Our team at Canterbury produced a short, 15-minute video detailing the current state of the markets, the challenges facing the “conservative” investor, and how the Canterbury Portfolio Thermostat has navigated this difficult market environment so far this year. That video can be found below. We would recommend watching it.
The market index, the S&P 500, fell for the 7th consecutive week. The last time the index rose for the week was the last week of March. What does that mean? Well, not too much. There isn’t anything special about a week’s end, month’s end, or year’s end. Remember, markets do not understand the calendar.
What has been concerning is the number of outlier days. We have outlier days in just about every one of our market updates. We, at Canterbury, define an outlier day as any trading day beyond +/-1.50%. Outlier days, particularly in clusters are a characteristic of high volatility. High volatility is a bear market characteristic. After Tuesday, we will be one hundred days into 2022. Thirty-four of those days have been outliers. That is nearly double the number of outlier days that occurred in all of 2021.
Here are some statistics on outlier days. Looking at the S&P 500 and going back to the beginning of 1970 and including 2022 as year, there have been fifty-four total years of data. On average, each calendar year has averaged twenty-eight outlier days. We already mentioned that there has been thirty-four outlier days in just the first five months of this year. To put that into perspective, if 2022 ended today, it would rank 18th (out of 54) in terms of years with the most outlier days. So, just five months into the year, and 2022 already is in the upper third of years for the most outlier days. In the next seven months, who knows what will happen.
As for the calendar years that had the most outlier days, we do not have to look back that far. The year 2008 had the most outliers with ninety-eight. The year 2009 then had another seventy-six outliers. The bear market years prior to that, from 2000-2002, featured a total of two hundred nine outlier days. Outlier days are a bear market characteristic. No one knows what will happen for the remainder of 2022. We do, however, know that the broad markets are in a bear Market State.
This was a short market update. Markets continue to see outlier days, and defensive sectors like Energy and Utilities are leading. Meanwhile, Financials, Communications, and Consumer Discretionary round out the bottom of our sector rankings.
We would recommend watching the video highlighted at the start of this update. It gives a lot of helpful information on the state of the markets and why the traditional methods of managing risk have struggled during this year’s volatile market. The Canterbury Portfolio Thermostat has made the necessary adaptations to navigate the current market environment and will continue to make adjustments in the portfolio to maintain low volatility regardless of the market environment- bull or bear.
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