Portfolio Intelligence podcast: positioning portfolios for late-cycle investing

John Bryson:

Welcome to the Portfolio Intelligence podcast. I'm your host, John Bryson, head of investment consulting at John Hancock Investment Management. Today is July 21, 2022. And Matt Miskin, CFA, and Emily Roland, CIMA, our co-chief investment strategists here at John Hancock have recently released their Q3 Market Intelligence report. So, I thought it would be a great time to invite them back to the podcast to do a midsummer check-in. Matt, Emily. Welcome.

Emily Roland:

Great to be here, John.

Matt Miskin:

Thanks for having us.

John Bryson:

So Emily, maybe I'll start with you. Like I say, you just released the Q3 version of Market Intelligence, what are the key themes you're focused on this quarter?

Emily Roland:

Yeah, John, we're really excited about this quarter's Market Intelligence outlook. And we have made some pretty meaningful changes to our views, particularly on the fixed-income side. So usually people think about fixed income as being boring, but we're actually pretty excited about it this quarter. And really, the key input to our changing views across both equities and bonds is where we are in the economic cycle. And that's really always been critical to our cross asset of views and Market Intelligence. And we look at The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators Index is one of the key ways to really identify where we are in the cycle. And as you recall, when the leading indicators are bottoming and starting to really improve, that's an early cycle period. That's where you really get rewarded for taking a lot of risk in portfolios, allocating to more economically sensitive areas. It's where you might want to overweight stocks.

Emily Roland:

And when you see the leading indicators decelerating and ultimately looking like they're heading toward a recession, those have been periods that we have pruned risk. We've emphasized more defensive parts of the market. We've looked more opportunistically or more favorably on bonds. And when we look at the LEI today, it's moving quickly and it's decelerating from its peak back in the spring of 2021. And what's happening really is that we're seeing the removal of ultra-accommodative monetary policy, the removal of warlike stimulus that was implemented, or fiscal stimulus that was implemented in response to the pandemic, and those things are now going in reverse. There are some bright spots. We're still seeing that unemployment is very low. Consumer spending is holding up okay.

Emily Roland:

But some of the big components of the leading indicator is like manufacturing hours and the ISM Index of New Orders, consumer confidence, those are moving the other way right now. So we do believe that we're not at the recession yet, given those bright spots that we're seeing, but that we are firmly planted here in late-cycle territory, which has some pretty key implications across those stocks and bonds.

John Bryson:

Now calling bonds boring this year, certainly a misnomer. I certainly know that you and Matt don't consider bonds boring. So, Matt, I'm going to pivot to you. We're looking at this late-cycle environment, what does it mean for bonds in people's portfolios?

Matt Miskin:

Yeah. Thanks, John. And so, bonds have taken it on the chin over the first half of 2022. The Fed has really moved aggressively to raise rates. The 10-year Treasury yield has nearly doubled over the course of the year, starting at about one and a half percent, now about 3%. But these yields have moved up at a time where now these yields could be really attractive for portfolios as the economy slows. So we're looking at investment-grade corporate bonds, yielding nearly 5%. Mortgage-backed security bonds, nearly 3% to 4%. Treasury bonds, 3%. And even municipal bonds. We don't talk about municipal bonds much, but we've been looking at them more and more attractively here, given where we are in the cycle. They're about 3%.

Matt Miskin:

So a lot of these higher quality bond yields have moved up. And this is a time where this high-quality bond yields could be attractive, because in a time where the economy slows, that's usually a time where the Fed pivots. So they go from raising rates to fight inflation to eventually cutting rates, because they need to, because the unemployment rate rises. And in our view, the Fed is going to tap out in raising rates here in the next several months, and actually be cutting rates into 2023. So what we're looking to do across our portfolios is increase duration in terms of our views. From about five years to six years, move away from more credit-sensitive and lower credit quality parts of the market, like high yield and floating rate, and into more core and core-plus fixed income.

Matt Miskin:

And in our view, those type of returns, and what we just had was a big inversion of the yield curve. And that's another late-cycle sign that Emily was talking about in those leading indicators. Well, typically after yield curve inversions, you want to move into the intermediate part of the curve. You want to move into more core or core-plus fixed income. And that's one of our highest conviction calls here as we go into the back half of 2022 and into 2023.

John Bryson:

And before I move off fixed income, Matt, maybe you can speak for you and Emily, where are you in the camp of the next round of rate hikes, 75 basis points, 100? Does it matter if it comes in one or is it more, we're going to have a little bit more rate hike, and then it's going to pivot to a rate cutting type of cycle?

Matt Miskin:

Yeah. So we're going into next week. The Fed meeting is going to be huge here in July. And we do believe they're going to do 75 basis points. After that, they could do, in September, 50, but the bond market's pricing in much more. So the bond market's pricing in already the 75 basis points next week, already the 50 basis points in September, and then several more rate hikes in November and December. And in our view, after September, they're going to pause and eventually be cutting. The bond market's already pricing in rate cuts in 2023. And in our view, that's a signal that the bond market's telling you that, that's going to be peak rate hikes. I mean, yeah, peak rate hikes. And you actually want to think about positioning portfolios for the other side of that into 2023 today.

John Bryson:

I'm glad you said that the pricing in component and the fact that you want to be positioning today for that future situation is vital. Emily, I want to come to you, based on what you started with and what Matt added to the conversation, how have your views on equities changed in Market Intelligence?

Emily Roland:

Sure. So when you think about this late-cycle period right now, we really are emphasizing U.S. equities over international equities at the margin here. And the key reason for that is because you're going to get more quality from an index composition standpoint when you own U.S. equities. So quality to us is really the strong balance sheets, good return on equity, more durable profitability, basically owning companies that don't need to tap the capital markets in order to grow. As we know rates are going up, the cost of capital is becoming more expensive. So we really want to own companies that make money but we don't want to overpay for them. So when we think about that quality element, technology is really our favorite sector for high quality, great return on equities, solid profit margins, great balance sheets, lots of cash on their balance sheets.

