“Given the popularity of our weekly Market in Pictures, we started the habit of picking out a few and going into more detail with our PMs. In this edition, John Luke and Dave spend a few minutes on each of the following:

• • Follow Through from April Lows

• • Earnings Strong to Quite Strong

• • Grow the Economy Faster Than the Debt

• • Tariff Rollercoaster

• • “Time of the Tails”

Hope you enjoy, and please send a note to info@apt.us if there’s a particular chart/topic you’d like to see covered next month. Time to swing it around!

3 Minute Read: Executive Summary

Full Transcript

Derek

Good afternoon. May 29th, it is Thursday. There’s still another business day in the month, but our guys like to help advisors get ahead of the curve and think about how they want to prepare for June. And it’s been a pretty eventful month, certainly, an eventful couple of months. So here we are. We’re going to talk through some of the stuff that’s been going on. We’ve got Dave Wagner, head of equities, John Luke Heiner, head of fixed income. We’ll cover all the stuff that’s been going on. Some of the main things, earnings, tariffs, debt, deficit, everything that’s going on. And we’ll try to be concise about it. And we appreciate you tuning in. Dave, JL, thanks for joining.

John Luke

Thanks a lot.

David

There’s a lot going on right now, D. Hern.

Derek

There is a lot. Oh, I’ve got to do my disclaimer too. The opinions expressed during this call are those of the Aptus Capital Advisors Investment Committee and are subject to change without notice. This material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed. Aptus reserves the right to modify its current investment strategies and techniques based on changing market dynamics or client needs. More information about Aptus’s investment advisory services can be found in its form ADV Part 2, which is available upon request.

So we’re starting with earnings. I remember when we were on either last month or the month before, just talking about how it would be nice to get away from politicians and towards CEOs. Market tends to like that better sometimes. That seemed to be the case. And here’s where we ended up for this past month. Obviously, April ended up I guess flattish after being way down, but May was pretty clearly to the upside. So I’ll let you run through some of that.

David

Yeah. I think a lot of people could be surprised by the performance or at least the magnitude of performance that we’ve seen since the April 8th bottom. But the question I’m probably getting the most right now is like, “Dave, how can we get these types of equity returns given the backdrop, not just of politics …” Actually, not politics at all right now, it’s more focused on interest rates. And I think John Luke has done an absolute great job really covering and foreshadowing the bond market, specifically on the long end of things. And given the recent fee bias of 2022 when rates went higher, valuations came down, it’s not the story right now. So that’s the question I’m getting the most. How can performance be so good given the volatility on the long end of the curve?

Well, my response is that the market’s been focusing on something else right now, and it’s earnings. And it’s obviously some of the jargon on the pullback of the tariffs out of Washington DC that’s really been driving this market. I think the thing I’m focusing more on when looking at this table, because I just ran it a few minutes ago, and you’re getting my raw knee-jerk thoughts on some of these returns, it’s going to be a few things. It’s the continued performance of the MSCI EAFE and even on the EM side. And I’ve been a big believer that the market is the best arbiter out there. And what we’ve seen from the international markets is that it outperformed on the way down from February 19th to April 8th, but it’s actually even outperforming the S&P 500 on the way up.

I don’t think it really changes our thesis on the international side of things, and I put a musing out there not so long ago talking about the concentration in the countries alongside their heightened valuations with low margins and low growth means that, I’m not a big believer in the rally of international, but I think if you want to play devil’s advocate with yourself, right now the market’s telling you something different. Albeit a lot of the rhetoric about performance on the international side versus the US, which is about like 13% or so, is coming from the dollar weakening and valuation expansion on the international side of things. But I think that’s what I’m focusing the most on, is just the give and take on the international side versus domestic.

Also looking at small caps performance. Small caps just really continuing not to be invited to the party. And that’s after, in my opinion, a pretty good earning season by small. Obviously we’re going to talk earning season here momentarily. And large did an unbelievable job, but small still did really well. And as the market’s focusing, trying to figure out if the soft data is going to turn into hard data, if the weak soft data is going to turn into weak hard data, we’re just not seeing that right now. And it seems like a lot of the jargon around the R word, which is recession, has somewhat abated, which should help small caps, but just hasn’t really happened yet.

I think the last thing I’ll look at here too is more on John Luke’s side of things. It’s on the high yield bonds. Really doing well year to date, up 2.8%, outperforming the Bloomberg Agg, which probably would surprise a lot of people. And John Luke, tell me if I have this statistic wrong, but I think it’s a great point of why high yield has been working. It’s probably due to the spreads, compression of spreads. I think it’s like 50% of the high yield index as an option adjusted spread of like 200 basis points, an unbelievably low level.

And if you want to put that in context or relativity, the market tends to see high yield spreads get close to about 700 during recessionary periods at the peak and about 1,000 during the depths of a recession. And so far this year we saw spreads go to maybe 500 base points in the high yield space, but yet somehow only 50% only have an OAS of 200 basis points. It’s kind of unbelievable, but I think any sense you’re really looking towards right now is that a soft landing is still very much plausible in the face of all of the volatility coming out of DC.

John Luke

Yeah, the high yield piece is certainly interesting. The high yield as you think of it today is quite different than maybe how it was thought about 10 or 15 years ago from a quality and construction perspective. A lot of the really crappy stuff went under. And so it’s no longer represented in the index, or at least much less. And many of the names that have either split ratings or the highest rating of non-investment grade are still really high quality companies, or relatively high quality companies, but many of them were fortuitous during 2020 and 2021 to lock in a lot of low-cost debt that was longer dated, which has been kind of a joke within our company, is like, what the heck was the federal government and the treasury thinking not doing the same thing back when rates were much, much lower? It would have alleviated a lot of the pressures that are creeping into markets and becoming much more mainstream the last couple months.

Derek

The numbers are, they are pretty wild when you look over pretty much every time period comparing investment grade to high yield. And it’s probably a whole separate discussion on the construction index. That’s probably a topic for another day, and maybe you can write something up on that, but I do think that that definitely stands out. So cool. Well, we did just come through earnings season. Dave, I know you spent a lot of time with earnings and company calls and all the rest of it just to get a sense of what the outlooks were. I think a lot of people were expecting outlooks to be completely withdrawn. What was your take through the earnings season?

David

Party on, Wayne. It was great. The commentary is much better than anticipated also. I’m writing a musing right now on my overall thoughts. I’m still gathering them myself, especially with NVIDA out this week, being the summation of all the S&P 500 earnings. But go back a month ago with all the uncertainty and the depths of the April 8th bottom, earnings per share was expected to only only to grow 8% on a year over year basis during this quarter. Well, results came in and earnings grew by 14% this quarter. So that means in the last two quarters, earnings per share on a year of year basis grew by 16% in Q4 and 14% here in Q1. That’s substantially above the Mendoza historical average line of 8% to 8.5% earnings per share growth for the S&P 500.

And I’m not too surprised by it. I think a lot of people didn’t believe me on my original commentary when we came up and said like, “Hey, earnings this quarter is going to be good.” And I actually think the commentary moving forward is also going to be better than anticipated. And it was very simple, our logic that really played out. We all know that the S&P 500 as a pretty substantial concentration issue, or at least people say it’s an issue for the S&P 500, with the mag seven equating to like 30% of the index itself. But as the mag seven earnings goes, so does the market, but vice versa also. And the capex spend that we saw come out of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, it just continues to be, Meta, continues to be unbelievably good. And Google said it best a few quarters ago, the risk is underinvestment, not overinvestment. And that thematic just continued to move on here.

And when those mag seven that equate over 30% of the index live and die right now, at least, by this capex number that’s not slowing down, it’s really hard for earnings to get in trouble. And so the mag seven commentary was unbelievably awesome. Six of the seven mag seven companies beat on the top line and beat on the bottom line, the outlier being Tesla. And I think if you delve into the commentary from not just the companies of the mag seven, but some of the cyclicals out there, some of the other bellwethers, commentary is really, really good. I think one of the lines that stood out the most to me was from the CEO of Visa when I was reading through the call, saying like, “Hey, Q1 consumer spending, great.” But the inevitable question always pops up like, “Hey, what are you seeing so far this quarter now that we’re three weeks in?”

