Midyear Outlook 2023: The Path Toward Stability

Last Edited by: LPL Research

Last Updated: July 11, 2023

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Jeff Buchbinder (00:00):

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest LPL Market Signals. Jeff Buchbinder here with my friend and colleague, Adam Turnquist. Adam how are you today?

Adam Turnquist (00:11):

Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me on again, exciting day here with the approaching Midyear Outlook from LPL Research. So, look forward to talking about that today.

Jeff Buchbinder (00:21):

Yes, by the time you hear this, you will have already seen the Midyear Outlook. It will already be out. So yes, an exciting day indeed. We'll start with these wonderful disclosures and then get into the publication. Some of you may have seen this on social media as we tried to create a little hype around the publication. It is Monday, July 10, in the afternoon as we record this. But the publication will be out the morning of July 11. So, we're really, really excited in LPL Research to bring this to all of you again, as we've been doing for boy, probably 15 years now. Proud to say I've been part of all of them, 30, probably 30 full years and mid years since we started doing this. So we're just going to run through this high level story.

Jeff Buchbinder (01:11):

You're going to have, you know, an equity strategist and a market technician going outside their lane <laugh>, right? We're going to talk economy, we're going to talk fixed income, we're going to, you know, do some currencies and commodities, right? So there's a little bit of you know we'll call it discomfort with telling these stories, but we've certainly heard them from our subject matter expert colleagues a number of times. We've certainly read the publication many times, so we'll try to do it justice. So, let's start with the economy. The section we've titled "A Moving Pendulum in a Stable Financial System." So here are our updated economic forecasts. I think a couple things to point out here. You know, number one, all of the forecasts for GDP by region, U.S., Eurozone, advanced economies, EM, and global have gone up since our full year Outlook was released in November of last year.

Jeff Buchbinder (02:16):

That's first point. So, the economy, not just the U.S., but globally, has outperformed. But at the same time, all these CPI forecasts have increased as well. The U.S. for you know, December 2023, over 22, we think maybe a little under 4%. A lot of progress has been made, but that's still certainly on the high side, but we've got even higher inflation around the rest of the world. So we still have a global inflation challenge. We're working through it, moving in the right direction. That will be a key to determining where the markets go in the second half. But you know, the good news here is that GDP growth looks a little better than we think it did at the start of the year. I'll go through these next few charts, Adam, and then I'll let you chime in.

Jeff Buchbinder (03:04):

So here is a look at well, frankly, two data series, right? Payrolls, this doesn't include the payroll number we got late last week, but payroll trends, right? Jobs have been slowing, not dramatically, but jobs have been slowing, and that has been correlated with the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, hiring intentions. So you ask small businesses, are they going to hire more or hire less? That has been a leading indicator of future job growth. Of course, small businesses are a big piece of job growth in this country. And what this tells you is the job market is cooling. That is what the Fed wants. But at the same time, that is what we think will eventually tip us over into a very mild and short-lived recession, maybe starting by the end of this year. So, if we have a recession, we think the job market cooling is going to be a big reason why.

Jeff Buchbinder (04:08):

Turning to the inflation piece this chart shows multi-family construction and single-family construction, right? So, you know, individual homes. And what you see here is that multi-family construction's actually been quite strong, and that's good for the inflation picture because it takes pressure off of rents, right? More supply tends to bring prices down. We're also seeing with new leases that prices are down. And that tells you that the official data on rents, you know, for example, what goes into the CPI this week, over the next several months, that data will cool. So, we still think we're in this downward trajectory for inflation, and you know, we'll get a three handle by the end of the year, even though we're still looking at five roughly by most measures still at this point. You know, next you know, so you saw in the previous slide, we expect about a 1% GDP growth figure this year, but that's really from the first half, right, front end loaded economic growth.

Jeff Buchbinder (05:16):

So, we're going to see, you know, cooler numbers in the second half, maybe a slight contraction, but still the first half was strong enough to get us to a 1% or so growth number for the full year. The key to the resilience here is going to be services, right? We had a massive spike in good spending while we had pent-up demand for services spending. So you see here in this chart, services spending hasn't reached its prior peak in terms of share of the economy. Those of you who have flown on an airplane recently know that there are still, there's still pent-up demand for travel, as an example. So, we're, you know, maybe through most of that, but there's still a little bit left. So, we'll get some services spending, you know, in the second half, maybe offset a little bit of weakness potentially in the goods side, and you'll end up with just kind of a, let's call it a stall, an economic stall in the second half. So, anything there you want to add color on Adam, hopefully I captured that pretty well.

