Transcript
A (0:00)
The 6040 mix of stocks and bonds in a portfolio model has been the default approach over the years and survived many critiques. But is it still relevant today? Join Vanguard's Jomana Selehin, head of Investment Strategy Group Europe and chief European economist at the break to hear her thoughts about this well known model and whether 60:40 even means the same thing to all investors.
B (0:26)
The last six months have been super interesting. I feel like there is peak exuberance post US elections and I can't tell you how many investors just said to me, Trump is going to manage the stock market. He views the stock market as a gauge of his success and the last few weeks, days, what have you, have been a little bit of a reckoning for them.
C (0:49)
Hello and welcome to the Barren Streetwise podcast. I'm Jack Howe and the voice you just heard is Amy Wu Silverman. She's the head of derivatives strategy at RBC Capital Markets. In a moment, she'll talk to us about what to think about if you're thinking about hedging the U.S. stock market. We'll also say a few words on a new report studying 125 years of global investment returns. What does it mean for someone plunking money into an S&P 500 fund? Now. Listening in is our audio producer, Alexis Moore. Hi, Alexis.
D (1:30)
Hey, Jack.
C (1:31)
With us also, Jackson Cantrell. Jackson, you are leaving us soon. You're here for another week and you're leaving for. I guess we'll get into it next episode, right? You're. You're doing a. You're doing a startup. It's industrial composting. You're leaving me for rotting banana peels. Have I got that right?
E (1:51)
That's a, that's, that's an ungenerous way to say it, but. But yeah, it's my penultimate week.
D (1:57)
We're gonna miss you. Big shoes. To feel. To feel.
E (2:01)
I'm not sure they're that big. I'm a size 11, Jack.
C (2:07)
It's already gold.
D (2:09)
I appreciate this because I feel like every time I make a mistake, Jack, you just laugh and compliment me. So I think I could do this more often.
C (2:17)
Do I need to apologize in advance for my voice for whatever is going on here with this frogginess? Can people put up with 10 minutes of this before we get through our conversation with Amy? I'm not sure I wasn't up late yelling at anyone or anything. It's just. I don't know. I've got some chicken soup here. Let's. Let's see what happens. So I started this week with a question in the back of my mind. Is your S and P500 fund still enough? Is it still the thing you need to do the job? Because it has done remarkably well. You've more than tripled your money in that thing over the past decade. It's also turned you into a stock market genius if you hold an S&P 500 fund. You were bullish on Nvidia back in 2001. Not like those babbling fools who said it was just a video game company. You knew that it was a future artificial intelligence world beater, or at least Your S&P 500 fund did. And it increased your weighting to Nvidia over time. And that's just one of the reasons that you've done so well. Congratulations on your genius. And this year so far, you can't really call it a crisis of confidence in the S&P 500. I call it a hiccup. Amid hallelujahs, it's down last I saw a fraction of a percent year to date. Okay, no big whoops. But if you really know where to look for stock market anxieties, you can find some. There's something called the equal weight S&P 500 index. It's not loaded up with big tech behemoths. It just gives each company an equal weighting. And that's doing better than the regular index so far this year. Is that a change in leadership? Defensive sectors have been rallying. Health care was one of the worst performers last year. It's this year's best performer so far. B of A securities calculates that February ranked among the top 5% of months going back to 1979 for the relative performance of value stocks. They beat growth stocks by 3.9 percentage points. There have been so many calls over the years for a rotation of value. Is this another head fake or is this the real thing? Meanwhile, shares in Europe and China are outperforming the US this year. So I think that has to be leaving a lot of index investors torn over whether they should fiddle with their fund mixes. And the answer to that is a tough one. Theoretically, yes. There's other stuff out there that is cheaper than the S&P 500 index at 21 times this year's projected earnings. But real world experience says no. We keep doubting the cap weighted US stock market and it keeps beating the world. I'm not sure where that leaves us, but three UK professors this week released a report. It doesn't really address this topic directly, but it does offer Clues to how investors should think about long term returns. The professors are Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton at London Business School and Elroy Dimson at Cambridge. If those names sound familiar, it's because around the turn of the millennium they wrote a book called Triumph of the Optimists 101 years of global Investment Returns. In it, they lovingly compiled evidence on the exploits of stocks and bonds and bills and currencies and consumer prices across countries and time periods. Not just the chipper stuff that Wall street puts in the glossy brochures. What about the countries where there were government expropriations of private assets? How did those affect investor returns for people who were broadly diversified? Release professors have freshened up their numbers in yearly reports since that book, and they're just out with their latest installment. It's sponsored by the Swiss bank UBS and it has 125 years of data. I have read the report and no, dear listener, much as I like you, I'm under strict orders from UBS to not share copies. But I will share a handful of observations. Number one is that America has gone from exceptional to exceptional error. Back in 2000, the original time of the book, the US had been the best performing stock market of the prior century. Back in 1900 it was 14% of the world's stock market. And by 2000 it was up to 49%. And maybe that's unsurprising because the US was the world's dominant economy in the 20th century. It was relatively insulated from the destruction seen in Europe and Japan by world wars. What's maybe more surprising is that since then, the US has become more dominant, not less. There was a better part of a decade after 2000 where US stock returns were weak and there was a lot of hot money flowing into emerging markets. The BRICs, remember Brazil, Russia, India, China. But that trend didn't last. And by 2021, the US had climbed even higher, to 56% of the world's stock market value. And in that year's report, the professors caution investors should not expect more. US Outperformance. Runs like this don't last forever. But this one has kept going. And by now, by the end of 2024, the US was 64% of the world stock market. If you're looking at just developed markets, the US is 73%. It makes you wonder how long this can last. Dominant markets do not have to lose their place, lose their dominance in order to slip into underperformance. All that really has to happen is for the good news to be fully reflected in the share prices. But there are, of course, cases throughout history of dominant investment markets losing that position. I mentioned that back in 1900, the US was 14% of the world market. That was the second position. The leader back then was the United Kingdom or Great Britain or whatever you're supposed to have called it back then. Don't jeopardy me on this. It was 24% of the world stock market, and now it's down to 3%. And that's not even the most extreme example. And this brings me to observation number two. Jackson, you know how I feel about the 1986 movie Gung Ho starring Michael Keaton. We've talked about this before.