And they came back and said, “You know what, actually it’s even better than what we saw during the first quarter from a spending perspective.” So you’re really just not seeing that translation of the weak soft data turn into the strong hard data just yet, not just last quarter, but this quarter date so far. So all in all, it’s really good. And I think people have got to recognize the different levers that corporations and equities as a whole can pull to get some type of earnings growth. Obviously, to John Luke’s point that he always makes, bonds don’t have levers to pull for growth, only equities do. And even though there’s some uncertainty and some decision-making abilities, capex slowed a little bit on the S&P 493, but that just gave them the ability to go out there and repurchase stock to an extent where margins started to expand, and the market liked that because that drove a lot of earnings per share growth.

A lot of people throw shade probably at that, that it was engineered growth. But all in all, it’s still growth. It’s still tangible growth for these companies investing in themselves, which is something that you absolutely love to see. So it was a great earning season. Obviously people are going to say that, “Well, the focus needs to be on Q2 season. No one cares about Q1.” But the commentary is really strong. And I think that’s why we’ve seen pretty tremendous stock market returns over the last, call it six weeks.

Derek

Right. So corporate America’s doing all right. How’s the government doing?

John Luke

Private sector can figure out problems. Public sector, eh.

Derek

How are we doing there?

John Luke

Yeah, so we’ve gotten a bunch of news, and Scott Bessent is probably one of the more respected treasury secretaries that we’ve had in a while, where he actually came from true money management side where he’s had a real job and not gotten a paycheck from either academia or the government for his entire career. So a lot of folks, including myself and the team, have really paid attention to what he said. And he came out last week with some sour-ish thoughts about the fiscal backdrop that the administration has inherited from the Biden administration and the fiscal spending obviously being substantial, probably overly substantial, part of GDP growth the last several years. And the thesis of what he was saying that has to be done is, you have to continue to grow the economy at a faster level than the debt grows. And so going back to our three ways of getting out of a debt problem that we’ve talked about for a long time, you deflate out, you grow out, or you inflate out.

Sorry, you grow out, you inflate out, or you burn it down. Austerity. We know austerity isn’t an option. The thing that we thought the way out is that inflation lever, and hopefully you get some part of gross. And what this chart is really just showing is, with public debt to GDP near 100%, obviously the government debt’s a hefty chunk of GDP from a total, there’s a ton of treasuries in existence, $38 trillion of treasuries. So you look at the deficits that we’re running, you look at the effective interest rate, and what essentially Scott Bessent is telling us, and I think this applies to our asset allocations and how we’ve constructed portfolios, is, you have to run nominal GDP at about 6.5% to slightly higher in order to just keep the debt to GDP metric stable. And so going back to those three points, nominal growth has an inflation component embedded in it.

And so we think that there’s going to continue to be the emphasis to grow our way out of this problem, which is just really bad for long-term bondholders, full stop. And so if you look at periods where GDP has run above that 6.5% nominal level, it’s really only been a handful of times. The secular inflation that we saw from the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s, and then bubbles, so the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and then post-COVID where we really ran hot during that period. And so the backdrop in our opinion is like, just listen to what the government officials are telling us. And I take a little bit more credence to someone that’s actually navigated difficult markets and environments for the bulk of their career. And he’s really just telling investors, don’t own long-term bonds, which is kind of interesting, because he’s basically the US salesperson for all treasury bonds and has to get someone to buy them. So our thought is, we’re not going to be that guy.

Derek

John, you said it great the other day on a call, Scott Bessent has given investors the playbook, and yet people are still shying away from that playbook, and it’s right in front of them. And it’s the exact point that you just said. Hey, fiscal spending is going to be higher because we need to get some type of growth. We’ve got to go faster than the debt to GDP ratio, and we’re going to do it. And it just shows you the debasement case that we continued to make, the case not to own long-term bonds and the need to own risk assets, which is stocks. And that was the exact playbook Bessent came out and said. You need to be doing this.

John Luke

Yep. And if you take it to another chart we’ve showed, which, it shows real returns of bonds looking back to 1900. And I don’t have that one in the presentation, but essentially from 1900 to 1981, bonds lost money on a real basis for 81 straight years. Then rates got jacked up with Walker, and we saw a steady decline of disinflation and weakening growth. And so bond yields rallied drastically from the mid-’80s until COVID, effectively. But you had 81 years where bonds were a legitimate certificate of confiscation. And it just seems like that’s probably the playbook from here. We’ve seen high debt levels in the past after wars and other events, and back after World War II they implemented yield curve control for a number of years to really cap the yield on treasuries. And effectively that’s just the government debasing you.

And another chart we’ve shown drastically is just purchasing power over the last 50-odd years, and your $1 million 50 years ago, in terms of purchasing power today, it’s worth about $130,000 in terms of what you could actually buy with it today. And said another way, in order to have the same dollar today as $1 million was 50 years ago, you’d need over $7.5 million to have the same purchasing power. And it’s just debasement. That’s how governments work long-term, is they have to, we live in a debt-driven world, and you have to debase the value of that dollar to service the debt.

Derek

Yeah, obviously there’s a lot going on. As far as that, debates with the Fed, and I know the Fed minutes came out this week and there was something about Trump and Powell actually spoke today. I’m curious your opinion there on the Fed. Are they even in a position to do anything either way?

John Luke

Well, in the graphic we have coming up on tariffs, I had some thoughts on potentially how the Fed could spin that, but it’s a difficult backdrop, because Chairman Powell also has a pretty distinguished career in the private sector. I don’t think he likes being bulldog-ed around. We know Trump likes to be the bully, and it’s going to be hard for him to bend the knee to just do what Trump says. I think that Trump’s probably made it even more difficult for himself by pushing that button with him. I do think that if you do have, like we saw last night with the tariff policy being upheld in court as unconstitutional and not an option, since the Fed has really leaned on the fact of tariffs creating this inflation uncertainty and hence unwillingness to cut rates, that, well, if tariffs get back down, could that put the Fed in a spot where they could cut rates quicker?

But I think ultimately what the Fed has been doing is, by keeping tight, they’ve tried to protect the long end of the curve ultimately by not letting it get too overheated. And it hasn’t worked super well now with 30-year rates over 5%.

David

And that’s globally, the long-term rates are just getting obliterated, whether it’s Japan, the bonds, all of them.

John Luke

UK, yep, all of them.

David

This chart here is obviously talking about the wildness that we’ve seen with tariffs. And to John Luke’s point, last night, we’re recording this on May 29th, there’s some news that federal court was coming after Trump’s IEEPA utilization to impose these tariffs. And I think my knee-jerk, because I don’t want to get in the minutia of policy and the 19, was it 30s, tariffs act. You get into all these details and go into weeds, but the Trump team is going to try to find a way to bring tariffs back to the table. I would say the big news that comes out of this data for me, out of this information for me, is that trade negotiations are likely to become more difficult right now, at least in the short term, given the trade partners. There’s no need to cut a deal right now. I wouldn’t say that the July 9th deadline from the 90-day pushout, it doesn’t mean anything any more, but it definitely means less.

But I think the big questions we’ve got to be asking ourselves in regard to that news is, what happens next? And also, what do we need to be focusing on? And on the former, what happens for here, I’d say that there’s just a slew of methods that Trump can reimpose tariffs. I think those could be really two things, at least from what I’ve read, and I’m not a pro here, I’m very much a novice. But there’s some lines in the section 338 of the 1930s tariffs act that would allow up to like a 50% tariff rate. And I think that’s why Trump came in with the 10% across the board rate, knowing that this was not a loophole, but a secondary ramification that he’d go if he was challenged here in court. And then there’s also the balance of payments authority that allows for Trump to impose tariffs on countries with large trade deficits, but limits that rate to 15%.

I would say that that authority is temporary, as it gives Congress 150 days to vote on this measure itself, obviously which they would not pass, but it definitely buys Trump and his team to find another type of workaround with those 150 days. So I think today’s reaction with the market that was up maybe 40 basis points a day or the day after this announcement, where majority of today’s performance was contributed from the NVIDIA earnings last night, that the market doesn’t really have to think too much about this because they know tariffs are going to continue to stick around and Trump’s team is going to find some type of way to instill them in place.

John, the last thing I would say before I turn it over to you is the latter point that I made. What am I focusing on here with this news of the federal court blocking the tariffs? It’s probably the tax bill. What is it called? The one big beautiful tax bill here that made it through the House and is on its way to the Senate right now. Because tariff revenue, it’s growing at a pace right now, it’s so far year to date like maybe $190 billion year to date right now from these new tariffs. But if you include all these tariffs over the next 10-year window, it’s roughly equal to the 10-year cost of the tax bill. If these tariffs are removed and not replaced through other means, the US deficit is just going to be larger than otherwise would have been the case.