Adam Turnquist (06:21):

Yeah, no, I think you got the story certainly relates to my own personal anecdotes in terms of spending, you know, I seem to be spending more on restaurants and going out, enjoying those things, and not a lot of Amazon packages at the door. I still have the tendency when I walk outside just to look, to make sure there's no Amazon packages. Cause I was so used to that during, you know, that pandemic era. But that spending has certainly shifted there. Not sure if it's the same for your household, but certainly the case here.

Jeff Buchbinder (06:50):

Oh, no doubt. Maybe the difference from my household is it hasn't slowed down as much as <laugh> maybe this chart would suggest with you know, good spending fading, that's the orange line, and then services spending you know, picking up, but still not quite you know, back to pre-pandemic levels. So we, you know, I don't know, call it the seventh or eighth inning on that on that trend. So you know, that's a quick overview on the economy. It's not a great outlook. But we also recognize that, you know, maybe we're being a little bit too conservative. There's the possibility, certainly, that we have a soft landing. You'll see percentage odds on that here in a little bit as we get through the equity section. Certainly the recent data suggests that there's a better chance of a soft landing than we thought at the beginning of the year.

Jeff Buchbinder (07:42):

But our view in LPL Research is that it's just delayed. That mild recession is delayed, but it's still comes. So here's the equity section. We titled it "Weight of Evidence Points to Modest Gains." This is where, you know, we've got this kind of you know, continuation of a balanced theme, right? We were looking for a way to find balance in our outlook for the full year. And now we're talking about the path to stability. So, you see some of these, you know, plays on that theme throughout the publication. So, weight of evidence points to modest gains. Frankly, when we locked this in stocks are a little bit lower than they are now. But we still see modest gains in the second half. And here's another place where, you know, we've kept our price target range of you know, at the high end, 4,400 on the S&P 500, but that's just a fair value range, 4,300 to 4,400. It's not a point forecast for the end of the year. And stocks can trade above fair value for, you know, a period of certainly several months, if not longer. So, Adam, I'll let you walk through this table. There's certainly a lot here, a lot of good stuff here, but I think it's going to paint a picture folks to suggest that maybe just modest upside is the base case, but, you know, there's certainly the possibility that stocks do even a little bit better in the second half.

Adam Turnquist (09:11):

Yeah, I like that framework in terms of the base case being modest. And this table really supports that weight of the evidence approach. In terms of a really compelling case for a solid year. We looked at several different indicators for the market. You know, if you go back to the beginning of the year, we were obviously lower <laugh> coming in, you know, 2022 was a down year. When you look at years following a down year, they're pretty rare. There's only been a few occurrences over the last 80 years. So your average gain coming off a down year is 15%. You're positive 84% of the time as the table shows. Then we also move through January, we hit that trifecta. That means we had the Santa Claus rally period, positive first five days of January were positive. And then the month of January, also positive.

Adam Turnquist (09:59):

So that's the trifecta. You can see annual gains there, 17.4%, 90% of the time when you hit that trifecta. You're also higher midterm election years are seasonally strong years average gains there for an annual basis at 17%. Obviously, we're in that midterm election year now. And then we also entered a new bull market. Even all that pessimism that we heard about in the beginning of the year, the market climbed the wall of worry, cleared that 20% threshold off the October lows, and we back tested that as well. So, once you hit that 20% threshold, the average gain 12 months later is 18.9%, and you're higher 92% of the time as well. So, again, pretty compelling evidence. We didn't include everything. We had to kind of cut this short to keep it on a page, but, you know, even after a Fed pause, the market's higher, I think right around 10%, 12 months later when you're positive in the first half, the market's higher in the second half, right around I think it's 6% in the second half.

