Key Points: Consumer stocks had a rough third quarter. Staples continued their downward slide. Discretionary stocks tend to outperform when staples are cratering, but that’s not been the case this time around. We’re mindful of the fact that spending seems to have slowed post-Labor Day, but we think the consumer will regain their footing. We built a new interactive model that projects income, spending, and savings through 2025. We stress test assumptions to determine where

Key Points: We’ve refined our models to incorporate new data on the distribution of income, spending, and savings. Overall, we think that the consumer will continue to power through, but we remain concerned about the low-end of the income distribution. The question we seek to address in this report though, is whether the market has already braced for that outcome. Stocks that cater to the low-end consumer have taken a beating – they’ve underperformed a

Key Points Investors seem to have accepted the notion that the consumer is resilient. Our sense though, is that this new-found optimism is tenuous, and if consumers tap the brakes for one reason or another, it won’t take long for skeptics to come out of the woodwork. This report seeks to address the most common concerns we are hearing from our clients. Q: Is excess savings still a thing? The concept is an abstraction that

Key Points Our firm’s mission is to connect top-down themes with bottoms-up analysis. This report is a bit different in than it fuses learnings across sectors. We analyzed seven companies that hail from six different sectors – media, industrials, leisure, apparel, staples, and financials. Our goal is to provide an alternate lens through which to view your core holdings. Starbucks and Sherwin Williams hail from two very different sectors, but they are two peas in

Key Points: Our mission is to surface compelling investment ideas for our clients by connecting top-down themes with bottom-up analytics. For the past year and a half, our top-down view of the US consumer has been more optimistic than most, and that’s underpinned our pro-cyclical bias for the stocks. We’ve been particularly keen on the leisure names that stood to benefit as spending shifted back to services. There’s still a long way to go before

Key Points: The Fed has raised rates 10 times and the consumer has yet to flinch. Real PCE has come off its post-COVID peak, but for the past 18 months it’s been growing at a ~2% pace, almost like clockwork. Rate increases have derailed the consumer in the past, but this time could be different. This report assesses whether the consumer will remain impervious to rate hikes, or if a shoe is about to drop.