And so I believe that these tariffs will get reimposed through other methods that I just explained, but the bias is another headwind for long-term bond yields just in the short run, because there has to be some type of pay-forwards, which are supposed to come from tariffs, to not allow these individual tax tax things that are supposed to sunset at the end of this year to move forward. There’s a necessity for that to happen. So all in all, I think this just creates more volatility, while the knee-jerk reaction is probably positive because it takes the tariffs kind of out of the question. But there are going to be other workarounds here, and I think the focus should be on the ramifications on the pay-forward and what we can get from the tax side.

John Luke

Yeah. Well, we know Trump probably knows the courtroom better than a lot of lawyers do, just given his background. So I would expect him to aggressively look for the different varieties of loopholes or other legal ways that he can get around some of the court rulings to keep imposing tariffs to some degree. As much as he’s run his whole campaign and the start of his administration on increasing tariff revenue, it is very hard to see him, like the Muhammad Ali quote about getting punched in the face, I think he gets back up and punches right back. And the two big pieces are, number one, that tax deal of, how do you replace the fiscal measures in terms of the tax revenue that was expected to come from tariffs and was key to passing the bill?

But the second piece goes back to the Fed, and does it change the rate or the speed to which that they’re going to cut rates? And they’ve argued that inflation from tariffs is really what’s kept them on the fence from cutting policy further, even though some of the data I think would say that their policy is restrictive and there’s some room to cut. So whether that plays out or not, I guess time will tell. But if there is an abrupt halt to tariffs, I think that that could push the Fed to cut rates faster than maybe what the market’s expecting.

Derek

All right. So we’ve talked about a lot of the stuff that’s really in our face right now, April, May, June, stuff that’s going on. This is always a fun one to come back to, because it does stretch things out and put things in a little bit of perspective. Dave, you always reference, when you’re doing presentations, everybody says, “What’s the average return for stocks?” That’s like 8%, 9%, 10%, somewhere in there. Well, it never does that in a given year, right? I mean, never. So we’re probably, you can quote the stats, but chances are we’re not going to end up at an 8% to 10% gain, even though that’s where all the strategies start every year. So talk through this one a little bit.

David

Yeah, this is something that we just always, you have to harp on and come back to the asset allocation, that tails are just going to occur more often than not, or at least what we’ve been accustomed to. And the stat you’re referring to, Derek, is that if you go back to 1950, there’s only four years where the S&P 500 had a return between 7% and 9%. That’s what, 5.6% of the time? The average doesn’t happen. The tails occur more often, and they actually occurred a lot back in the day. If you go back to 1924, if the S&P 500 was up in a calendar year, it was up on average by 21%. If the mark was down during the calendar year, it was on average down 13%. Over the last 100 years, tails have occurred in the market more often than not. And I think given the composition of the benchmark, I’ve written a lot about this, exactly what our outlook was heading into this year, that tails will just continue to happen more often and probably at more of a grandiose scale than what’s been occurring over the last 100 years.

I would say that I had another point in my head that I wanted to bring up, but … Oh, it’s this one. In this decade, the 1920s, it’s only been five years, four, whatever, it’s, we’ve seen three 20% pullbacks this decade. 2020, 2022, and then March and April of this year. And if you go back over longer period of time, as far back as I had to go, you’ve never seen two 20% market pullbacks so close in a timeframe, ever. And yet now we had another one just three years later from 2022, so we’ve seen three 20% pullbacks. That just doesn’t happen. We’ve seen the market pull back fast and then rebound fast. I’m a big believer that the faster the market pulls back, the faster it gets back to break even or all-time high. Then the slower there’s a pullback, the longer it takes to get back to where it was previously.

But given the introduction of Fed policy and fiscal policy, we’re probably just going to continue to see more sharp declines and sharp, not pullbacks to the opposite points, but rebounds. And I think that’s why it’s so important that one needs to do better in the tails, the left tail when the market pulls back fast, but also in the right tails when the market rebounds fast, and the need to be active when the space and not be calendar constrained, because volatility happens interquarter. There’s not just peak volatility to at the end of the month or at the end of the quarters where a lot of these calendar constrained products can benefit from. You have to be very advantageous and active, because volatility con strike at any time and not just at the end of a month or at the end of a quarter. And that’s what we exactly saw in the first quarter of this year and part of the second quarter so far. So just be prepared for more tails moving forward. Good tails and bad tails.

John Luke

Yeah, the DC volatility has certainly increased, and arguably that was the left tail that we saw in March and April. And then like you said, quick fall and quick rebound. So arguably two tails within the last two, three months, with March and April being down and the past six weeks or so being hard up. And so I think that it’s just likely that those are here to stay. But going back to the first or second chart that we showed about growing our way out of this debt problem, you don’t grow your way out of the debt problem if there’s a recession, because think about tax receipts or highly correlated stock returns. This year we had records tax receipt collection with a really strong market in 2024. So I think running it hot also benefits the government from a tax perspective, of people realizing gains and selling stocks and having to pay taxes on it.

So just going back to what that means for markets and what that means for the economy, we have to run our way out of this and grow our way out of this. And if you look at the left tail types of environments, and as a backdrop, well, the Fed’s got a lot of ammo that they can cut rates into, they can turn back on QE, which probably happens even without a recession, where the Fed balance sheet continues to grow. There’s just a number of tools that I think are there to insulate the left tail. So you really need to be advantageous and take advantage of them, but still keep that at that allocation geared towards owning stuff that can grow.

Derek

Well, I think for better or worse, we’re getting into June. The earnings boost and support and distraction that came is pretty much over, right? You’ve got NVIDIA, NVIDIA just came out, now you’ve got maybe some of the retailers.

David

Broadcom next week are coming through.

Derek

Okay, so Broadcom. But in general it could be back to tariff talk and the rest of the macro type stuff that swings markets around. So I don’t know if there’s anything else on your radar.

David

A weak period too, from, what is it, April until September. All the PMs, except Aptus, of course, they all go on vacation and summer vacation and don’t do a whole lot. But it tends to be a pretty quiet period. But historically speaking, we’ll see if that reigns true given all the talk out of DC.

Derek

Awesome. Well, thanks for making the time, guys. Always appreciate it.

John Luke

Thanks, fellas.

David

God bless America.

Derek

All right, see you.

Disclosures

Past performance is not indicative of future results. This material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. The information contained herein should not be considered a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security.

The opinions expressed are those of the Aptus Capital Advisors Investment Team. The opinions referenced are as of the date of publication and are subject to change due to changes in the market or economic conditions and may not necessarily come to pass. Forward-looking statements cannot be guaranteed.

Aptus Capital Advisors, LLC is a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is headquartered in Fairhope, Alabama. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. For more information about our firm, or to receive a copy of our disclosure Form ADV and Privacy Policy call (251) 517-7198. ACA-2505-26.

Given the popularity of our weekly Market in Pictures, we started the habit of picking out a few and going into more detail with our PMs. In this edition, John Luke and Dave spend a few minutes on each of the following:

• • Historic April

• • Consumer Debt Metrics Supportive

• • Earnings

• • Decade+ of US Dominance

• • It Pays to Be Bullish

Hope you enjoy, and please send a note to info@apt.us if there’s a particular chart/topic you’d like to see covered next month. Time to swing it around!

3 Minute Read: Executive Summary

Full Transcript

John Archbold

Okay, here we go. It is the 1st of May, after a very, very uneventful April, so I’m not sure what we’re going to talk about here, right? Not a lot happened last month, but we have our head of equity, David Wagner, head of fixed income, John Luke Tyner. Very excited to get going here and hear their thoughts on what we were seeing.

Before we get into all that, of course just to read the disclosure, the opinions expressed during this call are those of Aptus Capital Advisors investment Committee and are subject to change without notice. The material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed. Aptus reserves the right to modify its current investment strategies and techniques based on changing market dynamics or client needs. More information about Aptus Investment Advisory Services can be found in its Form ADV Part 2, which is available upon request.

So very excited to get going here. As you folks have probably already realized, I am not Derek Hernquist. My name is John Archbold and I am a client portfolio manager here at Aptus. Derek was kind enough to let me take over here for this month, so we’re hopping in here, but we’re going to kick it off. And Dave, John, who wants to start off? Who wants to get us going here?