Adam Turnquist (11:01):

So, there's a lot of evidence pointing to a strong year overall. But that goes back to that modest part of the segment, because if you look at some of these average gains, you know, 15% years following a down year, we're almost there already on the S&P 500. I think we were talking earlier for year-to-date performance, I think the S&P's up right around 14 to 15%. Technically, I think you can see modest gains right now from a pure technical perspective, you know, we're extremely overbought last month, especially with the technology sector starting to see evidence of that sector cooling off a little bit. Some of that momentum is pulling back a little bit, and that's a 33% weight within the S&P 500. So those are some pretty big shoes to fill for other sectors to come in and support the trajectory of this market right now. So, certainly could see a potential for a pause or a pullback, at least on a near term basis. But overall, when you look at it on a yearly basis certainly you know, the weight of the evidence, certainly suggests we're in for a pretty strong year this year.

Jeff Buchbinder (12:05):

Yeah, absolutely. The you know, it feels like a booming year, right? But remember, we're still not all that close from last year's high, right? And we are kind of following this playbook. I mean, it's, I don't think it's any coincidence that these indicators point to mid to high teens gains, and that's what we're on track for.

Adam Turnquist (12:27):

Yeah. And one stat to throw in the mix is just the average drawdown during the year. You know, right now for the S&P, we've only had a drawdown of around 8% for the year. On any given year, the average drawdown or max drawdown is about 14%. And so you, you know, a pullback or a correction within a bull market is completely normal. Wouldn't be surprised to see that in the second half as well. I think the good news would be that would most likely be a buying opportunity for investors that missed this first half rally.

Jeff Buchbinder (12:58):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we write in the Outlook that there's certainly a bull case as investors look through whatever recession we're going to get, or if we're, I mean, maybe we don't get one at all, but whatever it is, people look through this period and toward the end of the year, markets are going to be trading on, you know, an economy in mid-2024 that could look quite a bit better. We could remove this uncertainty that we have right now about recession that everybody's focused on. And you know, that could be your path to stability, right? The sort of just getting the point where we can price this in. Maybe we've priced in some recovery, but we would argue not a full recovery and earnings are still a little bit depressed. We'll do more on earnings here in a bit.

Jeff Buchbinder (13:47):

But this table, I believe every chart we have here is actually in the publication. So you know, this table will certainly be there. And as you mentioned, Adam, there's certainly a number of other studies that you could look at that would tell a similar story that, you know, this is a real bull market and it probably has a little bit more upside. We are still neutral equities. Our investment committee and the, you know, the biggest reason why is because bond yields have moved up so much, and fixed income actually offers pretty attractive returns as attractive, you know, as we've seen in decades. So, this chart puts the valuations for equities in the context of fixed income. So, you convert the price to earnings ratio for the S&P 500 into an earnings yield.

Jeff Buchbinder (14:39):

You just take the inverse of price to earnings and make earnings to price. And that's the equivalent to a yield for bonds, right? The income over price. And so, you know, when you compare those two statistics, you get what's called an equity risk premium. Right now, that equity risk premium is about 1%. So, in a sense, you could say that you're getting paid a percent to take on the additional risk with equities that you would, you know, relative to what you would have to pay for bond risk, right, for bond income. Well, common sense would tell you that that's not a great deal, right? That 1% isn't really much extra earnings to get for taking on equity risk. So, you know, what this says is just stocks relative to bonds are pretty average, right? Long term average, but down stocks are not as attractively valued as they've been in recent years relative to bonds because yields have moved up.

Jeff Buchbinder (15:40):

You know, as we're recording this, the 10-year yield's pretty close to 4%. So another reason to stay neutral. So turning to earnings, and this is where, you know, I alluded to the, you know, the odds of a soft landing here. Frankly in the last several months, our odds of a mild recession have gone up a bit, but I think it's fair to say in the last few weeks, maybe they've gone down a bit. So, let's call it two thirds roughly, odds of a recession starting at some point in 2023. We think in that scenario, you know, it starts so late in the year, it wouldn't affect earnings too much. In that scenario we think we could do $212 in S&P 500 earnings, but there's a little bit of an upside case and a downside case. So we probability weight that just to show that it could go in either of these other two directions and you end up with 213.