Emily Roland:

We also want to think about emphasizing value, basically owning companies that are not overly extended as far as valuations go, minimizing our exposure to those not unprofitable and more expensive stocks. And then finally, we're adding an element of defense here. So as we move through the economic cycle and as consumer behavior changes, we want to be positioned more defensively. So think about the fact that we're all feeling elevated food prices, commodity prices, oil prices. That is changing the mindset of the consumer away from the things that we want and more toward the things that we need. So we may be issuing those big-ticket items in favor of continuing to turn the lights on and turn the water on and take a shower. We're going to continue to do those things, even if we are entering a late-cycle period into a recession.

Emily Roland:

So quality, value, defense, finding that more, emphasizing the U.S. equity market a bit more here in order to play those key themes. And we still want to have some international exposure, but we want to be really thoughtful about the way that we're doing it. Investing in an index internationally is going to get you just on, again, an index or a passive basis. You're going to get a lot of economic sensitivity, a lot of cyclicality. The two biggest sectors in the MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Index are financials and industrials. We want to instead emphasize quality and defense internationally by overweighting those same sectors that we like in the U.S.: tech, healthcare. Healthcare's got it all; that's our favorite sector, as well as utilities. So really being active in the international space and thinking about those factors is really our key thesis here for the back half of the year.

John Bryson:

Really helpful. The last thing I want to talk about is, if you look at what we've gone through this year, a lot of volatility, tough year. Matt had said bonds took it on the chin. Stocks have also had some volatility. It brings up the conversation of, well, what are my other options? And alternatives are popping up in more and more of the conversations that my team's having. And I imagine it's happening in your conversations too. Matt, alts have been out of favor for the last 10 years, but they're starting to look a little bit more appealing. What are your thoughts regarding alternatives in this late-cycle environment?

Matt Miskin:

Yeah. I think it's really becoming more and more about risk management as we get later in the cycle. And that's what alternatives in a broader asset class typically is all about. So you're trying to minimize your beta. You're trying to minimize the standard deviation of the things you're implementing in your portfolio standard. Deviation, being a measurement of volatility and risk. Beta, also being sensitivity to equities, for example. And so, you want to find ways to pull that down and take less risk as we get later in the cycle. And so ideas for us in the alternative universe, and it is a broad, broad universe with a lot of different options. But infrastructure is one that we continue to like, hitting on some of those themes Emily was talking about for utility type businesses. These are long-lived assets.

Matt Miskin:

They've already got the fixed investment there. They're pipelines or toll roads; they give you essential things and they have very dependable cash flows. They tend to be non-economically sensitive. And they're pretty simplistic in that the business model is, and it's not overly complex in terms of its investment strategy. But infrastructure is probably our highest conviction, alternative investment strategy today, just because the less economically sensitive nature of them and dependable cash flows. Other things that we're looking at, I mean, there is absolute return, which is obviously going to be lower beta. It's going to be looking for return potential, but managing risk. And there's also multi-alternative. I think right now one of the things you got to manage is concentration risk with alternatives.

Matt Miskin:

So if you go all in on one single strategy or one single type of alternative strategy, and that goes wrong on you, that can also be an issue. But if you package different alternative strategies in one implementation, one kind of product, if you will, or one strategy, you can have a lot of different things. You could diversify it. So you can have long short, you can have global macro, you can have absolute return. You put it all together and that can smooth out the ride, but it also achieves those broader goals that you're going to have in alternatives, like taking down standard deviation, taking down beta. So it does achieve those goals, but in a much more diversified manner. So I think our top two would be infrastructure and then diversified multi-strategy type implementations. But both right now, given where we are in the cycle are becoming more and more compelling for us.

John Bryson:

So it's the middle of the summer, which is usually a boring time when it comes to our marketplace, but this is not the case this go around. Folks, there's a lot of volatility. We're in a transition period. Matt and Emily shared a ton of great insight on how to manage that. Things that pop up to me are manage risk appropriately, maybe lower the risk in your portfolio, seek out quality, whether that's in stocks or in

bonds, find good values out there. You may have heard my phone ring halfway through the podcast, we'll, people were calling to say, "Hey, I want to hear more." So if you want to get a view, it's the latest version of Market Intelligence, Matt and Emily's work, you can visit our website, jhinvestments.com.

John Bryson:

I'll also tell you we've got a bunch of other great resources on the website around how to manage volatility, what resources are out there in terms of alternatives available. We even have an investment consultant team, my team that's willing to get on the phone and talk to financial advisors and helping with this volatility. So Matt and Emily, thank you as always. One last plug, follow both of them on Twitter at emilyrroland and matthew_miskin. You're going to get great insight from them. They're sharing a ton of great info all the time. Folks, if you want to subscribe to our podcast, we'd love to have you. You can do that on any of the places you download your podcast. And if you have any feedback for us, please reach out to your local John Hancock business consultant and pass along other content you'd like to hear from. Matt, Emily, thanks as always. To the audience, thanks for listening to the show. Have a great summer.

This podcast is being brought to you by John Hancock Investment Management Distributors LLC, member FINRA, SIPC. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speaker, are subject to change as market and other conditions warrant, and do not constitute investment advice or a recommendation regarding any specific product or security. There is no guarantee that any investment strategy discussed will be successful or achieve any particular level of results. Any economic or market performance information is historical and is not indicative of future results, and no forecasts are guaranteed. Investing involves risks, including the potential loss of principal. Diversification does not guarantee a profit or eliminate the risk of a loss.