John Luke Tyner

I will start with the normal performance review, and like you said, Arch, it was pretty notable just with the move that we saw in April. I think it was probably one of the more busy months that Dave and I have had with inbound client calls and a lot of worry, and I think we got a good chart at the end to hit on that, but Dave hit it.

David Wagner

So it was a roller coaster of a month, of emotions, price action, everything. I would say that the month ended with seven straight days and the 1st of May made it eight straight up days for the S&P 500. This doesn’t happen often. It’s actually pretty rare. It’s only happened seven times since 2004, and John Luke, was the Zweig thrust officially engaged this month or was it not?

John Luke Tyner

I think it was maybe mid last week. funny tweets.

David Wagner

The old Zweig thrust coming back into conversations.

John Luke Tyner

I think there was like an ultra Zweig thrust that was hit too.

David Wagner

I don’t even want to know what that means.

John Luke Tyner

Don’t know what that means.

David Wagner

Nonetheless, that tends to be a positive that presages future pretty good performance for the market. I think a lot of people would be surprised since the Liberation Day, more to the tech sector and the NASDAQ have actually recouped all of their losses plus some. Well, a lot of the other sectors continue to underperform since the April 2nd date. From there, the market did bottom in the month on April 8th, and since that period of time, international has actually continued to outperform, then it’s EM and then it’s S&P 500 and then it’s small caps. And I think that’s telling you, I’m not sure if this is the market trying to tell us something. I think I’m still dissecting and bringing in more information on this whole international versus domestic debate, but international outperformed on the downside and it’s also outperforming on the upside right now, even when the S&P 500 is being led by the mega cap stocks and the tech stocks that have catapulted the S&P 500 higher for almost five years now, especially relative to international.

So I think ourselves as a team, John Luke, myself, Arch, Brad, Beck and everyone, we’re trying to figure out if it’s a head stake or if this is a changing of the guard. I think one of the hardest things for investors to do is not just try to figure out when the light is going to switch on certain factors, sectors or different stocks from underperformers to outperformers and vice versa. It gets even harder to try to gauge and understand when that light switch occurs when an asset class that’s been out of favor for so long gets back in favor. So there’s a lot going on here right now, but I think that the market has not seen any of that soft data move to hard data as of yet, and so you’ve seen this market rally.

John Luke Tyner

Yeah. No, I think that’s good points. Dave, we have another good chart to hone in on that a bit more. But no, I think we’ll start with this one, looking through some of the consumer debt metrics and as they appear now versus back right before the financial crisis and then again in 2022. And we’ve talked about this a lot. Consumer balance sheets are much cleaner than what they were coming into really that bubble that we saw in the financial crisis, and it’s continued to support consumer spending. It’s continued to support net worth levels where people have the propensity to spend and the wealth effect certainly has been real.

Actually, when we posted this chart internally, it was funny because Joseph immediately responded and said, “Now, let’s see the public balance sheet.” And of course that wasn’t the nature of this chart because it was more geared towards just the consumer and staying the course that the consumer could weather the volatility in market. But really, I think where we’re at is less of a consumer strained issue and more of a bubble, or at least some excess from the public sector. When you look at debt to GDP, you look at how much debt has been issued the last 15 years since when this chart comes into existence, and those measures have grown drastically.

And of course, the Texans go through wealth effects to the consumer. Where asset prices have risen drastically, the US has performed quite well, but when you look at this, you look at also the bottom, which goes through some of the banking capital metrics to look at how safe that banks have got from a capital reserve perspective and debt service ratio perspective today versus where they were 15 or 20 years ago, and it’s quite different. And you’ve seen some articles talking about banks pulling down or being more selective on who they’re lending to, and at the end of the day, that’s their job. They have to make sure that they make loans that they get paid back on. A.

Nd so I think many of these features just put maybe a safety blanket in a way for how bad things can get. When you have a consumer that has dollars in the US, they tend to spend them, and we think that the recession, if there is one, would be driven by job losses, and probably large job losses before that you see a dent in the consumer. So Dave, anything you want to add to that?

David Wagner

That’s the most important thing is what you said at the end there, that basically everything hinges on the labor market, and at least that’s personally my focus moving forward. But I really like this chart because it looks at all the stuff from a relativity standpoint. I think there are so many stories and narratives that can get pulled in as people look at absolute numbers, like, “Hey, we’ve never had credit card debt this high.” Okay. Well, relative to disposable income, relative to net wealth, it looks a lot more palatable. It actually looks pretty good.

So I think this is a great chart to really bring it back, because at the core of everything that created the volatility amongst tariffs, it was, hey, what if the consumer slows down their spending because costs are higher? And I think this shows you that maybe we can weather another slight battle of inflation in the near term. And what I’d really like to see is actually something that came out of one of the compounders’ stocks earnings report, and it was Visa. The CEO came out and said, “Hey, it was a great quarter from a spending perspective.” And like always, someone comes on. “Well, what do you see in this quarter so far? I know it was an earnings report for last quarter, but have you got a little inkling on what’s going on here in the first four weeks of Q2?”

You know what guys? We’re seeing no changes across all income cohorts. People are still spending exactly like they were in the first quarter, spending just like they were last year. A lot of that soft data sentiment surveys that came out, it hasn’t come to fruition from a hard data perspective, and I don’t think there’s probably any other better company to really look towards as a north star to talk about consumer spending than a Bank of America. Moynihan always has a great hand on the consumer itself, but also companies like Visa and MasterCard, and it looks okay right now. Actually, it doesn’t look okay. It looks pretty good right now.

John Archbold

And I think especially you brought up relative, right? Even on the public debt side, not to say that it’s not a concern, but certainly if you look at US demographics, you look at the productive capacity of our own economy and then you look at debt levels to GDP of a lot of other developed nations, we’re still the cleanest dirty shirt. So certainly from that perspective, it’s always important to remember that these things are always a relative game, not an absolute game.

John Luke Tyner

Absolutely. All right.

David Wagner

I like how you named this slide.

John Luke Tyner

Yeah, if you’re a curb your enthusiasm fan, you might notice the name, but this one looks at what’s going on with earnings growth. Obviously, earnings growth expectations coming into the year were rather lofty to some degree. I know there’s a lot of operating leverage and a big piece of our outlook coming into the year was hitting on that. But pair where we’re at now, Dave, on earnings growth, and then maybe some thoughts just on the volatility with the chart next to it comparing the market’s reaction to Scott Bessent versus a few of the other cronies that Trump’s got speaking on TV.

David Wagner

Cronies is a pretty good word for the situation, so nice work. I’ll let you take the political chart. I’ll let you step on that one. These numbers are a little bit stale now that we’ve had a lot of the mega cap companies report, because this chart on the left came out on April 23rd. But unlike Larry David in the Curb your Enthusiasm episode, maybe season 10, he wanted something to yo-yo down. I don’t. I want earnings to yo-yo up, and I think that’s where we’ve been pretty surprised with earnings so far this year, probably in the first quarter, is that they’re pretty good, specifically around the mega cap names.

And if you read my musing that we all put our little hand in and putting them together, was that, you know what? We’re actually kind of optimistic heading interns. We don’t need to make that call. We don’t have to make a call because sometimes we’re wrong, but this is the point where we were right, that you have to play the hand that you’re dealt, and 37% of the S&P 500 is within the top 10 stocks that are virtually driven by the AI narrative and the tech-like proxy nature of some of those companies. And whether it’s Google, Amazon that came out today, I haven’t looked at Apple yet today, but Microsoft yesterday, Meta yesterday, CapEx continues to increase and that’s been driving a lot of the revenue growth. So you’ve seen revenue numbers come in better than expected, which given the nature of their operating leverage, we’ve seen earnings per share growth come in a lot better than expected.

If you separate the year out here in 2025 from the first half to the second half, a lot of the earnings expectations have been only pulled back in the first half, not the second half yet. That’s telling the market like, “Hey, you know what? These tariffs, they could be a short term hit, but long term, I think we’re not a derailed economy.” And that goes back to the slide that John Luke just had pulled up there, that balance sheets at corporations and at the consumer level, they’re still very, very good.