Jeff Buchbinder (16:33):

So that's no change. You know, even though we raised our GDP forecast slightly, that's kind of old news. And even though inflation expectations are up a bit there's really no change in how we assess corporate profits for 2023. Now we are just about ready to start earnings season. This will probably be the trough, expectations based on consensus or for a 7% decline. We think we'll probably do three or four points better than that when all earnings are in. But the key will be the second half, right? Do estimates drop much for the second half. And that'll certainly the guidance that corporate America provides will also go a long way in determining the near-term direction for the markets, especially, you know, and Adam, you mentioned big tech, right? Those tech names are expensive. And so, to put it simply, we're just going to need to see good earnings out of those companies to keep those stocks up where they're at. What do you think?

Adam Turnquist (17:34):

Yeah, I mean, even with a low bar coming in, that's been kind of the theme for earnings season this year. You know, very low bars, you mentioned 7% expected earnings decline. We come in beat and raise, but I think that bar is getting a little bit harder to beat in terms of the expectations. That's what it all comes down to. I think most analysts know that we'll come in a little bit better than that. So we'll need to see incrementally better earnings than even some of the whisper numbers of, you know, maybe we're down three or 4%. And then tech alone, the valuations there, I think, last time I looked, you were close to a two-standard deviation above the 10-year average in terms of the forward PE. So those are hard multiples to justify, especially when you look at what's going on in interest rates over the last couple weeks.

Jeff Buchbinder (18:23):

Yeah, I mean, you hit on the reason why we're neutral tech and not more positive. That still gets you a lot of tech, as you mentioned, because it's, you know, 30% or so of the market. But frankly, it's just an uncomfortable valuation to put new money to work here. So, we think neutral's right. We'll wait for a fatter pitch as they say. So, let's turn to bonds and you know, I'm an equity guy, so I always say I'm not going to spend a ton of time on bonds, but you know, actually they're as interesting as they've been in quite some time, even for an equity guy or Adam in your case a market technician. So, you know, Lawrence Gillum, our chief fixed income strategist, titled this section, "Balancing Opportunities with Objectives." I think that speaks to the dual roles that bonds play right now.

Jeff Buchbinder (19:13):

They're generating some decent income, so they're attractive from that perspective, but they also can diversify your equity risk and cushion the blow if we do have a pullback or a correction. So, you know, we've grown increasingly comfortable with bonds here this year as yields have come up. You know, we say it all the time, but the best predictor of future returns for a bond is its yield. And, you know, short term bonds at 5%, that's certainly a higher hurdle for stocks to clear here. One of the reasons to be comfortable with fixed income is because historically when the Fed stops raising rates, bond yields have fallen. So we actually have two charts in here, one for the 2-year treasury yield, and then the next one you'll see is for the 10-year. But the story is the same. At the ends of these last five rate hiking cycles

Jeff Buchbinder (20:09):

yields have fallen over the next, you know, six to 12 months. So, you know, not only do we think we're going to get the yield, the starting yield for bonds as income, we actually could get a little bit better than that if yields fall consistent with history. Now we don't know when the Fed's going to stop. It could be July, could be a little later but we're pretty sure they're going to stop soon. And that you know, that will lead to, you know, range bound or falling yields over the next six months and into 2024. So as promised, here's the 10-year yield. Again, same story, you know, 2006, you know, you didn't really get as much of a move lower in yields over the 12 months. That's the orange line, but the others you did. So we just think, you know, the weight of the evidence suggests yields can go down.

Jeff Buchbinder (21:00):

Now of course, falling inflation's going to help too, again, you know, probably have a three handle, maybe mid threes by the end of the year and then lower in 2024. Certainly, lower rent inflation is part of that, but that's not the whole story. The job market's going to slow, we think. Wage pressures will abate, we think. And you'll end up with you know, still a modest growth economy and that should lead to lower yields. So, you know, what does that mean for bonds? Before I kick it back over to you, Adam, just show this slide. Core bonds tend to do very well during Fed pauses. So, after the Fed is done, and whether that's, you know, July or September, we think the odds favor one of those two. You see here, these are the gains historically coming out of these pauses over the past several decades.

