Mid-Year Strategy Outlook: Risk/Reward in Currency and Commodities

While the forecast for global bonds remains strong for the latter half of 2023, other asset classes could see bifurcated results across regions.

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Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Global Chief Economist. 

Andrew Sheets: And I'm Andrew Sheets, Morgan Stanley's Chief Cross-Asset Strategist. 

Seth Carpenter: And on part two of the special two-part episodes of the podcast, we're going to focus on Morgan Stanley's year ahead strategy Outlook. It's Friday, June 9th at 10 a.m. in New York. 

Andrew Sheets: And 3 p.m. in London. 

Seth Carpenter: All right, Andrew, in the first part of this two part special, you were grilling me on the economic outlook. You were taking me to task on all of our views, pointing out the different ways in which our clients, investors around the world were pushing back at different parts of our story. And now, it's payback time. Let me ask you, basically, what are we thinking as a research house in terms of where the best trades are likely to be for markets? We're looking for a soft landing in the U.S., but that doesn't mean a good outcome. So very weak economic activity and policy rates that are still restrictive. So what is that type of backdrop going to mean for one of the most closely watched assets in the world, the U.S. dollar? 

Andrew Sheets: Sure. So we do think that this backdrop, despite the fact that on the surface it looks decent, you have the U.S. and Europe avoiding recession. You have stronger growth in Asia, but you have a lot of uncertainties that are front loaded, and you still have slowing growth, you still have tight monetary policy. And we think this is going to still lead to a somewhat more difficult backdrop for markets over the next three months. And so I think in that context, the U.S. dollar looks quite attractive. The US dollar pays investors to hold it, it's a so-called positive carry currency against most major currencies and it's a diversifying currency, so as an asset it helps protect your portfolio. And I also think kind of within this context, if any economy is going to be able to handle higher interest rates, well, it might be the U.S. where a large share of consumer debt is fixed in a long term mortgage, which is very different from what we see in Australia or the UK or Sweden. So, we think that the dollar will do better, we think the dollar will do better in large part because of this attractiveness in a portfolio context that it offers investors a positive yield, while at the same time offering portfolio protection. 

Seth Carpenter: All right. So, if you're feeling reasonably upbeat about the dollar, presumably that spills over to dollar denominated assets. At the end of last year, the strategy team published a piece that was called ‘The Year of Yield.’ Are you still feeling that good about bonds in the United States in particular? Is it really fixed income securities that are your strongest call? 

Andrew Sheets: So, we still feel good about bonds, but I would say that the start of the year has been a pretty mixed picture. I think kind of relative to what we were expecting at the start of the year, the Fed and the ECB have raised rates more. Growth has been somewhat stronger, inflation has been somewhat higher. I would say none of those things are good for the bond market and yields instead of falling have kind of trended sideways. So they've done okay, but they've not done as well as we on the strategy side initially thought. But, you know, looking ahead, we think that the case for high quality fixed income is still quite good. We still think we see slowing in the second half of the year, which we think will be supportive for bonds. We think, certainly based in large part on the forecasts from you and the economics team, that the Fed and the ECB are largely done with their rate hikes, which we think will be supportive for bonds, and we think that inflation will moderate over the course of the year, which could also be supportive. So, we still think that when we look across global assets, while we see positive returns from most bond and equity markets, we think it's high grade bonds that generally offer the best risk adjusted return on our forecasts. 

Seth Carpenter: Okay, So risk adjusted return on bonds seem attractive to you. The natural follow up question to that is what about equities? Equities have actually performed reasonably well this year. On our first part of this podcast, I said that we are looking for a soft landing. What's the call on equities in the United States? Is this going to be a great second half of the year for equities? 

