저자: 짐크레이머 · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 인플레이션 정점을 기다리지 말고 지금 주식을 매수해야 한다는 주장. [시장 상황 및 기본 논거] - 다우·나스닥 신고가 흐름이 펀더멘털로 정당화되는지가 핵심 질문이며, 경제 문제가 완화되고 있다면 상승은 정당하다는 입장. - 시장이 과매수 상태일 수 있어 추가 하락 가능성은 있으나, 10월 말부터 시작되는 계절적 강세기(최근 23년간 가장 강한 시기)를 감안해 주식 보유 또는 약세 시 매수를 권고. [은행·소비자] - 미국 소비자 대차대조표가 역사상 최고 수준이며 신용점수도 매우 높음. 소기업 대출 재확대로 은행 수익성 개선, 연체율 상승 없음. 은행 산업 건전성은 과거 40년 중 최고라고 평가. [운송] - 유니온퍼시픽 실적 호조 및 신고가. 바이든 행정부의 항만 혼잡 해소 계획 이후 공급망 개선이 빠르게 진행 중이며 문제 해결 여지가 크다고 봄. [실적 시즌·가격 전가력] - P&G 등 가격 전가력이 있는 기업은 4% 성장. 코스트코·홈디포·월마트·아마존·로우스는 가격 억제 노력. 가격 전가력 있는 기업은 좋은 주식, 없는 기업은 저가 매수 기회. [원유·천연가스] - 원유 84달러 부근 정점 전망이 유지되며, 천연가스 충분으로 에너지 가격 급등은 제한적. 유가·가스 하락 시 증시 긍정적이라는 시각. 퍼미안 생산 회복 및 생산업체 증산 기대. 북동부는 송유관 부족으로 에너지 가격 완화가 어려움. [화학·철강·반도체] - 다우케미칼 실적 호조로 공급 타이트 지속, 그러나 신규 설비 증설로 2022년 가격 하락 전망. PPG 원재료 비용 부담 지속에도 주가 3% 상승 → 시장은 핵심 화학 상품 가격 정점을 가리킨다고 해석. - 뉴코어 실적 미스로 철강 사이클 정점 우려 제기되나 크레이머는 기회로 봄(철강 정점 여부는 불확실하다고 언급). - 마이크론 하락, 램리서치·ASML 실적 양호. 반도체 부족이 2023년까지 갈 것이라는 전망에 의문 제기(장비 투자가 활발하지 않음 → 이중 주문 가능성). 포드는 공급망 압박 완화 기대로 주가 3% 상승, 다만 단기 급등에 따른 주의 권고. [노동력·기타] - 노동 부족은 가장 답하기 어려운 인플레이션 요인. 코로나 사망자·장기 코로나·미접종자로 인한 인력 감소 지속. 전쟁 이후와 유사하게 삶의 재평가 후 노동 참여가 회복되고 1950년대처럼 안정될 것으로 예상. - 스냅은 애플 개인정보 규제로 타겟 광고 효율 하락, 디플레이션 요인으로 지목. [결론] - 인플레이션 퍼즐이 완전히 맞춰질 때까지 기다리면 너무 늦다. 큰손들이 이미 매수 중이므로 지금 주식 매수를 권고. [리스크] - 노동 부족 해소 불확실성, 반도체 공급 과잉 가능성, 과매수 조정 가능성 언급.
다듬은 글
Now I'm just trying to make sense of this here, because I want to make you some money. My job is to entertain, educate, and teach. Let me put this whole thing together.
Listen to the bears, right? We're in the grip of what, yes, persistent, pernicious inflation that is certain to wreck the economy, as well as your pension, your payroll, anything. And don't even get me started on the budget deficit. They know nothing yet. But there's a conundrum here. The averages are holding up pretty darn well, aren't they? The Dow is just six points away from making a new high. Yesterday it advanced 0.3% and hit a new intraday high, and the Nasdaq gained 0.62%. I'd bet you hear this from the commentators too: this market's endless advance keeps posing a powerful question, doesn't it? What happens if the move turns out to be justified by the fundamentals? As opposed to what everybody comes on and says, which is that it's not justified. What happens if the woes that plague the economy are easing? What if things are getting better?
