Key Points: The housing market has been scraping along the bottom for some time. We would’ve expected the combination of lower rates and pent-up demand to have added some vigor to the market by now, but that’s not been the case. The question is where do we go from here? The path of rates is uncertain, so our objective is to frame the upside and downside scenarios. Overall, we think the risks are more skewed

Key Points: Up until recently, the AI debate has been centered on the tech sector, but some have recently begun to worry – er… panic – that AI will crush the consumer by weighing on aggregate demand. The arguments we’ve seen have been long on theory, but they’re devoid of math. This report offers a data-driven perspective on how AI is likely to affect aggregate demand. AI is likely to supercharge the shift from labor

Key Points: Consumer staples have had a strong start to the year, and we want to know if this is anything more than a dead cat bounce. In this report, we assess the appeal of consumer staples stocks from both a tactical and a fundamental perspective. After years of underperformance, valuations have compressed, but our analysis says that buying staples because they’re cheap isn’t a winning strategy. Figure 7 shows that investors are better off

Key Points: Companies tend to follow a predictable life cycle. The key is for them to act their age. We’ve seen far too many companies push for growth beyond their prime, and it rarely turns out well. There’s not a lot of green space left when it comes to the consumer arena, so it’s incumbent upon investors to make sure companies are aging gracefully. There’s no shame in getting old. Modest organic growth coupled with

Key Points: Consumer sentiment used to give us a read on the consumers’ psyche, but the metric has gone mad. The consumer needs a new therapist, and we’re eager to fill the void. This report is a psych evaluation of sorts – we use hard data to assess soft concepts like (i) the consumers’ sensitivity to price, (ii) their tendency to trade down, (iii) the willingness to spend from wealth, and (iv) their love affair

Key Points: Gen Z was born in the era of social media, came of age during a global pandemic and are launching their careers in the face of AI. It’s been well documented that their mental state has suffered as a result, but the aim of this report is to understand how their behavior will shape consumer spending in the months and years ahead. The first section details the Gen Z predicament. The second offers

Key Points: AI is the most dominant theme in the broader market, but we don’t think it’s driven a whole lot of alpha within the consumer universe just yet. Investors in consumer stocks are busy grappling with a potential soft patch and a subsequent recovery once the OBBB kicks in. When short-term volatility subsides, AI is likely to take center stage. The data center boom is great for chip makers, hyper-scalers and utilities, but it’s

Key Points: Global brands have shed $1.5Tr in relative market value over the past two years, and the effect isn’t limited to a single sector or a single country. We’re in a brand-emic, and we think it’s a better idea to invest in high-quality retailers than to hope for a turnaround in global brands. Retailers sell an array of brands, and that portfolio approach feels right at this point in time. So far, betting on

Key Points: The state of global brands has gone from bad to worse since we published Part I of this report a year ago. When it comes to stock price returns, brands had the upper hand for 25 years, but that advantage has been erased in just two years’ time. The aim of this report is threefold: (i) we seek to understand what’s ailing global brands, (ii) we assess whether branded companies or the retailers

Key Points: As investors get back to work, we thought it would be a good idea to explore a variety of subjects that clients are asking about. The topics range from macro to micro. Our macro work says there’s a soft patch ahead. Our micro work seeks to identify stocks that can work in that setting. Is the consumer strong or weak? This should be an easy question, but there’s room for debate. Consumer sentiment