Key Points: Over the past year, the market was convinced that higher rates would derail the consumer, but that’s not what happened. The debate is likely to get turned on its head this year – some are suggesting that falling rates will stimulate consumption, but we’re not taking the bait just yet.
Key Points: We’ve been bullish on the consumer for the past two years and at the same time, we’ve been skeptical that the low-end would be able to keep up. Stocks that cater to the low-end have indeed underperformed, and our sense is that investors have written the cohort off as a problem child. We’re starting to see reasons for optimism. Our original concern was that the low-end ran through “excess savings”, but that’s one
Key Points: The auto industry missed out on selling 9 million units over the past few years. The question we have is whether that pent-up demand will ultimately surface, or remain latent. This report assesses demand trends, supply dynamics, and credit conditions with the aim of understanding where the auto cycle is headed. We suspect that usage will factor into the replacement cycle. Miles driven are still (5)% below normal, and by our count, the
Key Points: The consumer has stood strong in the face of meaningful headwinds, and we think they’ll continue to hold up well in 2024. The uptick in credit card delinquencies seems to run counter to our thesis, so the aim of this report is to understand why delinquencies are moving in the wrong direction, and what that might mean for PCE in the year ahead. A little over a year ago, credit card balances eclipsed
Key Points: The housing market is typically the Fed’s most reliable transmission mechanism, and while housing activity has slowed markedly, the tack-on effects have yet to sink the economy or the consumer. Housing is a complex subject, and there’s no shortage of data to analyze. We focus our energies in this report on demographics, the normalization of pandemic effects, spending on home improvement, and the labor market. Housing turnover has reacted to rate hikes much
Key Points: We’ve been bullish on the consumer and that’s created a bias for discretionary stocks over staples. Staples, though, have lagged the market by ~20% over the past year, and the aim of this report is to determine whether it’s time to buy this beaten-down group or if we should continue to tread lightly. The decision to own consumer staples stocks cannot be made in a vacuum. That’s because staples often act more like
In issue #2 we analyze the effect rising energy prices may have on consumption. One month ago, energy prices would’ve been a 75 basis-point “good guy” for the consumer. Now it’s more of a marginal friend. We measure inflation by income cohort, also focus on credit card delinquency trends and the profile of housing inventory.
In Issue #1 we dig into macro issues like tax refunds, capital gains, the wealth effect, credit card application and rejection rates. We also look at excess savings for the bottom 40% of income, and the top 20%. We offered up a new analysis on Lululemon that maps store productivity versus inventory productivity to complement the work we recently did on Nike.