“2018 Is Starting To Look Historic”: This Is The Worst Market Since Nixon’s Presidency
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 12/05/2018
Usually the excuse “nothing is working” is used by finance professionals when begging clients not to pull their money, desperate to explain woeful performance and when there are no other explanations left. Only in 2018, that excuse is actually spot on.
After another abysmal day for stocks, in which stocks suddenly “waterfalled” due to coordinated CTA liquidations once the S&P500 breached its 200DMA, which saw both the S&P and the Dow turn to just positive for the year, the broader market suffered one of its worst, if relatively muted, sessions in the past three years.
As a result, market statisticians continue to fall over each other to describe the pain being felt across asset classes. And while it is customary to use the phrase “since Lehman” when in need of a blanket synonym for “dreadful”, one analyst framed performance in 2018 differently: things haven’t been this bad since Richard Nixon’s presidency.
As Bloomberg notes, Ned Davis Research – which groups various asset classes into eight big buckets, from bonds to US and international stocks to commodities- finds that not a single one of them is on track to post a return this year of more than 5%, a phenomenon last observed in 1972, according to Ed Clissold, a strategist at the firm.
A similar analysis which we flagged two weeks ago, showed that the year-to-date return of the “best” performing asset between US and global equities, corporate bonds, Treasuries, gold and real cash, was barely in the green, and which showed that 2018 was shaping up as a disastrous year for cross-asset investors, in which not a single asset managed to generate positive returns!
This is how Bloomberg puts it:
Nothing’s working, not large or small-cap stocks in the U.S., not international or emerging equities, not Treasuries, investment-grade bonds, commodities or real estate. Most of them are down, and the ones that are up are doing so by percentages in the low single-digits.
The Rest…HERE
