Rally still smells of a bear trap Investors relish consensus 'beats,' ignore 'growth' By Thom Calandra, CBS MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - The mini-October rally continues, powered largely by individuals who dismiss a bleak earnings outlook for America's largest companies.
"There is a feeling that investors continue to follow the elite of Wall Street down the path of despair through the past year of the market's decline," says Chris Johnson, senior quantitative analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati. "Buying on the dips serves a purpose on a dip in a bull market but does extensive damage to one's portfolio in a bear market."
Using investor sentiment indicators such as options contracts as a guide, Johnson sees "the very real possibility that new lows could be achieved" for the major U.S. stock indexes. Many investors, he says, are putting the best gloss they can muster on dismal corporate earnings reports.
Yet when it's all over in a couple of weeks, the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index could show a year-over-year decline of more than 20 percent for third-quarter profits, according to data from First Call. Right now, the year-to-year decline is running about 16 percent. See the full story.
"Investors remain focused on comparing actual earnings against consensus expectations that have continually been lowered as a result of the slowing economy," says Johnson. "This may serve to further explain the bear trap rallies seen this year."
Let's put it like this. How'd you like to be screening the earnings conference calls that are coming in by the bucket-load and hearing the same thing time and again?
"We made our Wall Street consensus by a penny . . . before non-recurring items, which may or may not recur sometime in the future. We're very, very happy about beating our own internal guidelines, too," the scripted CEO says. "Now that we've written off a few hundred million of bad investments and goodwill, reduced the work force by 20 percent and taken a charge for that and other cost reductions, we're confident going forward that we're poised for continued success."
A pause. "That success, of course, depends on growth in our operating earnings, and while we don't see that growth occurring in this quarter, because of the soft economy, we do expect that we will resume growing soon."
If this were a baseball game, or a football game, you'd be throwing food on the field just about now.
Doesn't matter if you're watching 3M (MMM: news, chart, profile) or Nortel (NT: news, chart, profile) or SBC. Doesn't matter if the CEO made the analysts' numbers or beat the numbers. Doesn't even matter if, like Lexmark (LXK: news, chart, profile), the company enjoyed slightly greater sales and profits than a year ago. The same language is in most of these reports: soft economy, cost reductions, layoffs, year-to-year declines, non-recurring charges.
Every indication is that America's largest companies will, by and large, stick to their game plan for the remainder of this reporting season, which will last another couple of weeks. The executives will jam as much bad news as they can into the third and fourth quarters. They'll take the charges. Console the shareholders. Hope for a turnaround next year.
If you're sitting at home, of course, you probably don't see much of a problem in all this. The companies are mostly making money. They're trimming fat. What's wrong with non-recurring charges; they happen all the time, don't they? The stock market's bottomed, right? It's time to find that final stash of cash that hasn't evaporated in a stock-market puff of smoke these past 20 months and find a bargain before the spouse catches you playing that darn-fool market again.
The October rally, powered by Dow component 3M and others with lackluster earnings, is proceeding, as improbable as that is to quantitative analysts who measure real earnings growth.
Momentum investing is even staging a small comeback, thanks to the day-traders who are finally making a little money this month. If you're Joe Q. Public, you're even getting calls at work again from that friendly neighborhood investment adviser - you know, the one who has you down 55 percent this year.
"The result is a security blanket that makes investors feel better about buying the market ... until the focus turns back to earnings growth after earnings reporting is over," says Johnson, who holds an excellent track record for sidestepping the market's bear traps this year. (See www.sentiment.com.)
If you believe this is your chance to dig yourself out of that hole you're in, then go ahead and dive right back into the bear trap. You'll have plenty of company.
Then I saw her face . . .
Joe Duarte, president of tiny River Willow Capital Management in Dallas, is a believer, with some caveats. Duarte, who wrote the book "Successful Biotech Investing," sees a strong link between demand for technology and demand for energy.
"I was playing with charts and found this," he said, pointing to the CBOE Oil Index (OIX: news, chart, profile) and the Amex Computer Technology Index (XCI: news, chart, profile). Both charts in the past two weeks have gained, more or less in lock-step with one another. (See chart in this column.)
Duarte, who relies on charts and common sense for what he calls short-term moves in stocks, sees a continued rebound for both indexes. Oil companies, he says, are just about finished suffering from lower gas prices at the pump, falling demand for airplane fuel and the international oil cartel's inability to raise prices.
Technology companies, especially hardware makers, will benefit from better prospects for one of their largest clients, the energy industry. Sounds simple, doesn't it?
It's not. Duarte warns that most ordinary folks are suffering vast losses because they still believe stocks are for buying and holding forever. "Lots of people believed being a long-term investors meant holding stocks forever," he said Monday. "But you have to know when to sell when you buy."
As an example, Duarte says he bought the Semiconductor Holders (SMH: news, chart, profile) last week with a $37 target. It's at $35. If the stock, which tracks the major chip makers, hits $37, he'll sell half and set a new target for the other half.
"Sure lots of people are hurting and hurting badly. I just want to show people there's another way to invest, an intermediate way to trade," he says "This is no longer a secular bull market but a cyclical bull market, like in the '70s when you got those 20 percent moves over six or eight months."
Duarte has one other caveat for the desperate individual investors who hope this October mini-rally will continue. He wants to see the major indexes close above their 50-day moving averages. For the Nasdaq Composite, that's a level of 1,715. The index was last at 1,696.
"We're knocking at the door," he says. Duarte's next book, due out in the spring, will be "Successful Energy Investing." Let's hope investors in the current bear trap will have the pocket change they need to buy the book when it's published.
Thom Calandra is Editor-in-Chief of CBS MarketWatch
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