Hello my friends, today is May 27th, my name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. Now this week was super exciting in markets so we have quite a few things to talk about.
First off we got to talk about what's happening in the tech sector. It seems like the tech stocks just go up and up and up every single day. What's going on there?
首先,我们需要谈谈科技行业正在发生什么。似乎科技股票每天都在一路飙升。这是怎么回事呢?
The second thing we'll talk about is we'll take a little bit of a detour and we'll talk about what's happening in the Eurozone and in the UK because markets are connected and what happens there impacts what's happening in the US as well.
And lastly, what's how about how the market seems to finally be on the same page as the Fed when it comes to pricing in rate hikes this year?
最后,市场对于今年加息的定价似乎终于与美联储达成了一致,你有什么看法?
Okay, let's start with the tech sector. So let's take a step back and look at the three major market indexes over the past year. Which is eight, NASDAQ is up about 25%, S&P is up about 10%, and the Dow Jones industrial average is about flat. So tech has been strongly overperforming the other stocks.
What seems to be happening is that there's a lot of interest in AI in the tech sector. So as many of you recall a few months ago, ChatGPT, Logged and ChatGPT was thought of as many by many people as something that's truly revolutionary that will really change the way we do things.
And unsurprisingly, many of the largest tech companies are capitalizing on this. So you have Google announcing AI stuff, you have Microsoft announcing AI stuff, you have Facebook announcing AI stuff. In fact, if you look at a company whose ticker is literally AI, you'll see that that company, even though it doesn't do any cutting edge AI stuff, actually doubled just this month.
So there's tremendous amounts of interest in AI, and that seems to be driving tech sector higher. Now if you're interested in AI, you all need one thing. You need to have good hardware to power all the complicated AI calculations. There's actually basically only one company that designs these cutting edge AI hardware stuff, and that's Nvidia.
So you're to date until their earnings call this past week, Nvidia had actually doubled your to date. Now it doubled heading into their earnings call. Now their earnings call, as many of you have heard, triggered a huge, huge upward surge in their prices, where after their earnings call, their share price basically went up 25 percent in a day.
Now Nvidia is a pretty large company. It's already a several hundred billion dollars in market cap, but it went up 25 percent in a day like a penny stock. Now people are very excited what they announced at their earnings call. So from a quarter over quarter basis, actually, their sales were down about 10 percent.
This past quarter compared to the same quarter last year, but they guided higher for their current quarter. Analysts were expecting that their current quarter will have sales about 7 billion, but they were saying that their current quarter sales looked to be about 11 billion, noting that there's tremendous demand for their products due to the excitement in AI.
And that basically let a fire under their stock price and brought the risk of the tech sector higher. And so again, there seems to be a lot of excitement here.
这基本上让他们的股票价格飙升,也提高了科技行业的风险。因此,这里似乎又出现了很多激动人心的事情。
Now this is something that we've seen before, and I'm not talking about the 2000s when we had a big tech bubble. I'm talking about what happened two years ago with crypto. Now crypto was also a very interesting technology and it drew a lot of excitement, companies that had crypto in their description or were telling investors that they were a crypto company, saw their stock price go to the moon.
And we saw many companies like Coinbase go public to very large valuations. Now fast forward to today, if you look at all those companies that were involved in crypto, they are not doing as well as they used to.
Coinbase for example, could still be a very interesting company with a very bright future, but their share price is a fraction of what it was when they first IPO'd. Now if you're looking at a stock like Nvidia that has a really good story because they're powering the future of AI, and you can have to try to figure out just how much, what's the right price for this stock?
So this week, it went from $300 to $400. And I'm guessing there's going to be people who are willing to buy it at $500, $600, and so forth. If you are a traditional investor, you would look at stock prices from the perspective of something like price earnings, price of sales, and so forth. And you wouldn't be investing in the stock.
But the truth is, I think that I'm not sure that perspective has been very useful in investing the past several years actually. It seems what dry stocks hire is having a good story and stuff like options positioning, where as we will see in the past, if you have a lot of people buying claws in a stock that can push the stock higher.
So I'm getting a sense just looking at all this excitement in the tech sector that this is very similar to what we saw during the big frenzy in crypto. And we all know how that ended. And I suspect something like that would happen here as well. No, I'm not saying that crypto, I'm not saying that this AI stuff is going to implode or anything. But when you see something go up and up and up and straight up, usually, usually it also can exhibit the same amount of volatility downward.
Now broadly speaking, the economy is slowing, the Fed is hiking. And as we'll talk about later, the market is beginning to understand that. And if you look at the rest of the stocks in the stock market, they're not going to be doing that well. So I think my best judgment is that these euphoria that we're seeing right now is going to definitely down a lot in the coming months. But I've been wrong before. I certainly didn't expect that the Nasdaq was sore this week. But I would be cautious. So that's how I think about that.
