November 2nd, 2024 | Presidential Elections, Job Openings, Job Report, The GDP, Retirement Plan Allocations, Chewy, Inc. (CHWY), Genuine Parts Company (CPG) & ASML Holding (ASML)

Don’t let the presidential election be your investment indicator

Presidential elections, especially this one, make people become very emotional, but don’t let that sway you away from investing. Looking back to 1950, the S&P 500 index gained 12.1% per year under Democrats and 7.1% under Republicans. So based on that tad bit of information, you would think that Democrats are better for the stock market than Republicans. If we dig deeper, we will see that Nixon had a major negative impact as he left office in August 1974. This was at the end of the 73-74 market crash when the S&P 500 was down 48%. The other Republican who had bad timing was George W. Bush, who was in office from 2001 to 2009. The S&P 500 dropped 38% in 2008 during the Great Recession and wiped out all the previous gains in the stock market while George W. Bush was in office. Looking more recently, there were investors who hated Trump as President and when he got into office, they sold their stocks missing an average annual return of 13.8% per year while he was President. The same thing happened in 2020 when Joe Biden became president, many Republicans thought the world was coming to an end and sold their stocks. The gain in the stock market under Joe Biden so far has been an 11.9% average annual return. The best advice I can give you is do not look at the President for any type of analysis on stocks, there are so many other factors at play rather than just who is in the White House. Instead, I recommend you look at the equities you are investing in and ask yourself how will they do going forward. Ultimately, businesses will find ways to succeed regardless who the President of the United States is.

 

Job openings continue to decline, is that a problem?

In the September Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTs), job openings declined to 7.44 million. This was below both the expectation of 8.0 million and the prior month’s reading of 7.9 million, which was revised lower by 179,000. This also marked the lowest level of job openings since January 2021. While this all sounds negative, there are still around 1.1 job openings per available worker. Also, this should be positive for inflationary concerns as the labor market is now more balanced when looking at the relationship between employers and employees. When employees have way more power like we saw over the last few years, it can have a big impact on wage inflation, which generally feeds through to overall inflation. While this isn’t an overly exciting report, I believe it still shows the labor market is in a good place. I think we could see job openings even fall a little further before it would become a concern.

 

Based on Friday’s job report, it looks like the economy is in trouble, but it’s not!

We have not seen numbers like these in the jobs report since 2020 with nonfarm payrolls only increasing by 12,000 for the month. The expectation was job creation of 100,000 jobs. Why the big miss? Right off the bat the strike of Boeing was a loss of an estimated 44,000 jobs and who can forget the two hurricanes we had in the south. It’s currently unclear how many jobs were lost during that timeframe due to those natural disasters. On the positive side, average hourly earnings did increase 0.4% for the month, which was above the estimate and the 12 month gain of 4% held steady. Revisions to August and September took out 112,000 jobs bringing the August number to only 78,000 and September’s gain declined down to 223,000 jobs. Temporary jobs are sometimes seen as underlying strength of a job market, but they have declined by 577,000 jobs since March 2022. We don’t feel this is the indicator that it used to be and we expect to see some reversal of temporary jobs for the holiday hiring season. This should start being reflected in the next month or two. The hurricanes in the south were a hit to leisure and hospitality as I’m sure many bars and restaurants were closed and the category saw drop of 4000 jobs in the month. Only two sectors in the job market saw increases which was healthcare as it added 52,000 jobs and government experienced an increase of 40,000 jobs. On the surface, the job report looks frightening, but we are out of hurricane season and heading into the holiday season. I think you’ll see a reversal in the job market in the next 2 to 3 jobs reports, which should be rather positive. Not as positive as it was during the expansion when we were recovering from Covid, but definitely better than a 12,000 job increase! There are two meetings left for the Federal Reserve and I think this job’s report would allow them to cut rates by a quarter point at the next meeting. For the last meeting of the year, we will wait for more economic data before predicting another rate.

 

Is the US economy still growing? The GDP shows it is.

While Q3 GDP, which stands for Gross Domestic Product, growth of 2.8% came in below the expectation of 3.1% and Q2’s reading of 3.0%, it is nowhere near signs of a recession. It also points to a US economy that remains in a good spot, even though it may be slowing. Remember slowing and declining are very different! The consumer continued to remain a bright spot in the economy as personal consumption expenditures added 2.46% to the headline number. This was thanks to growth of 3.7% as service spending growth was 2.6% and goods spending growth was 6.0%. Durable goods in particular were quite strong as they grew 8.1% in the quarter. Gross private investment had little impact on the headline number as it added just 0.07% to the headline number. The change in private inventories subtracted 0.17% and residential investment continued to be a problem as it fell 5.1% and subtracted 0.21% from the headline number. This was largely offset by growth in equipment spending of 11.1%. Government spending also was a large factor in the quarter as it added 0.85% to the headline number in large part due to growth of 14.9% for national defense spending. The only major category that subtracted from the headline number was trade as it had a negative impact of 0.56%. While exports were up 8.9% in the quarter, imports were up even more at 11.2%. Overall, I’d say this was a good report. I would warn people that I would not be surprised to see growth slow in the quarters ahead, but I’m still not looking for a recession in the near term.

 

Retirement Plan Allocations

The majority of working people have some type of retirement plan through their employer like a 401(k) or 403(b), but many of those people don’t pay enough attention to how those funds are invested.  Employer retirement plans are great because they automate your savings so every paycheck you have a portion that gets invested.  Over time this can build to a lot of money.  There are also no income limits you have to worry about like with IRA accounts and you get the tax benefit from making tax-deferred or Roth contributions.  However, in order to get the most out of the plan, you need to make sure you’re choosing the best investment options within that plan.  Every plan has a list of options called a fund lineup.  These may include stock funds, bonds funds, balanced funds, asset allocation funds, real estate funds, and cash funds, all of which will have different expected growth rates.  In many cases we see people choosing a random fund that they don’t understand or the default option which is usually a target date fund or stable value fund.  Target date funds generally have higher fees and an overconcentration of bonds which results in lower performance over time and a stable value fund is essentially cash which doesn’t grow.  It only takes a few minutes to update the investment options but taking the time to do it can result in thousands of extra dollars per month in retirement without actually contributing any more.  Once you choose your investments, you typically don’t need to adjust them too often, and in many cases, you can set up automatic rebalancing if you would like.  Making sure your retirement plan is set up correctly is a simple thing everyone can do which will have a huge impact on your financial future. 

 

Companies Discussed: Chewy, Inc. (CHWY), Genuine Parts Company (CPG) & ASML Holding (ASML)