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“Forget about style; worry about results. ” – Bobby Orr

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

If you missed Friday’s CNBC segment, you can catch it by clicking the image below.

While futures are higher versus fair value this morning, the magnitude of the gains is minimal at best for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures are indicated lower, so listless would be a good description of how things are looking to start the week, and it is the last week of August heading into Labor Day weekend after all. The key events to watch this week are PCE data on Friday and earnings from Nvidia (NVDA) after the close on Wednesday.

Durable Goods orders just hit the tape, and the headline number came in at more than double expectations (9.9% vs 4.0%), but ex Transportation, the report was slightly weaker than expected (-0.2% vs 0.1%).

The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows the performance of various international equity markets on a dollar-adjusted basis. At the top of the list, US stocks have maintained their leadership role despite modest underperformance last week. With a gain of 18.7% YTD, SPY is outperforming the next closest ETF on the list – the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) – by nearly 300 basis points, and a primary reason that ETF is the second-best performing ETF on the list is because of the large weighting of US stocks! At the other end of the list, the only ETF on the list that was down last week was the Latin American 40 (ILF), and it is also the only one that’s down YTD. In other words, North and South America account for the best and worst-performing stocks this year. Sandwiched in between the US and Latin America, returns for the rest of the world are remarkably similar with YTD gains in the range of 12.1% (Europe) to 9.2% (Asia Pacific).

Looking more closely at the performance of the best (US) and the worst (Latin American) stocks this year, the chart below shows the YTD performance of both ETFs. While ILF underperformed SPY right out of the gate this year, the bulk of the divergence came in late May through June when SPY saw its YTD gain climb from around 5% to 15% while ILF moved entirely in the opposite direction.

As anyone paying attention knows, though, this year’s underperformance of ILF relative to SPY is simply a continuation of a trend that has been in place for several years. Looking at a 10-year comparison of the performance of the two ETFs, SPY has rallied nearly 240% while ILF has been worse than dead money with a decline of 9.5%.

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