Jeff Buchbinder (21:52):

And you see some really good 12 month returns for bonds. Now you can't compare this period to the early 80s, right? When yields were, you know, high teens. Certainly, we're not going to see 24% returns for bonds. The math doesn't work. But if you look at some of these more recent periods, you know, high single digits or low double digits are not out of the question, right? Especially if we do get a modest, mild short live recession later this year, early 2024 and yields come down. So, I mean, of course it depends on what happens with the credit markets because there's credit in the Bloomberg Aggregate Bond Index, but you know, Adam, we could potentially get a really solid six to 12 months in the bond market.

Adam Turnquist (22:40):

Yeah, these look more like equity market returns, to be honest. It's pretty impressive and certainly I think timely from a Midyear Outlook perspective in terms of our call for, you know, going into core bonds, technically as well, when you look at even the, the 2-year treasury for example, you're right up near the March highs, have not cleared those March highs. So maybe, maybe a potential double top forming on that 2-year. So we think it's definitely time to lock in some of those higher interest rates, as you know, the charts on the previous two pages show they're not going to be around forever. If we do get that Fed pause, at least that's what history is telling us.

Jeff Buchbinder (23:17):

Yeah, that's a great point that we have in the Outlook publication as well, that, you know, we don't just plow into bonds at any maturity and say we're going to get 5%, right? You have to think about the reinvestment risk if you go too short, right? And so, you know, maybe three-month T-bills aren't the best answer. Maybe you want to be more in the, the belly of the curve, right, intermediate term bonds. And that way you, you know, you don't have to worry about reinvestment risk over the next several months when you may end up with lower rates. So, another a good point Adam, and one that we highlight in the Outlook publication. The last chart here we have for fixed income just shows you the sectors, right? I mean we didn't cover sectors for the equities, but we still like industrials.

Jeff Buchbinder (24:08):

The you know, I think the message here is that yields are really attractive relative to the last, call it 13 years. Not just in core bonds in general, but really across the spectrum, right? So that's what these diamonds here represent. These are the current yields based on the yield to worst calculation. The current yields for all of these different bond sectors, right, from the higher yielding areas bank loans, high yield bonds, the aggregate preferreds, right? Some of the credit sectors still yields very high relative to this recent history. And then it's the same for the high quality stuff, right? Whether it's treasuries, municipals you know, EM. EM's not high quality, but you know, whether you look high quality or core we call, or I'm sorry, plus sectors which are more credit sensitive, core more higher quality conservative sectors. Regardless of where you look, you've got really attractive yields relative to history. So, anything here Adam jump out at you?

Adam Turnquist (25:22):

I'll just add to what Lawrence Gillum has talked about in terms of going into those plus sectors, you can see the incremental yield pickup is relatively, I would say relatively minimal for the credit risk. So we think you can capture pretty attractive yields by sticking in those core sectors without taking on that credit risk right now. So kind of a unique opportunity I think at the credit level.

Jeff Buchbinder (25:45):

Yeah, good point. It's similar to the yield question, right? Are you getting paid to take interest rate risk? Are you getting paid to take credit risk? Are you getting paid to take equity risk? Frankly, in general, we don't think so. So, we still recommend folks keep their bond portfolios pretty conservative. Again, you know, take these attractive yields but also get some protection against potential equity market volatility. Because we do think, and this isn't going out in a limb <laugh>, we do think we're going to get more equity volatility in the second half than we got in the first half. I think that's, it's fair to say that's probably a consensus view at this point because we got very low volatility in the first half. So those bonds can provide a nice cushion and we wouldn't take too much risk. We do like preferreds, certainly we think you're getting more of a discount than maybe you should based on the regional bank stress, you know, coming out of those March bank failures.

Jeff Buchbinder (26:41):

So we still think that that area looks interesting and worth maybe taking some credit risk. But in general, we're keeping our bond portfolios up in quality. So that's probably the longest I've ever talked on bonds, Adam. So <laugh> maybe set a new record. Let's close with commodities and currencies. We actually, we really don't have a commodities chart in here, but in the publication, we just didn't want to go too long. But in the publication, we do have a commodities chart and you know, certainly you watch the precious metals and industrial metals complexes closely. So we got a couple of charts on currency on the dollar. And then maybe you can also make some brief comments about commodities as well, Adam.