I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have when looking at the market, like, well, if earnings are bad, the market’s going to go down. Well, the market’s already been down peak to trough at 21.35% pricing and a lot of negativity. Can the market look through a Q2, so in three months from now, a poor earnings season then? I’d say yes. As long as Q3 and Q4 remain on track, the market is going to weather that earnings volatility and the storm to continue having the path of least resistance, continuing to be higher. That’s why it’s so important that the duration between a tariff ramification as we continue to talk about, hey, tariffs are the spinach. Deregulation and tax benefits are the dessert. The faster we get to this dessert, the market can give you more of an all clear sign. Now, I know I sound pretty bullish right now. I just don’t see earnings, whether it’s management commentary, I just don’t see them being a complete headwind here so far in the first quarter, or even from their guidance.

John Luke Tyner

And I think the point of the chart on the right was a little bit tongue in cheek of just the political volatility, but you notice that the worst in terms of the expectations on Jan 1 and where we are today isn’t small and then followed by mid. And I think if you’ve been paying attention to the tariff news, a lot of the big dogs have figured out ways to get exemptions from a number of the tariffs. Think about semiconductors and high phone chips and things like that, whereas the small and mom and pops have been kind of the most impacted and probably have the least leverage for negotiation. Though I do think as we get clarity over the next couple of months, July 4th being that 90 day barrier of trade negotiations, and then you get some of the back end tax cuts and deregulation, you could potentially see these things revert back. That’s more or less how I’m reading it.

John Archbold

Yeah, for sure. And I think going into this next chart of course, where we talk about US dominance and so forth and is that changing? A big part of that though of course are flows. How much of this is actual information versus how much of it are flows coming into the year, and I’m curious as to your thoughts on this, for both of you, is just everyone was trying to buy Microsoft and Apple back in December. It’s a little tougher to put all those flows into German utilities that hadn’t seen flows in quite a long time. That can have an outsized impact on price, but what are your thoughts there?

David Wagner

John Luke, I want to hear your opinion here too. We already touched base on this international running on the upside and on the downside. We all know that it’s come from valuation expansion and currency translation. About 60% of the outperformance relative to the US has come from currency translation with the residual 40% being valuation. The question I would ask you guys, do you believe it? Is this a head fake and are you buying this structural nature of the story that the script has changed? Because I know that a lot of our clients, and not just our clients but if you look around the entire United States, everyone tends to be underweight international stocks. So has the tide changed? What do you think, John Luke?

John Luke Tyner

Well, when it was 70% of sort of the ACWI global index was allocated to US stocks coming into the year roughly, and maybe it’s bumped down to 65%. So for every dollar that gets invested, 70 cents was going into the US. Now it’s 65, so it’s still meaningful. So I think you could see some shifting around from foreign investors that maybe impact this a bit, but if the mag seven and the top names continue to perform, I would imagine they’ll be as quick to chase back in as they were to get out.

And I saw this and I thought it was pretty interesting. So looking at US, our quality stocks, so just think about the mag seven types of names, and this might be slightly off, but Amazon’s trading at 29 times, 25 earnings. Nvidia is at 24 times, Oracle’s at 30 times. I think Google is in the teens, Meta was in the teens.

David Wagner

16.

John Luke Tyner

What do you think Germany’s SAP is trading at on a multiple of ’25 earnings?

David Wagner

Of 2025? I’d say 35 times.

John Luke Tyner

41 times. So do you want to own-

David Wagner

Do you want to own Oracle or one of those? Do you want Nvidia at 24 or that at 41?

John Luke Tyner

Yeah, pretty easy to look at that. And to echo Arch’s comments too, the sector buildup of those indices is quite different than the US from both a sector perspective but also from a growth and a quality perspective. So as long as the US continues to demonstrate the growth, I think it’s going to be hard to see that swap, and maybe you see some general rebalancing from repatriated flows, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough to really flip things that drastically.

David Wagner

I’m with you. The one thing I can’t stand… Once sec, Arch. I’ll let you go after this. The one thing I can’t stand is that everyone says that market concentration is a bad thing. All right, guys. Well, give me those returns back that have been driven by the Mag seven for the past few years. If you’re so anti mag seven and think concentration is an issue, it’s not. We’re one of the least concentrated nations in the world, and everyone just assumes, “Market concentration. They got to pull back. You got to go average market.” I just disagree with that. It can go both ways, but I would say 98% of people say that market concentration is a bad thing. I don’t. Sorry. Go ahead, Arch.

John Archbold

No, never apologize. No, I think on that front, David, one of the fallacies I think, there’s the gambler’s fallacy. We’re due, international is due, value is due, and the reality is nobody’s due anything, right? Markets are not a mean reverting system. It’s just not how they behave, and so as you folks point out, there’s a CapEx story, there’s an earnings story, there are fundamentals. The point, Dave, that you’ve made at the beginning of the year about the US large caps being the only area of the global stock market where you actually have operating leverage.

And then beyond that, never forget the dominance of the dollar. Folks forget how correlated international returns are to the performance of the dollar, and yes, the dollar has, air quotes, “taken a beating,” but if you look at where the DXY is today versus where it was even in 2018, we’re well above where we were in 18. So we have not and until you see that dollar really retreat, and this is just my own view, but I think, again, that the structural dominance of the dollar is tough to overcome for international stocks. It really is.

John Luke Tyner

Agree. I thought we’d end on a fun one, and I know Dave and I have a lot of comments on this. We’ve shared a number of graphics and if you’ve looked at any presentation that we put out, towards the end, there’s quite a few charts just talking about time in the market, not getting scared on the worst days because they’re typically followed by the best days. And this is just a scorecard that Bloomberg put out about buying the dip and the following returns, basically following a 5% return over two days, and what you’ve seen is once again, the dip buyer program had paid off.

And so whether it was sitting tight in your allocations and not panicking when things got a little bit rocky or whether it was putting more money to work, and we did see a number of that across our clients where they actually were increasing the risk tolerance for clients as markets sold off, or if you’re systematically rebalancing in your funds from profits from hedges and reinvesting back into stocks, you’re getting a lot of this effect. And this I think just shows a lot of practicing what you preach.

David Wagner

And Johnny, you sent me an awesome quote today and it’s just perfect for this, and probably, we should have just read this. Well, actually, I am going to it. Given all these questions, all the known unknowns and all the ones anyone has not asked so far, unknown unknowns, do you really think that you can predict the future course of the global economy, the stock market, interest rates, whatever it is? I can’t imagine anyone answering those questions in the affirmative.

Even in the best of times, it’s hard to predict the market or economy a year in advance. I’d say it’s impossible because of those unknown unknowns. Black swan events do exist, and these are not by any stretch of the imagination the best of times, there’s uncertainty about the future economic policies off the charts ,and the geopolitical situation is far from comforting. But there’s so many unknown unknowns out there, you have to control what you have the ability to control and prepare for what you can’t control, and I just think it’s a great way of saying it. And you said a quote down in Austin this week, John Luke. It was something about duration of a bull market, when there’s a bull market and bear market. Do you know what quote I’m talking about?

John Luke Tyner

Well, basically, when it’s a bull market, the time horizon is infinity, and when it’s a bear market, the time horizon is today. And I thought that-

David Wagner

I love it.

John Luke Tyner

Putting those together, you had some great quotes in a recent talk I heard you give, just talking about the magnitude and the number of tail environments and how that it’s likely we could see a large increase in that moving forward, whether it’s the left tail, which arguably we saw a 20% drawdown. It wasn’t quite a left tail event, but it was close. But then you snap back and you see a right tail, and then of course the last couple of years have been a right tail. And so I think if anything is known or likely, it’s that volatility is here to stay.

And you build these financial plans, you build investment allocations to stay the course and be resilient, and it’s not necessarily how your portfolio does in the best of markets because it’s going to be fine. It’s how it does in the worst of markets and does it hold up? And we think a lot of the things that we’re doing have helped us navigate a choppy market. Even though a number of the tilts that we make in portfolios have been somewhat negative this year, whether it’s underweight international, underweight duration, overweight stocks, underweight small cap, none of those have really worked. But if you look at the performance of the portfolios, even in an environment where we’re 0 for four, it’s highly digestible. And I think that’s the magnitude of the benefits of having different types of strategies that aren’t as correlated to markets, but also the diversification has paid off a bit this year.

So just teeing it up for moving forward, I think buying the dip probably won’t always work, but I think if you have the ability to recycle profits within your portfolios and within the funds inside of the portfolios to sell expensive hedges after you get some turmoil and reroute that back into cheaper stocks, that you’re just improving your chances of long-term compounding at deficient rates to meet your goals.

