for the closing days of the year since at least 1952 and the 12th year during that span that it fell over 1%.