Special Market Update - Addressing the Current Market Sell-Off

Equity investors have had a tough start to 2022, as the S&P 500 slipped into "pullback" mode on January 19th after falling by more than 5%.

The S&P 500 was down 8.3% at the end of the day on Friday, January 21, while the Nasdaq-100 is well into correction mode, having fallen 12.9% year-to-date. Depending on this week's results, the S&P 500 could easily join the Nasdaq in correction territory. Worse yet, the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks has tumbled 18.6%. If you want a double "worse yet", Bitcoin, probably the best example of the risk-on trade, is down 50% from it's all-time high.

The current sell-off appears partially to be the result of a rising yield on 10-year US Treasuries from 1.52% at year-end 2021 to a recent high of 1.87%, which finally put pressure on over-extended equity valuations. Additionally, with the Fed finally retiring the word "transitory" from their description of inflation, markets are pricing in concern that the Fed will have to respond in a more assertive manner than previously anticipated by increasing the rate of tapering, implementing more frequent rate hikes, and accelerating the run-off of the balance-sheet.

Most Wall Street economists now expect the Fed to raise short-term interest rates by 25 basis points (.25%) in each of this year's four quarters. As a result, equity prices and P/E ratios have come down as rising interest rates tend to reduce the long-term intrinsic value of these investments.

However, investors are not in uncharted territory. Sell-offs of this magnitude are actually quite common. Dating back to 1946 (75 years) the S&P 500 has experienced 84 pullbacks (i.e., declines between 5-10% - occurring more than one per year), with an average recovery time of roughly 1 month. Over the same time period the S&P 500 has suffered 29 corrections (i.e., declines of 10-20% - occurring about once every three years) with an average recovery time of 4 months. We discussed this previously in our March 2021 Special Market Update.

Declines in S&P 500

Sam Stovall, in today's CFRA Research daily market commentary email, pointed out that the S&P has nearly always experienced a market correction in the calendar year following 20%+ annual gains. Encouragingly, all of the declines that started in the first half of the new year got back to breakeven before the year was over.

The US banking, bond and equity markets are the very best in the world and have an unprecedented ability to re-price on the way down and recover on the way up in what feels like days and sometimes even minutes. The best advice is to never get emotionally invested in either the euphoria on the way up or the pessimism on the way down.

As always, we would encourage investors to not look at days, week or even months of results, but instead focus on longer time periods. The markets have always rewarded the patient investor and hammered the investor who makes snap decisions and follows the crowd. It may just be that the best investment opportunity in front of you today is to stay invested in the holdings that have declined and participate in the eventual recovery.




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