Now, going to our next topic. Let's talk about what's happening across the pod in the EU and in the UK. Now those countries are very similar to the US in a lot of ways. There's similar political institutions, similar policy tools, and at the moment also very similar economic problems. So over the past few years, the Fed has been very concerned about inflation. And indeed, inflation was as high as 9%. Last year, it's now down to about 5%.
The same thing happened in the EU and in the UK, but actually to a more significant extent. Right now, inflation is still about 10% year over year in the UK, and about 8% year over year in the EU. The causes of inflation there are broadly similar to what they were here. You had supply constraints, you had labor shortages, and you had sizeable fiscal stimulus.
A big difference between the US and over there is that energy and food. So the US is a big producer of energy and food. They export it to the rest of the world and they're self-sufficient. But the Eurozone and the UK import a lot of their energy and a lot of their food. So when you had political disruptions in Eastern Europe, the price of energy went up, the price of food went up, and that fed directly into their inflation numbers. So even though the US inflation has come down a lot to 5%, over there, it's still stuck at very high levels.
The good news is that the expectation is that inflation is going to come down rapidly over the next few months. That makes sense because when we look at things like food prices and oil prices, they were really high last year and over the past several months have gradually come down a lot. So the expectation is that their inflation will drop rapidly, but it doesn't seem like it's going to go back to 2%. Unless of course you are central banker, then you make projections. That's say something like that. But at the moment, when you look at their inflation numbers, their core inflation numbers look a lot like the core inflation numbers in the US. That is to say around 45%.
Now, the drivers of high core inflation in the US, so core inflation is just inflation, excluding food and energy, is largely wages. So we are service driven economies and the largest cost in services is wages. In the US, we have a later version shortage. Wages are going up 5% year over year, and something broadly similar is happening in the EU and the UK. Now, there's this big demographic shift where as our population age, there are fewer and fewer people entering the workforce. That's pulling a role over there as it is over here.
I think in addition to that, in the UK, at least they have more people going to school and so that also takes people out of the labor market. Now, we care about what happens over there is because global markets are interconnected.
Now, in response to what those central banks at the Bank of England and the ECB are seeing the data, they are also talking about holding rates higher for longer. That's going to feed in to the US financial markets because bond markets are interconnected and it's going to have currency impacts as well.
Now, I suspect that even though the UK and the ECB are going to keep their rates higher for longer, they're probably not going to be able to raise rates as aggressively as the Fed simply because for the monetary policy is actually more effective than it is in the US.
A lot of their mortgages, for example, are either short term, let's say within five years or floating. So when they height the rates a little bit, their households immediately feel that, or at least feel that pretty quickly and so cut back on spending because they have to pay higher mortgage payments and that will slow their economy pretty quickly so they don't actually have to height rate super aggressively to slow their economies down. Whereas here, well, we have basically everyone refinance that 3 to 4 percent mortgages, the fact that can height the 5 percent but that doesn't really impact a lot of households.
Now over the past few weeks, now the Fed has said that they're going to keep rates about 5 percent or more and keep that for the rest of the year but the market has been aggressively pricing in rate cuts.
You've been, if you've been following me, I've been telling you that the market is totally wrong and eventually they're going to have to converge to where the Fed is and we saw that happen to a big extent today, this past week.
On a year over a year basis, PCE has basically been stocked just below 5% for the past several months as well.
按年度计算,过去几个月中个人消费支出基本上保持在5%以下。
The Fed has hiked rates a lot and you can either say that, well, it just hasn't taken effect yet or you can look at this and say that, well, it doesn't seem to be doing anything.
美联储已经多次加息,可能有人会认为这只是尚未见效,也有人会认为这根本就没有产生任何效果。
I think the market saw the most recent PCE data, heard commentary from Waller as well as other Fed speakers.
It's beginning to think that maybe the inflation really is entrenched.
开始有人开始认为通货膨胀可能真的已经扎根了。
Maybe the Fed is not done with the hike cycle.
也许美联储的加息周期还没有结束。
意思是可能会再次加息。
We see this coming out showing up in market pricing like the dollar or the dollar strength in meaningfully this past week and also the 10 year yield went up quite a bit this past week as well.
I would expect that to actually filter into other asset prices as well.
我希望这将实际过滤进其他资产价格中。
You can see that excluding the AI-oriented tech stocks, the bottom market actually is doing all that well.
您会发现,除去以人工智能为导向的科技股之外,整个市场其实表现并不那么好。
Perhaps as time goes on, as more and more of this pricing seeps into different asset classes, we'll also see it drive down some of the high-flying tech stocks.