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.

Summary Points: We’ve been tracking a dozen headwinds and tailwinds that’ve been acting upon the consumer. The math has been telling us that they have the wherewithal to keep spending. We don’t see clear signs of a retrenchment, and even the soft patch we’ve been envisioning has yet to materialize. Now that we’re halfway through 2023, it’s a good idea to extend our analysis to incorporate 2024 and beyond. We built a line-by-line model that

Key Points: Retail stocks have had a rough couple of months. Many of them have pointed to macro headwinds as a reason for lackluster results, but it’s hard to reconcile that with PCE that’s been growing at a 7% clip. This report seeks to understand whether the headwinds retailers have been flagging are macro or micro in nature. We also made a shopping list of sorts to help identify attractive retail stocks. Prior to the

Key Points: When it comes to consumer spending, we’ve been vocal in our concern for the low-end. Lately, however, we’ve been getting questions about the high-end consumer, and clients are beginning to wonder if they might also come under pressure. This report seeks to tackle that question. In the process, we offer a perspective on both the global luxury market and the corresponding stocks. Categories that over-index to the high-end are a blend of goods

Key Points: In a recent report we assessed whether the consumer was hitting a soft patch or a wall. We concluded that they are more likely to bend than break. It’s rare for a recession to arise when real PCE is positive, but even a slowdown in spending can create risk to earnings. This report introduces a framework that can help identify stocks with the most – and least – earnings risk. Companies in the