Morgan Stanley har ændret sin aktiestrategi. Hidtil har banken lagt vægt på højkvalitetsaktier og store selskaber samt defensive faktorer. Nu er tiden inde til at satse på risikofyldte aktier. Investorerne skal tænke på den tidlige fase i en ny cyklus.
Uddrag fra Morgan Stanley:
Our constructive view since late March has not changed, nor has the narrative: a severe recession acknowledged by all, the bottoming rate of change in economic data and earnings revisions, unprecedented central bank support, and fiscal stimulus, that is likely to become more structural in nature, that leads to rising inflation expectations.
In addition to our more constructive outlook for the broader market, we’ve also tilted our recommendations towards higher beta, cyclical, and smaller capitalization stocks. While this is a change in our strategy from the past few years to be more defensive, it’s not an abandonment of high quality and/or growth stocks. For the past few years, we’ve recommended high quality growth, large cap, and defensive factors– classic “late cycle” winners. However, with the arrival of a recession, investors need to start thinking “early cycle,” and that means adding riskier stocks to one’s portfolio just as the economic and earnings data are collapsing.
Therefore, we will look to recommend more of these types of investments into what we think could be a 2-3 week correction in the overall market. More specifically, we think a barbell of high quality growth, i.e. “best of the best,” and lower quality cyclicals, “best of the worst,” continues to be the right strategy as we begin the uncertain recovery from the worst economic downturn in our lifetimes. While such a rotation is difficult to trust, while the data remains so weak and the outlook unclear, history suggests that’s exactly what investors need to contemplate and do at this stage of the cycle.
At the end of the day, this pandemic will go down as the exogenous shock that pushed a late-cycle economy into a recession that, we think, may have been inevitable anyway. As noted in prior Thoughts on the Market, the oil price shock may have been enough on its own to cause a recession, albeit not as severe. The silver lining is that the health crisis nature of the pandemic has allowed for record-breaking policy support that would never have been achieved without it. What this means for investors is that the sharpest recession in history may be followed by one of the steepest recoveries, making the economic data appear very much V-shaped in hindsight.
Finally, as discussed last week, this recession is centered more on the corporate rather than the consumer channel. With the stimulus directed right at the consumer and small businesses, this means investors should focus more on consumer cyclicals rather than capital spending beneficiaries, which may be slower to rebound. Some of our favorite areas for such a rebound include housing-related stocks, casinos, apparel manufacturers, as well as restaurants and retailers that can weather the storm.