Adam Turnquist (27:30):

Yeah, we'll start with the dollar as that really shapes the commodity landscape and, you know, the dollar's been in the headlines all year. Part of it just the volatility in the dollar. We think risk is to the downside, technically at least, we've seen some of that momentum from last year roll over. The trend has been violated. So we do see some, a potentially weaker dollar that should bode well for U.S. equity markets. They're negatively correlated to the greenback. But the other headline is just over the dollar, you know, losing its world reserve currency status. And we've been out with a couple publications now, and I think you've talked about it even on your Market Signals podcast, that a lot of those headlines are greatly exaggerated. And I think this chart shows one of the reasons why we think that it's still the currency of choice. You can see here the dollar accounts for 90% of all global foreign currency transactions. Runner up to that is the euro, not even half of the amount of global FX transactions are in the Euro. So, we don't see any risk to the dollar losing that reserve status. You can see it clearly dominates in terms of its use as a foreign currency here.

Jeff Buchbinder (28:44):

Yeah. And this is out of 200% because currency transactions go to directions, right? So yeah,

Adam Turnquist (28:49):

Good, good point on

Jeff Buchbinder (28:51):

That, but almost half. And the key point here is way more than any other currency and it, I think it's also interesting that the U.S. share hasn't really changed over this, right?

Adam Turnquist (29:03):

Yeah, it's been pretty stable over the years. I mean it's, you can see on the blue bar, that stands out. It's, you know, 85 to 90 plus percent going back to, you know, the last 20 plus years.

Jeff Buchbinder (29:16):

Yes, absolutely. So the reports of the demise of king dollar are exaggerated. We have another chart on the dollar here, Adam. This, I mean, maybe tells a little bit of a different story.

Adam Turnquist (29:29):

Yeah, and I think this helps feed that narrative, but if you think about it in a macro world, you know, this is looking at the percentage of the dollar that's held in reserves around the world at other foreign central banks. And if you think what happened last year, the dollar basically went parabolic. So, a lot of those central banks outside of the U.S., they had to dip into their reserves and defend their own currency just to stabilize it against a rising dollar. So that's weighed on overall foreign exchange reserves held in the dollar. And then there's also been an allocation toward gold. That's another developing theme this year. A lot of central banks are buying gold to basically move some of their currency or their foreign reserves away from the dollar and into gold. China has been one of those countries, they've added gold for seven straight months after being out of the market for a few years. So continued buying pressure from some of the central banks, but again, still think the dollar's going to be here to stay.

Jeff Buchbinder (30:30):

Yes, absolutely. A hundred percent. So, you know, it makes sense in this geopolitical environment for particularly China and Russia to diversify away from the dollar. So, it's no surprise, but as you saw on the previous slide that, you know, the U.S. is not going to lose its global leadership in dollar transactions at any time soon. I mean, these are, you probably don't even need to talk about it in decades. It's probably something to talk about in terms of centuries <laugh>, right?

Adam Turnquist (31:01):

Yeah. Not, not in my lifetime at least, maybe <crosstalk>, but I doubt that.

Jeff Buchbinder (31:06):

I think that's fair. So there's a section on this concept in the Outlook publication and then again on commodities. So you know, precious metals have certainly done better than industrial metals you know, in recent months. Adam, anything you're seeing on the charts there that people should think about?

Adam Turnquist (31:30):

Yeah. I mean, for example gold or silver, some of the industrial metals, you know, they had significant rallies beginning of the year as the dollar pulled back. Now we've seen some of those precious metals actually pull back and start violating uptrends still outperforming depending on the look back period, but I think year to date they're still outperforming industrial metals. What's interesting, for example, with copper, one of the industrial metals, that space is, it's starting to hold up a little bit better. I think there's some hope for China's reopening to gain some momentum. Haven't seen enough evidence there yet. So, we certainly continue to like precious metals right now. We think, you know, maybe this is just a pullback within a longer term uptrend and that's technically how we're viewing it.