David Wagner

From a risk and investment management perspective, we’re always going to harp on about the same thing. Build convexity into your portfolio, improve the geometric compounding path of investments through time. It’s not about predicting the future. It’s about building resiliency in your portfolio to divergences from expected outcomes. So it’s exactly what you said there, John Luke. It is about how your portfolio performs when you’re wrong, not when you’re right. That will make all the difference.

John Archbold

Well said.

David Wagner

Well, Arch, you guys have your first three pointers.

John Archbold

Yeah, I did my best Stephen impression that I could.

John Luke Tyner

Great work. Thanks, guys, for this, and anyone’s got any questions, you know how to get us. Here to help, but definitely both of us, I think we’re pretty happy to see the market come off those lows.

John Archbold

Here’s to a right tail man, right? That’s what we’re hoping for. Let’s get a right tail man.

John Luke Tyner

There are so many that go away. Thanks, everyone.

David Wagner

Thanks, guys.

John Archbold

Thanks, guys.

Disclosures

Past performance is not indicative of future results. This material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. The information contained herein should not be considered a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security.

The opinions expressed are those of the Aptus Capital Advisors Investment Team. The opinions referenced are as of the date of publication and are subject to change due to changes in the market or economic conditions and may not necessarily come to pass. Forward-looking statements cannot be guaranteed.

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Given the popularity of our weekly Market in Pictures, we started the habit of picking out a few and going into more detail with our PMs. In this edition, John Luke and Dave spend a few minutes on each of the following:

• • A Wild February

• • Growth Worries?

• • Tarif-Fying?

• • Bull Market, Year 3

• • Market Broadening Out

3 Minute Read: Executive Summary

Full Transcript

Derek

Well, hello there. It’s March. Came on quick. Friday was February 28th, and all of a sudden it’s March 3rd. So we are doing it on the first of the month here. And we’ve got our usual experts here, Dave Wagner, head of equities, John Luke Tyner, head of fixed income. Lots to talk about. Could probably do a half a show just about today, but we’ll try to handle most of February in this recap. I’ll read a disclosure. The opinions expressed during this call are those of the Aptus Capital Advisors Investment Committee and are subject to change Without notice. This material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed. Aptus reserves the right to modify its current investment strategies and techniques based on changing market dynamics or client needs. More information about Aptus’s investment advisory services can be found in its form ADV part two, which is available upon request. So we’ll start with our usual recap from a performance standpoint. A lot of dispersion. I don’t know if you want to jump in and tackle some of that.

David

Yeah, the subject line here actually is probably a little bit misleading because it says Wild February. Well, if you looked at the returns of the S&P 500, it’s only down about 1.3%. I’d say that emotionally it felt more like wild more so than the actual performance itself. But overall, during the month, it felt like the animal spirits really coming out of the election. Well, they’ve finally been disrupted by what’s perceived to be hyperactivity in Washington D.C., especially when it comes to tariffs and probably to a lesser extent the implications of the establishment of DOGE. But all in all, I thought it was actually a pretty good quarter, given all the news surrounding that. Obviously, we’re taping this on March 3rd, the first day of the month where we had the S&P 500 down almost 2%, the VIX spiking 16% to 23%. But overall, I would say the things that I would be focusing on here is kind of two things, that there’s a lot of noise out there, and there could be a lot of misleading signals when you’re looking at the market as a whole because it’s such a weird dichotomy that usually in the first two months of the year, a lot of the losers of the previous year tend to outperform in the first two months of the following year.

But not only that, if you actually look at the Trump 1.0 regime versus kind of what we’ve seen so far as the Trump 2.0 regime, you kind of saw the exact same thing, that the high-flyers post-election into year-end really saw their momentum swap in the first quarter of 2017. And that’s exactly what you’re getting right now. International security is up about 7%, 8%. A lot of that is based off of probably the move and the dollar here recently. The U.S. dollar has really started to pull back since January 13th as a whole. But even if you look at underneath the hood, I think the second factor I want to say that I’m looking at right now is that if you look at the defensive names versus the cyclical names, when you usually have a pullback in the ten-year treasury, which really started to happen, let’s call it say also around that January 13th date, you actually tend to have cyclicals outperform. But right now you’re actually seeing the exact opposite. You’re seeing the defensive securities substantially outperform the cyclical securities.

So what that tells me in accordance with the ten-year pulling back from… What was it?… 4.8 to about 4.15 right now, it’s telling you that the market’s starting to focus on actual growth of S&P 500, which kind of baffles me a little bit because what we saw in the fourth quarter earnings was really strong. You had earnings grow about 16% off of sales growing about 5%. Obviously, the market’s a forward-looking mechanisms, so it’s trying to delineate what type of growth we’re going to have in the future, not just in the fourth quarter. But right now if you’re looking at signals, what the market’s telling you, that the market’s starting to get a little spooked from a growth perspective. We’ve only pulled back about 5.1% from the February 19th highs, but overall, it’s a small minor pullback. I think a lot of these pullbacks that you see in this market of 5%, they tend to be healthy. They tend to be natural, especially if you actually see a lot of the heavier risk on securities starting to pull back. And that’s what you’ve seen really over the last two weeks. You’ve seen the heavy risk on areas like Bitcoin, the high beta names, the highly, highly valued names, names that have price to sales greater than 10 times. They’ve started to pull back.

So I’d say that a lot of the areas where you tend to see rational exuberance, they’ve pulled back. So it tells me that this is a healthy and normal pullback that we’ve seen in the market so far.

Derek

Anything you want to add on there from your… Obviously, fixed income had a pretty big move for the month on the yield side.

John Luke

Yeah, you’ve seen yields drop a good bit, and I think a lot of it has come with a little bit of a growth scare, or at least perception of a potential growth scare. And I think you kind of have to look at it from a couple of different perspectives. First, the market loved the idea of deregulation, lower taxes, more business-friendly environment, but maybe you forgot that that’s like a medium to longer term sort of timeframe for that to play out. And then I think that it’s been a little bit underwhelmed as far as expectations or under expected on what the DOGE sort of approach would take and kind of gutting a lot of the expenditures from a government level and short term as fiscal policy goes down, that’s a potential negative, but you would hope that the private sector would come back in and help fill some of that void and improve efficiency.

So Scott Bessent and Trump’s goal is more targeted on the ten-year yield than it is maybe on his first term of what’s the Dow doing every day. And so I think that as they get yields back into at least a more stable range… They’re still higher than where they have been, but a more stable range and you take into account some of the cuts… We have a hundred bips of cuts that are lagging, but flowing into the economy from an effect perspective. So I do think that there are a couple of things that can kind of be offsetting in the shorter or medium type of term, but looking further out, as some of this policy gets put into place, as we get more clarity, which, like Dave says, the market wants clarity, loves clarity, that it could be really helpful in kind of stabilizing things and kicking things back into trend. And I they got a couple good charts on a little bit of the short-term noise that we’ll hit on coming up.

Derek

So you both mentioned growth. Obviously, Dave says often that’s the most important thing to markets. And this chart has kind of flown around all over the place the past few days. It’s probably been over-interpreted, but I’m curious your take on it. That’s a pretty sharp change. I know there’s some weird factors that go into this. So any comments here on this one?

John Luke

Yeah, I’ll take first stab and let Dave clean house as he always does. But this was a bit of a surprise. We’ve seen the Atlanta Fed GDP number come in pretty amazingly strong for the last several years. And as markets have gotten sort of hit with this growth scare, this number has continually been revised higher, and then you’ve seen it with the actual numbers come through because this is just simply an estimate. But a lot of the decline that we’ve seen is focused on inventories. And if you think about you have to pay for the inventories today, which we’re importing these goods in from other places, probably places impacted with tariffs, but as that gets either sold or marked as inventory, which is an asset, it will help offset a substantial bit of this drop. So it’s obviously a notable… I wouldn’t say it’s a red flag, but it’s something that we’re watching. But you would expect over the back half of the rest of this quarter for the number to be revised as it gets more properly accounted for.

But I think the big piece was the merchandise trade deficit was 153 billion, as far as it was accounted in Q1, which was 30 billion higher than any previous record. And so what that’s really just showing is people are buying like crazy to get ahead of the potential hit of tariffs, but it’s not necessarily a net negative for the economy because now there’s more goods to sell and potentially at prices that are less impacted by tariffs.

