Where Are Stocks, Bonds and Crypto Headed Next? Five Investors Look Into Crystal Ball
Equities are often seen as expensive after promising start to 2023
7 min
A new trading year kicked off just weeks ago. Already it bears little resemblance to the carnage of 2022.
After languishing throughout last year, growth stocks have zoomed higher. Tesla Inc. and Nvidia Corp., for example, have jumped more than 30%. The outlook for bonds is brightening after a historic rout. Even bitcoin has rallied, despite ongoing effects from the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX.
The rebound has been driven by renewed optimism about the global economic outlook. Investors have embraced signs that inflation has peaked in the U.S. and abroad. Many are hoping that next week the Federal Reserve will slow its pace of interest-rate increases yet again. China’s lifting of Covid-19 restrictions pleasantly surprised many traders who have welcomed the move as a sign that more growth is ahead.
Still, risks loom large. Many investors aren’t convinced that the rebound is sustainable. Some are worried about stretched stock valuations, or whether corporate earnings will face more pain down the road. Others are fretting that markets aren’t fully pricing in the possibility of a recession, or what might happen if the Fed continues to fight inflation longer than currently anticipated.
We asked five investors to share how they are positioning for that uncertainty and where they think markets could be headed next. Here is what they said:
‘Animal spirits’ could return
Cliff Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management, acknowledges that he wasn’t expecting the run in speculative stocks and digital currencies that has swept markets to kick off 2023.
Bitcoin prices have jumped around 40%. Some of the stocks that are the most heavily bet against on Wall Street are sitting on double-digit gains. Carvana Co. has soared nearly 64%, while MicroStrategy Inc. has surged more than 80%. Cathie Wood‘s ARK Innovation ETF has gained about 29%.
If the past few years have taught Mr. Asness anything, it is to be prepared for such run-ups to last much longer than expected. His lesson from the euphoria regarding risky trades in 2020 and 2021? Don’t count out the chance that the frenzy will return again, he said.
“It could be that there are still these crazy animal spirits out there,” Mr. Asness said.
Still, he said that hasn’t changed his conviction that cheaper stocks in the market, known as value stocks, are bound to keep soaring past their peers. There might be short spurts of outperformance for more-expensive slices of the market, as seen in January. But over the long term, he is sticking to his bet that value stocks will beat growth stocks. He is expecting a volatile, but profitable, stretch for the trade.
“I love the value trade,” Mr. Asness said. “We sing about it to our clients.”
—Gunjan Banerji
Keeping dollar’s moves in focus
For Richard Benson, co-chief investment officer of Millennium Global Investments Ltd., no single trade was more important last year than the blistering rise of the U.S. dollar.
Once a relatively placid area of markets following the 2008 financial crisis, currencies have found renewed focus from Wall Street and Main Street. Last year the dollar’s unrelenting rise dented multinational companies’ profits, exacerbated inflation for countries that import American goods and repeatedly surprised some traders who believed the greenback couldn’t keep rallying so fast.
The factors that spurred the dollar’s rise are now contributing to its fall. Ebbing inflation and expectations of slower interest-rate increases from the Fed have sent the dollar down 1.7% this year, as measured by the WSJ Dollar Index.
Mr. Benson is betting more pain for the dollar is ahead and sees the greenback weakening between 3% and 5% over the next three to six months.
“When the biggest central bank in the world is on the move, look at everything through their lens and don’t get distracted,” said Mr. Benson of the London-based currency fund manager, regarding the Fed.
This year Mr. Benson expects the dollar’s fall to ripple similarly far and wide across global economies and markets.
“I don’t see many people complaining about a weaker dollar” over the next few months, he said. “If the dollar is falling, that economic setup should also mean that tech stocks should do quite well.”
Mr. Benson said he expects the dollar’s fall to brighten the outlook for some emerging- market assets, and he is betting on China’s offshore yuan as the country’s economy reopens. He sees the euro strengthening versus the dollar if the eurozone’s economy continues to fare better than expected.
—Caitlin McCabe
Stocks still appear overvalued
Even after the S&P 500 fell 15% from its record high reached in January 2022, U.S. stocks still look expensive, said Rupal Bhansali, chief investment officer of Ariel Investments, who oversees $6.7 billion in assets.