Jeff Buchbinder (32:18):

Great. So, the, I think we've covered all the sections except one, so we didn't include alternative investments charts, but we do have a section on alternative investments in the publication as well, and we do think those can make sense as diversifiers in portfolios of equities and fixed income. So, check that out as well. We don't want to shortchange it and wanted to make sure that I mentioned it. So I guess I think we covered it all. Adam, anything you can think of that I left out before we close?

Adam Turnquist (32:54):

No, just for advisors, we'll have our Midyear Outlook call on Thursday at 4:00 PM Eastern, I believe. So quick plug for that.

Jeff Buchbinder (33:01):

Yes, you, well, you are all hearing this story now. We think hearing it from all of the individual authors will probably be better for advisors <laugh>. So, keep that in mind. The publication, I mean, we're blasting this thing all over social media as we always do, but you can also find it on lpl.com, should be on the front page. But if you don't see it on the front page, and you can go into the newsroom section there and get it there. Certainly, available for the public and where you can dig deeper into the stuff. We just gave you a little bit of a taste here in about a half an hour, but much more in that publication. So, check that out. Hopefully you enjoy it and certainly glad we were able to bring it to you here on the Market Signals podcast. So, with that, we'll go ahead and sign off. Thanks everybody for joining. Really appreciate your support of our podcast and we look forward to talking to you again next week.

Midyear Outlook 2023: The Path Toward Stability

In the latest LPL Market Signals podcast, the LPL Research strategists share LPL Research’s outlook for markets in the second half of the year, featuring content from the just-released LPL Midyear Outlook 2023: The Path Toward Stability.

The strategists expect the Federal Reserve (Fed) to not only end its rate-hiking campaign toward the end of 2023 as inflation abates, but also introduce the possibility of a rate decrease as the U.S. economy potentially slips into a mild, short recession. A recession and subsequent cut in rates could happen should consumer demand and job growth cool.

Progress has been made in returning stability to the equity markets as inflation fell and interest rates stabilized. However, macroeconomic risks remain top of mind as the thought of recession looms and stock valuations no longer appear attractive relative to bonds. Earnings may decline modestly year, but solid revenue growth and stable profit margins may help limit the magnitude of any decline. Against this backdrop, LPL Research sees modest second-half gains for stocks, though with the potential for elevated volatility.

The strategists note that interest rates are at highs last seen in the early 2000s following one of the most aggressive rate-hiking campaigns in decades. The risk is these rates won’t last, and once the bonds mature, investors could be looking at reinvesting proceeds at lower rates. Investors may be better served to lock in today’s higher bond yields for longer. The strategists also note that core bonds, as proxied by the Bloomberg Aggregate Bond Index, have performed well in the past after pauses in Fed rate hikes, which we expect to see it in the coming months.

Finally, the strategists discuss the outlook for the U.S. dollar and how musings on the dollar’s’ downfall appear to be greatly exaggerated.  

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IMPORTANT DISCLOSURES

This material is for general information only and is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. There is no assurance that the views or strategies discussed are suitable for all investors or will yield positive outcomes. Investing involves risks including possible loss of principal. Any economic forecasts set forth in the podcast may not develop as predicted and are subject to change.

References to markets, asset classes, and sectors are generally regarding the corresponding market index. All indexes are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Index performance is not indicative of the performance of any investment and do not reflect fees, expenses, or sales charges. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results.

Stock investing includes risks, including fluctuating prices and loss of principal. Bonds are subject to market and interest rate risk if sold prior to maturity. Bond values will decline as interest rates rise and bonds are subject to availability and change in price.

High yield/junk bonds (grade BB or below) are not investment grade securities, and are subject to higher interest rate, credit, and liquidity risks than those graded BBB and above. They generally should be part of a diversified portfolio for sophisticated investors.

Any company names noted herein are for educational purposes only and not an indication of trading intent or a solicitation of their products or services. LPL Financial doesn’t provide research on individual equities. All information is believed to be from reliable sources; however, LPL Financial makes no representation as to its completeness or accuracy.

The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States.

The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, or the Agg, is a broad base, market capitalization-weighted bond market index representing intermediate term investment grade bonds traded in the United States.

All index data is from FactSet.

All information is believed to be from reliable sources; however, LPL Financial makes no representation as to its completeness or accuracy.

This Research material was prepared by LPL Financial, LLC. 

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