David

Yeah, I would say this just completely falls under the category of noise. It’s not a red flag. It’s not a green flag. It’s no flag. John Luke made a great point there that it’s going to right-side itself over the next month or two months. And when John Luke and I both spoke about the markets trying to recognize and dissect a growth scare, I think it has absolutely nothing to do with this Atlanta Fed GDPNow figure. I think it’s actually more on the earnings per share side. When you’ve actually started to see the first quarter 2025 earnings per share number come down to buy about $3 or $4 or buy about 1% or 2%, that’s normal. That happens all the time in the first quarter. So I think that’s what the market’s trying to dissect, is earning per share of the S&P 500, not kind of this growth worry from the Atlanta GDPNow Fed cast.

John Luke

Yeah. One other thought, Dave, and I know we hadn’t really talked about this, but you’ve got the next Fed meeting on the 19th. Actually, this number was revised even lower this morning and put in the chart, but it was revised even worse. But you’ve got the Fed meeting coming up here, and call it two and a half weeks or so, you’ve got some data that’s not necessarily terrible, but it’s certainly not as strong as we are kind of accustomed to see in the last couple of years. The market’s got the Fed at about a 9% chance of cutting rates 25 bips, with the first full cut priced in by June. Do you think that we could see them speed that up with some data? I know we got jobs on Friday, and I think the expectation’s like 160,000 jobs. Maybe it’s barring on that, but do you think that we could see a cut?

David

I don’t see that. I think the Fed recognizes that a lot of the data, whether it’s on the TCE side or the CPI side, is that there’s a lot of moving parts that need to be reconciled from a data input perspective in the first two months of the year. We’ve continued to see that, especially with inflation data. And I think that that’s what they would point to, is not just the last one or two data points, but a smoothing of data over the last three or six months is really going to discern what they’re going to be doing in the future. So I don’t see it happening. Do you?

John Luke

I think it’s a higher chance than 9%, but I wouldn’t say it’s by any means like a coin toss.

David

Yeah, too much seasonality in a lot of this data, and we’re still going to see with the nonfarm payrolls on Friday.

John Luke

Yeah. Prices paid data across the board has continued to be slightly elevated.

David

Yeah.

Derek

And, Dave, to your point on earnings growth, I know there’s a couple reports coming out this week, but we’re pretty much going into a black hole of earnings. We’re going to get very little visibility on that stuff for a while, right? The whole month of March?

David

Yeah, I mean, you got a lot of the more cyclical consumer discretionary names still left to report like Target and whatnot, but 96% of the S&P 500 has reported their Q4 2024 earnings. And that actually brings up a great point, Derek, that, hey, you know what? Now that earnings is behind us, that actually opens up the window for buybacks, which tends to be from a net liquidity perspective pretty supportive of equities.

Derek

Awesome. Okay. Tariffs. I mean, got to mention them. They’re obviously getting mentioned in the headlines every day. So curious your thoughts there.

David

I think we could probably take this conversation in two different directions, where we can give you our thoughts on why it’s happening now and the implications of tariffs, that $300 billion consumption tax that’s basically going to be unleashed out into the markets at the end of tonight, or we can kind of take this conversation the route of how do I describe tariffs to clients, and more importantly, how can I make sure that they recognize that it’s not something to fully worry about right now. Obviously, when you’re talking politics, because in a way when you’re talking tariffs, you’re talking to the unknown ramifications of tariffs, but also you talk politics in a way, especially in a country that’s basically a 50/50 split between Democrats and Republican, this is going to be a polarizing topic. So I think I would prefer to take the route of the latter, not talking the fundamental aspect of this, but talking more about how do I explain this to clients and how they need to look through a lot of the short-term noise coming out of Washington D.C.? Because, one, we still don’t know if it’s a negotiating tactic or an opportunity for us to get more pay-fors to get that 2017 TCJA, the Tax Cuts Jobs Act, reenacted that sunsets at the end of this year.

But as rudimentary as it is… Well, let me step back actually. As investors, you can never let politics dictate your investment thesis or what you’re trying to do from an investment standpoint at all. We invest in the world that we have to live in, not in the world that we want. And I think that’s really important to recognize. So I think going back to historical statistics of what’s happened during different regimes is very, very important. And I don’t think you could have more of differentiated policy makers or policies from Trump 1.0, which is basically 2017 to 2020, and then the eight years under the Obama regime from 2009 to 2017. And if you look at those two periods, the Trump 1.0 and the Obama regime, you look at the underlying sectors underneath the S&P 500 and how they performed during that tenure of president, they’re almost identical. If you look at the top three sectors under each regime, there was IT one, discretionary one, and healthcare one. But not only that, if you look at the bottom end of the spectrum of what sectors performed the worst, there was energy, real estate, and staples also a commonality amongst both regimes.

So the takeaway here should be is that the policy-makers in D.C. and the policies that they create, it doesn’t dictate the direction of the market over longer periods of time. That’s why we shouldn’t focus on it. That’s why I believe that it’s short-term noise. We need to focus on the deep fundamentals of what’s actually driving the economy from a growth perspective. All right, so that’s going to be earnings per share of the S&P 500, the operating margin of the S&P 500, and just the macroeconomic strength of the consumer within the U.S. That’s what actually drives the market over longer periods of time. And I think that this is such a very basic table to be able to show clients that even if you have two completely different policy-makers coming out of Washington D.C., policy doesn’t drive the market. Fundamentals do, and that’s what we need to focus on.

Derek

So this is Bill Murray from Meatballs, “It just doesn’t matter.”

John Luke

Got to loop it in.

David

I used that too much heading into the election, so I don’t know if I can use it right now. I need to come up with a new one.

Derek

Yep. All right, cool. I do think obviously clients are just going to hit advisors on this stuff because it’s in the news every single night, but hopefully people will become desensitized to it a little bit and, as you said, the economic impact is not nearly as great as the day-to-day noise that’s coming out of there. And you’ve written some pieces on it that I think advisors have benefited from and used with clients, so that’s a good thing. Year three of the bull. All right, so we got a script here of a couple comparative charts. Anyone want to talk through this one?

John Luke

Yeah, I’ll start and let Dave go. This is a point we’ve talked a lot about the last really 18 months or so, but when you look at the backdrop of the bull market, which was solidified, I guess two years of it last fall from the lows that we saw off of the 2022 kind of Q4, I guess meltdown that we saw, and then pretty massive recovery off of that, so after hitting sort of this bull market stride, what you see is year one and year two are typically the most friendly to market participants, which you can see in kind of the charts on the two left sides, year one and year two. We underperformed slightly in year one compared to the average year one, but we mightily outperformed in the year two period. But what you’ve seen since is a lot of chop with the market, and that’s not atypical to what you see in year three of bull markets. I’ll let Dave say the stat so I don’t misstate it, but I think whenever you typically see year two of bull markets achieved, it’s something like the average bull markets. Is it eight years, Dave? Yeah, and so-

David

Eight years.

John Luke

We’re not super surprised to see a little bit of chop, especially after two pretty monumental years from a performance perspective. And then the other thing that you have going against you… And, again, this is short term and probably a lot of noise, but after the inauguration typically leads to some choppiness. So you’ve got sort of the tail of the worst side on both pieces of it, year three of a bull market post-inauguration and then a lot of headlines obviously from the Trump administration and coming out of D.C. and what’s getting shaken up. But what I think the important piece is, and I’m sure Dave will strike on this, is this doesn’t mean it’s the end of the duration of the bull market by any stretch of the imagination.

And while it might be a little bit more volatile in year three, we think, number one, there’s a lot of benefits that hanging on, but then not to mention any of the funds specifically at Aptus, but we’ve got a number of things in place that are taking advantage of a lot of the volatility that we’re seeing, whether it’s higher income off of certain products or enhanced yield, whether it’s covered calls, whether it’s actively managed puts that can take advantage of some of the chops and keep getting money redeployed back into equity. So I think while it might not be as fun or as easy as it was the last two years, that we’re still positioned very well to navigate what hopefully is just the early parts of a longer bull run.

