There's a tremendous amount of disdain for this U.S. stock market rally. It took one day – a modest pullback in stocks earlier this week – for websites like CNNMoney to declare the "Trump stock market rally is under siege."
Talk about hyperbole.
It's a narrative we've heard since President Trump's victory back in November. One month later, journalists started complaining about stock market valuations. The S&P 500 hadn't been this expensive since the pre-Great Depression apex in stocks or the 2000 tech bubble, or the 2008 financial crisis, they said.
What happened? Stocks got more expensive.
Then the argument was that there hadn't been enough hard data to support the recent rally. It was all soft data, consumer confidence-type measures at decade-plus highs, they said, all of which would fall apart when Trump's over-promised policy proposals don't deliver.
As Hedgeye Senior Macro analyst Darius Dale wrote recently:
"Only once in the past 30 years has soft data materially diverged from the hard data domestically (during the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis) – and in the opposite direction."
The soft data acceleration would lead to a hard data acceration, we said. Then we got some hard data all of which noted a pick-up in U.S. economic activity, writes Hedgeye Director of Research Daryl Jones in today's Early Look, like Durable Goods (up 2.7% y-o-y), and U.S. home prices increasing to a 3-year high nationally (up 5.7% y-o-y).
That's why we think this stock market rally has legs.
Trump Tracking
#ElectionDay SPY #Trump
Despite declarations that the post-Election Day rally is "under siege" or it just "can't live up to the hype," you'd have to take a lot of juice out of this market to proclaim victory on either of those predictions.
Check out today's Chart of the Day and the performance of various assets since Trump's victory on November 8th:
- Financials: +18%
- Aluminum: +18%
- Steel: +17%
- Russell 2000: +15%
- Biotech: +12%
- Aerospace/Defense: +12%
What to Buy
Incidentally, our 40+ fundamental research analysts have over 190 stock ideas. Here are a few they have been writing about recently:
And for a detailed analysis of the Technology sector (XLK), check out Technology analyst Ami Joseph's Sector Spotlight below on HedgeyeTV. Joseph discusses major investing themes developing in his sector and highlighted his favorite LONG and SHORT ideas.
Bottom Line
Given the recent strength of the U.S. economy there's ample evidence to ignore mainstream media noise and stay long U.S. stocks.