Andrew Sheets: So we think the equity picture is quite bifurcated. In some ways, I think it ties quite nicely to the bifurcated global economic picture that you and the economics team are talking about. Where growth in Asia is accelerating, this year, it's accelerating in the second half of the year, while growth in the U.S. and Europe is slowing. And it's that bifurcation that we think is mirrored in the equity market where we see quite good returns for Japanese, in emerging market equities, we see double digit total returns over the next 12 months. But we see a U.S. equity market that's broadly flat in 12 months time to where it is today. Now, what's driving that is we do think that the slowing growth we have this year and tighter monetary policy that will hit profitability. We think it's already been hitting profitability, we think it will continue to. And more tactically, we think that a lot of the big questions for the market are somewhat unresolved, but will be tested very soon. It's the next two quarters, which is the weakest stretch of U.S. GDP growth. It's the next two or three quarters that we think is the bulk of the risks to U.S. earnings. It's this year, it's not next year. And we think the next two quarters is where monetary policy relative to inflation tightens more in our forecast horizon rather than tightening more in the future. So, when we think about the resilience of stocks, especially U.S. stocks year-to-date, it's been very impressive, it's been stronger than we expected. But also, I think year- to-date, growth has been pretty solid. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet has declined to less than initially expected. You haven't necessarily, I think, gone through some of the tests that investors, ourselves, thought might present more headwinds to the equity market, and those tests are going to present themselves, we think, rather soon. 

Seth Carpenter: Okay. So you highlighted a dichotomy there, especially for the second half of the year. That lines up, I would say, with some of our economic outlook, other parts of the world maybe doing a little bit better. I started off very narrowly with just the dollar. Are there other currencies in other parts of the world where based on, either what's going on with their central banks or what we think is going to be going on with their economic performance. Other currencies that you think would be really good for investors to take a look at. 

Andrew Sheets: So if I think about where we're forecasting currency strength, we do have the dollar appreciating against most currencies. So I'd say that's a dominant story. We do have the Japanese Yen doing modestly better, and that's largely a function of valuations that look to us very low versus history adjusted for inflation. And we do think that you could have a somewhat uncommon occurrence where Japanese equities and the currency both do well. We think that's the case because the currency is so inexpensive relative to other currencies and because Japanese corporates are already expecting their currency to strengthen some that, that wouldn't necessarily be an additional hit to profitability. The Brazilian Real is another currency that we're predicting to be stronger relative to regional peers. We think both the Indian Rupee and the Indonesian Rupiah can also do well as those economies are relatively strong in a regional context, and in a global context, looking out over the next 12 months. 

Seth Carpenter: All right. That's super helpful. I guess the last question will come back to you with, again, trying to take this global perspective on things, is commodities. Commodities are traded around the world. They are often a reflection of economic performance in different regions. We've got two big economies that we think will be growing fairly slowly, but we've got China and the rest of Asia that we think will be doing well. What is the outlook for commodities, and maybe especially oil, as we look forward the next six months, the next year? 

Andrew Sheets: Yeah so, we're underweight commodities. And here I want to talk about the market from a so-called factor perspective. When we think about markets, I think it can be helpful to think about them in terms of fundamentals, carry and momentum, as different things that can drive the market and especially for commodities where those things all matter. So, you know, what do we mean by fundamentals? Well, we think as growth slows, that's a negative for commodity demand relative to supply, and so a forecast where slowing growth is still ahead of us and it's really front loaded in our forecast is somewhat of a headwind to commodities. If I think about carry, that's another way of saying what does it pay you to hold the commodity or what does it cost to hold the commodity? And given how high short term U.S. interest rates are, it's quite expensive to hold copper or gold rather than hold a Treasury bill which pays you interest. The commodity does not. So, we think that works against commodities some. And then there's also momentum you tend to see in commodities more so than other asset classes that they tend to trend. They tend to stay in the same direction that they're traveling, rather than reverse, and commodity prices have been heading down. And if we look at the data, we think that tends to be more of a negative thing than a positive thing. So broadly, we think commodities produce lower risk adjusted returns than other assets. We do see oil prices modestly higher by the middle of 2024. We see Brent at about 78. So that's a little bit higher from current levels. But I think it's an asset class where after some very good returns in the recent past, is one where the risk reward looks less favorable relative to some other things. 

Seth Carpenter: All right, I'm going to call it there. Andrew, I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk, and let me throw a bunch of questions at you. 

Andrew Sheets: Seth, great speaking with you. 

Seth Carpenter: And thanks to everyone else for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or a colleague today.