David

I think that point you made there, John Luke, is perfect from two perspectives, that the returns are going to be harder to come from this year, but luckily we have a lot of active levers in place to take advantage of the volatility. And let’s get into this, John Luke, because John Luke and I were talking today. I’m not going to lie, I very much dislike charts like this that people try to overlap a certain period with another period. There’s so much chart crime that can really be put out there into Twitter. And JL and I were going back on a certain person on that today, actually that Derek knows, but I won’t name them on here. But I would say that we can make analogies to previous years as much as we possibly can because I do think that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes after two really, really strong years in the market. It’s normal for the market to take maybe a little pullback for some type of breather. A lot of people don’t recognize that markets and individual stocks, they kind of work in lockstep approach. Or set another way, they kind of do the stair-step approach on returns, that they go up for a little bit, they go sideways for a bit, and consolidate for a bit, then they go back up for a little bit, consolidate for a bit.

And we’ve had two really strong returns for the S&P 500 really going back to August 12th, 2022. I mean, 2023, the mark was up 27 and some change. Last year, the mark was up 25% exactly. We could say more superlatives that over the last four starts to a new election year, so basically year one of election year, the market has had really, really strong returns. It hasn’t seen a recession during that period of time, which kind of bucks the trend of what historical data has told you. Historically speaking, the [inaudible 00:21:56] is that year one is the worst year of the presidential election cycle in those four markets, but ever since the introduction of quantitative easing and a few other aspects, it’s actually the best. The year two tends to be the most difficult, but I think we, John Luke and I, can data mine any market fat to try to turn it bullish or to turn it bare. So as much I like these charts from a descriptive perspective or from a visual perspective, it’s hard to take them completely seriously without some context.

Derek

So I would also say a lot of the market the past couple of years has just been the Mag 7, right? That’s what everybody’s been watching. You guys have this chart in here about the market broadening out, and I think that’s probably more relevant to people’s actual portfolios versus picking dates. What is actually happening? Are we seeing differences in the market? I mean, obviously there’s been a lot less upside momentum in those handful of names than we had seen in the past. And we’re seeing other names step up, which I’m sure you both kind of appreciate that. But I’m just curious, what does this chart say to you? I see, I guess the black line in the middle is the S&P, and you’ve got gray on top as the S&P 493, and then on the bottom you’ve got the Mag 7. So kind of flipped from where we’ve been the past couple of years, I guess.

David

I’ll start, and John Luke, you finish. You close it. You’re the closer. I’m a starter. I think people want to talk out of both sides of their mouths. When the Mag 7 is working, they say it’s not a healthy market because the average stock isn’t participating. And then they say, hey, you know what? I don’t think the market can go higher if the Mag 7 isn’t driving the market. Well, what we’ve learned over the past few years is that you can have your cake and eat it too. The Mag 7 can drive this market higher, but when the Mag 7 takes a break, a lot of these stocks in the markets, they work in a stair-step approach. So when the Mag 7 is going sideways and consolidating for a little bit, I think you can actually see the average stock or the remaining 493 stocks and the S&P 500 can insulate the return of the overall benchmark itself. You saw it for a quarter last year. You’ve seen it year to date this year. And I think it’s more of a reason to be optimistic about this year, that the average stock can continue to drive this market higher, even if we don’t have any positive leadership from the Mag 7. It’s just such a great yin and yang of the S&P 500 right now.

And I think that this performance that we’ve seen to start the year with the average stock outperforming kind of mirrors and mimics what we saw coming out of earnings season. The Mag 7 continues egregiously high and very strong growth rates from an absolute perspective, but it’s really starting to come down. So I think this is the first time in maybe seven or eight quarters that we’ve seen a spread this narrow between the Mag 7 earnings growth on a year-over-year basis and the remaining 493 stocks growth on a year-over-year basis. So I think that you’re starting to see these two numbers converge kind of really mimics and shifts why we’ve seen the performance that we’ve seen of the average stock and the international stocks really starting to outperform to start 2025.

John Luke

Yeah, we certainly welcome a little bit of broadening in markets. It’s still been fairly central to large caps, especially on the U.S. side. If you asked me, if small caps would have done better than the equal weight S&P based on what we’ve seen this far this year, I would’ve said definitely, but actually that hasn’t been the case. Pretty decent gap there. But I think you take this and the broadening, which I think is good longer term, I always think back to looking at the long-term performance of the equal weight S&P, and believe it or not, it’s actually outperformed since they started tracking it, I think it was in the early 90s, the market cap weighted index. And so I think you get these kind of fits and rallies, and obviously market cap has a lot of momentum characteristics. It’s heavier than it has been in a while. It can still keep going up obviously, but we do like some of the cheaper parts of the market that I think can provide value.

And probably the most surprising that it’s actually happened, but the least surprising, based off the feedback we got at the beginning of the year, has been international. Rewind three months ago, and pretty much every advisor we talked to was questioning whether we should continue to hold international in their models at all. And we talked a lot of folks off the cliff of getting rid of it and prove some of the diversification there. But I think when you have a general overweight to equities and you can have different components or diversification of the types of equities, that this type of broadening really benefits our portfolios versus most of your simple 60/40 type of benchmarks that are pretty geared towards just the largest names.

David

JL, let me ask you a question real quick. You brought up a great point, like hey, small caps have not participated in the broadening. Obviously, I think I know small caps pretty well, so I actually want to hear your response in this. Everyone says that small caps should benefit from some reshoring aspects, from a market broadening out perspective. Why do you think small caps have not kept up in this year-to-date rally?

John Luke

I think sensitivity to rates, even though they’ve dropped, has probably been some of them, but I also think it has to do a lot with the policy marks and what tariffs are going to do to some of the companies that have less operating leverage and more susceptibility to taking a hit from eating some of the impact of the tariff. That would be my thought. And then the other piece is you had such a boom in infrastructure spending and construction that I know a lot of the companies benefited from, that it’s potentially getting DOGE’d in some capacity. So maybe a little bit more sensitivity to that side. But I do think, speaking out of the other side of my mouth, that the deregulation and the tax impact could be the story that changes that. Just like I said at the beginning, it doesn’t happen immediately. It’s a medium to longer term type of playbook, and I think it speaks to being patient on it. I’m definitely not throwing in the towel on small caps. I just have been surprised that 493 has done as well as it has and small caps haven’t.

David

I would agree, and I think it comes down to the constituents within the benchmark of the two. So I would say I think your reasons are exactly correct. I think if I was to put an ordinal rank, rates would be number one, even though they’ve pulled back. As we mentioned at the start of this call, the market’s trying to digest some type of growth scare, and that’s why you’ve seen defensive outperform cyclicals. And small caps are going to be heavily more tied to the sensitivity of growth of the domestic market itself, so that’s probably another reason. But even if you look at the constituents within the Russell 2000, specifically the Russell 2000 growth, 15% to 18% of the weightings within the Russell 2000 growth or within biotech and pharmaceuticals. And they have the exorbitant amounts of debt, and with the rates where they are, then you have the introduction of some R.F.K. Junior policies. There’s kind of just been an overhang. So I think that shows the necessity to be active within the small cap space, especially with so many landmines out there from unprofitable high debt ridding companies. But I’m definitely not throwing in the towel on small caps either, John Luke. I’m pretty excited for the potential in the future for them, especially in the second half of this year.

John Luke

Yeah, my uncanned response was there’s a lot of crap in the index on the small cap side. Didn’t you set it out? Say it more clearly.

David

Crapsy stocks, but pretty cool managers.

John Luke

Yep.

Derek

There you go. All right, well, cool. It sounds like growth is what we’re going to be watching.

David

Yeah.

Derek

So we’ll go with the macroeconomic figures first and earnings later. So appreciate you guys coming on and talking through some of this. Obviously, hit us up. We’re coming up on tax time, so I’m guessing a lot of advisors are talking to clients about different things. It’s not year-end where you’re doing last minute tax planning, but anything we can do to help think through ways to be more tax-efficient and strategies for handling concentrated positions or any of that kind of stuff, please do reach out.

John Luke

Yeah, we’re here to help as we navigate a little bit more difficult environment than we have been in. But I think it’s still exciting looking forward.

David

Appreciate you.

Derek

Thanks guys.

John Luke

All right, thanks.

Disclosures

Past performance is not indicative of future results. This material is not financial advice or an offer to sell any product. The information contained herein should not be considered a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security.

The opinions expressed are those of the Aptus Capital Advisors Investment Team. The opinions referenced are as of the date of publication and are subject to change due to changes in the market or economic conditions and may not necessarily come to pass. Forward-looking statements cannot be guaranteed.

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