The Peace Ratchet

Traders love to find patterns, and a major one is now quite clear.  The President or someone in his inner circle makes a positive comment – or one that can at least be interpreted positively – about an end to the war in the Persian Gulf that causes stocks to rally and bond yields and crude oil futures to fall.  That would indeed be good news.  Those moves, however, fail to fully reverse when nothing concrete is reported.  It’s a ratchet effect that has been beneficial to stockholders.

This is something we mentioned yesterday, alluding to the idea that we could use today’s activity as a case study, even if this is hardly a controlled experiment:

We have previously mentioned the sort of ratchet effect that accompanies positive rhetoric about the situation in the Persian Gulf.  Stocks and bonds rally (yields fall) and oil sinks whenever there is positive news about peace talks or a possible resolution to the war.  Yet the aftereffects have differed since the end of March.  When the talks lead nowhere, as they unfortunately have done multiple times, yields and oil return to their now-prevailing uptrends but stocks suffer no lasting ill effects. 

We’ll see if that continues in the coming days.  We have our usual hopes that today’s comments about the final stages of the war prove to be true, though we retain our now-well-earned skepticism that it will be the case immediately (especially when followed by comments like “we’ll see what happens” and “we’re going to do some things that are a little bit nasty, but hopefully that won’t happen”). It is more likely that this afternoon’s highly anticipated Nvidia (NVDA) earnings will set the tone for tomorrow’s trading. 

Interestingly, NVDA is not much of a catalyst in either direction.  Although the company once again beat consensus EPS and revenue expectations, raised guidance, and boosted its quarterly dividend from $0.01 to $0.25, the stock has meandered around unchanged levels – though with a slightly negative bias – since the numbers emerged after yesterday’s close.  It is quite possible that expectations for NVDA were so lofty that even raised guidance was not sufficient to excite investors, especially if they were hoping for something even greater than the company’s highly enviable 75% gross margin.  Or it might be that so many investors are currently so pleased with their positions that they require some really special news to get them to commit even more money to a full or overweight long position.

The other big earnings news this morning is not helping.  Walmart (WMT), a stock whose pre-earnings P/E of 49 was almost identical to NVDA’s despite a much slower growth rate, is down over 7% after offering downbeat guidance.  Once again, an EPS beat is a necessary condition for a post-earnings bump, but not a sufficient condition.  Good guidance is required. 

So, having mentioned two of the key factors influencing today’s equity market activity, we see that stocks have only given back a small fraction of yesterday’s gains this morning.  That is commensurate with the activity in crude futures, where they have only given back about 1/3 of yesterday’s dip.  We see something similar from 10-year yields, even though 2-year yields have recovered about 2/3 of yesterday’s drop.  The relative calm in oil and bonds could be attributed to reports that Iran is mulling the latest U.S. proposal.  Thus, today’s experiment is inconclusive at best.

Unfortunately, I haven’t kept a full count of all the various rallies that we could attribute to positive comments about peace, but compiling a list of such comments retrospectively has proven quite difficult.  I asked ChatGPT for some help, and it came up with at least nine since April 1.  Over that time, front-month Brent futures are up about 6% and 2- and 10-year yields are up about 30 basis points.  Meanwhile, the S&P 500 (SPX) and Nasdaq 100 (NDX) are up about 12.5% and 21.3% respectively over that span.  Solid earnings certainly have played an important role in stocks’ advance, but there is at least some circumstantial evidence for the ratchet effect.  Lots of peace proposals have unfortunately gone for naught (so far), and while bonds and oil might have reacted positively at their mention, the effects have not been lasting.  Stocks, however, like what they hear, whether true or not.