Of course, the market doesn’t appear as frothy as it did for much of 2020 and 2021, but she said she expects a steeper correction in prices ahead.
The broad stock-market gauge recently traded at 17.9 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, according to FactSet. That is below the high of around 24 hit in late 2020, but above the historical average over the past 20 years of 15.7, FactSet data show.
“The old habit was buy the dip,” Ms. Bhansali said. “The new habit should be sell the rip.”
One reason Ms. Bhansali said the selloff might not be over yet? The market is still underestimating the Fed.
Investors repeatedly mispriced how fast the Fed would move in 2022, wrongly expecting the central bank to ease up on its rate increases. They were caught off guard by Fed Chair Jerome Powell‘s aggressive messages on interest rates. It stoked steep selloffs in the stock market, leading to the most turbulent year since the 2008 financial crisis. Now investors are making the same mistake again, Ms. Bhansali said.
Current stock valuations don’t reflect the big shift coming in central-bank policy, which she thinks will have to be more aggressive than many expect. Though broader measures of inflation have been falling, some slices, such as services inflation, have proved stickier. Ms. Bhansali is positioning for such areas as healthcare, which she thinks would be more insulated from a recession than the rest of the market, to outperform.
“The Fed is determined to win the war since they lost the battle,” Ms. Bhansali said.
—Gunjan Banerji
A better year for bonds seen
Gone are the days when tumbling bond yields left investors with few alternatives to stocks. Finally, bonds are back, according to Niall O’Sullivan of Neuberger Berman, an investment manager overseeing about $427 billion in client assets at the end of 2022.
After a turbulent year for the fixed-income market in 2022, bonds have kicked off the new year on a more promising note. The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index—composed largely of U.S. Treasurys, highly rated corporate bonds and mortgage-backed securities—climbed 3% so far this year on a total return basis through Thursday’s close. That is the index’s best start to a year since it began in 1989, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Mr. O’Sullivan, the chief investment officer of multi asset strategies for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Neuberger Berman, said the single biggest conversation he is currently having with clients is how to increase fixed-income exposure.
“Strategically, the facts have changed. When you look at fixed income as an asset class…they’re now all providing yield, and possibly even more importantly, actual cash coupons of a meaningful size,” he said. “That is a very different world to the one we’ve been in for quite a long time.”
Mr. O’Sullivan said it is important to reconsider how much of an advantage stocks now hold over bonds, given what he believes are looming risks for the stock market. He predicts that inflation will be harder to wrangle than investors currently anticipate and that the Fed will hold its peak interest rate steady for longer than is currently expected. Even more worrying, he said, it will be harder for companies to continue passing on price increases to consumers, which means earnings could see bigger hits in the future.
“That is why we are wary on the equity side,” he said.
Among the products that Mr. O’Sullivan said he favours in the fixed-income space are higher-quality and shorter-term bonds. Still, he added, it is important for investors to find portfolio diversity outside bonds this year. For that, he said he views commodities as attractive, specifically metals such as copper, which could continue to benefit from China’s reopening.
—Caitlin McCabe
Find the fear, and find the value
Ramona Persaud, a portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments, said she can still identify bargains in a pricey market by looking in less-sanguine places. Find the fear, and find the value, she said.
“When fear really rises, you can buy some very well-run businesses,” she said.
Take Taiwan’s semiconductor companies. Concern over global trade and tensions with China have weighed on the shares of chip makers based on the island. But those fears have led many investors to overlook the competitive advantages those companies hold over rivals, she said.
“That is a good setup,” said Ms. Persaud, who considers herself a conservative value investor and manages more than $20 billion across several U.S. and Canadian funds.
The S&P 500 is trading above fair value, she said, which means “there just isn’t widespread opportunity,” and investors might be underestimating some of the risks that lie in waiting.
“That tells me the market is optimistic,” said Ms. Persaud. “That would be OK if the risks were not exogenous.”
Those challenges, whether rising interest rates and Fed policy or Russia’s war in Ukraine and concern over energy-security concerns in Europe, are complicated, and in many cases, interrelated.
It isn’t all bad news, she said. China ended its zero-Covid restrictions. A milder winter in Europe has blunted the effects of the war in Ukraine on energy prices and helped the continent sidestep recession, and inflation is slowing.
“These are reasons the market is so happy,” she said.
—Justin Baer
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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