Reflecting on the past month, Jeremy Richardson explores:
- Equity market trends
- Interest rate cut expectations
- A focus back onto company fundamentals
Watch time: 2 minutes 50 seconds
View transcript
Hello, this is Jeremy Richardson from the RBC Global Equity Team here with another update.
Now, it's been a strong start to the equity markets in 2024. End of last year, there was a big debate about whether or not the left behind stocks, the smaller and mid-sized companies, would be able to lead the market forward as we entered the new calendar year. That sign of broadening was actually taken as a positive trend, but so far in January it's been the larger companies that are continuing to hold their position and actually lead the market higher.
In the meantime, a debate is continuing between the policymakers, on the one hand, who are expecting around about three interest rate cuts for 2024 and the rest of the market, which expects that there's going to be more than that, potentially even double that. Now, this debate is yet to be resolved, and there is some possibility that as the continued positive momentum of the US economy is confirmed, that actually the need for interest rate cuts gets diminished because the economic strength is so robust.
So, there's a little bit of an iterative back and forth debate going on that has the potential to cause some volatility as we head through into the early part of 2024, as this topic gets resolved. But in the meantime, it feels somewhat reassuring to report that the momentum seems to be going back onto company fundamentals. It feels, when I look at some of the dynamics of the market, that companies results are once again informing share price developments in a way that perhaps they haven't been over the course of the last two years or so, when actually the inflation or the macroeconomic data was really sort of dominating the headlines. That feels less the case as we speak here today, although there's still a lot of interest in what the companies are saying and what their guidance may be for 2024.
So far, it looks as though investors are broadly getting results as they would expect. But as I sit here and have this conversation with you now, I'm very conscious of the fact that we're only less than half the way through the current earnings season, so we'll wait to see how the rest of that evolves. But actually, this move back away from the macro towards the fundamentals is a particularly encouraging trend that bottom-up investors like ourselves will heartily welcome and hope continues for the rest of this calendar year.
I hope that's been of interest, and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
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