What Goes Up Bloomberg

Artificial intelligence is all the rage on Wall Street. Some strategists see AI trends driving further gains for stocks as others point to how big banks are beginning to use it to automate some jobs. MarketReader, founded by Jens Nordvig, is leveraging AI to analyze US equity market trends and help predict why a stock might be moving a certain way. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he sees AI helping investors digest information at a faster pace.

“What’s happened this year is that actually applying AI has become so much easier than it was six months ago.” Nordvig says. “Our original plan was more focused on structural modeling, traditional fundamental modeling. But we’ve really seen how this actually allows us to do stuff that we just can’t do with traditional models.”
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Investing in farmland has historically offered an attractive and stable source of returns, yet it’s not an easy asset class for most investors to access. Carter Malloy founded a platform called AcreTrader in an effort to make it easier to purchase fractional ownership of a farm. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss some of the benefits and risks of this type of farmland investing. “You don’t have big, huge up years and huge down years that you do across so many other mainstream asset classes,” Malloy says. “So the consistency of the returns and that relative lack of volatility—in investor speak, the Sharpe ratio—of farmland can be very, very attractive.”
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A lot of investors are sitting on piles of cash. In fact, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management estimates its clients are more overweight with cash now than they’ve been in a decade. 

But attractive buying opportunities could be lurking, including in fixed income, US mid-cap stocks and European equities, according to Chief Investment Strategist Tom Kennedy. 

He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss corners of the market—in the US and abroad—that look enticing. He also talks about how Europe managed to avoid a recession, and why the US Federal Reserve is likely done with its hiking campaign, among other things. 

“Cash very rarely outperforms, and it takes a long time for rates to go up, but they can come down really fast,” he said. “The last seven business cycles, when you have the last rate hike from the Fed, in the two years after that, cash tends to underperform duration assets.”
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As the US government debt-ceiling standoff heats up and markets grow more volatile, veteran Loomis Sayles & Co. portfolio manager Elaine Stokes has some advice for investors in the corporate-bond market: Get ready to buy.

Stokes joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the opportunities the drama in Washington may create, the potential for a credit crunch stemming from regional-bank turmoil, and how high-yield bonds may not be as risky as they seem, given recession concerns.  “The volatility that I think we’re going to have over the next couple weeks is going to be the opportunity. So take advantage of that opportunity to buy a little further out the curve, to buy low dollar-price bonds, to build in real return for a long time,” she said on the podcast. With regard to high-yield bonds, she added: “I don’t believe that this time around it’s going to be the traditional high-yield market that’s going to see the big wave of defaults. That is going to happen in either the bank-loan market or the private market. That’s where the weaker issuance has come, the lower-quality issuance. So the traditional high-yield market is actually setting up to look pretty attractive.”
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Brace for a US recession to start next quarter and worsen at the end of the year, and don’t bet on the Federal Reserve to react immediately to prop up growth. That’s according to Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co. She joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her appraisal of the economy, and discuss what to expect for the rest of 2023.“It’s likely to be kind of more of a slow drag in terms of economic activity, just given that we also don’t think the Fed’s going to be riding to the rescue as soon as you do see that weakness,” she said on the podcast. “The nature of the inflation that we’re seeing right now, we think that the Fed’s actually going to be pretty reluctant to ease policy even as the economy is entering a recession.”
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While the drama surrounding regional US banks has largely subsided following the failure of three lenders in March, that doesn’t mean the ripple effects of Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes are over. This is according to Que Nguyen, chief investment officer of equities at Research Affiliates, who joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her outlook on markets and talk about why she doesn’t foresee a soft landing for the economy.“When the Fed raises rates and it breaks something, it rarely happens that it’s a very small break,” she says. “Usually it’s a very big break. And so while I’d never thought that we would get to a great-financial-crisis level of breakdown, I do believe—and I did believe, and I still believe—that there would be more things that break. Whether that continued to be in the small regional banks or whether that bled over to something else such as real estate lending, private credit—definitely those dangers still remain out there.”
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