Well, I suspect we're overbought. I know that from the S&P oscillator I follow, and we could always have another leg down. But I think there could be a buying opportunity that you should pounce on. Remember, seven to ten days from now begins the most seasonally strong period of the year, which has been the case for the last 23 years. So I would hold on to stocks, or pounce on weakness, as we are doing for our new investment club. Given our ubiquitous QR code, it's pretty darn easy to sign up. The QR code is that thing that looks like this. Is that good? I mean, doesn't it look like that to me? It does. I hold my camera up the wrong way to it, so, you know, get a little lesson there.
All right, let's synthesize what we've been hearing from the CEOs of major companies, since I'm on every earnings call. There it is. See, I'm on every single earnings call, and my life is terrible, and I'm driving my wife crazy. Here we go. Here are some clues I'm getting that you're not hearing, because people are looking at that top-down stuff and it doesn't have the real, real deal.
Why don't we start with the bank CEOs. Given where we were 20 months ago, the American consumer is now in remarkable shape. Individual balance sheets have gotten so strong that people don't need as many loans. By the way, these are the best balance sheets in the history of our country. And when they do need money, their credit scores are absurdly high. What does that mean? It means they can borrow money and create a small business, and there's an astounding resurgence in small business, which gives banks the opportunity to turn a profit by lending money in a prudent way. There's no spike up in delinquencies. Spike down, if anything. Having studied the banks for the last 40 years, I can tell you these institutions are indeed in the best shape I've ever seen them in. When the banking system is strong, that's very good news for the economy.
The second group is the transports. Have you seen the transports? Have you been following the action there? My most favorite group to look at. For example, if you listened to this morning's conference call from Union Pacific, Lance Fritz... we had them all, not that long ago, and he was kind of bearish. Remember, I was trying to get him to be positive. You know the port situation has been improving ever since President Biden got involved with his 24/7 plan to ease the congestion, and that's a big reason why Union Pacific, a very big position by the way in my Charitable Trust that you can follow by joining the investment club, rallied to an all-time high today. When it comes to fixing the supply chain, I think there's a surprising amount of low-hanging fruit. That problem is a lot less intractable than many people seem to assume. Just gotta shine a light on it.
Third, this earnings season is where we separate the wheat from the chaff. There are truly great companies, like Procter & Gamble. They can cope with higher costs by raising prices to pass them on to the consumer, which they haven't even done yet, and they've got 4% growth. Imagine what their quarters will be like next time. Meanwhile, Costco, Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon, and Lowe's have used their massive scale to keep prices relatively contained, tamping down on inflation where they can. They've done a good job. It's not perfect, but the outside pain from higher prices seems to be weighing, at least on the margin, even as inflation is certainly upon us. Some companies have pricing power, others don't. The ones with pricing power give you great stocks. The ones without pricing power give you great bargains on their products.
Fourth, more than a handful of chartists I've been studying told us that oil would peak at or below $84. That's been the line, the same for us on the fundamental side. Well, it seems clearer that unless we're heading to another ice age, we have enough natural gas to keep energy prices from skyrocketing. So what happens to the stock market if oil and gas start coming down? Have you ever heard anyone even say that? It would be positive on the oil side. The United States is still a long way from producing what we did before the pandemic, but the Permian Basin is no longer falling behind. The private producers are gearing up aggressively. I think it's only a matter of time before we see the same story in the rest of the country. I did not feel that way, but I'm seeing the Permian going up. So our producers are sitting on so much product they could make fortunes at these levels. They're not going to leave it in the ground, even as their discipline to date has been integral to the price rise of crude. That's a new development. There's one exception: the Northeast won't get any break on energy prices. That has more to do with the lack of pipeline capacity, because people don't want pipelines under their land.
Fifth, let's talk chemicals. This morning Dow Chemical, a company I like very much, put up a terrific set of numbers that indicated supply is still very tight and pricing is going up. I'd been worried that the two key building blocks, polyethylene and polyurethane, might tip into equilibrium and then oversupply, because new capacity is being added. But that sure isn't the case right now. I thought Wall Street would like the quarter. Nope. The stock got hit. The stock told you capacity is coming. At the same time, PPG, the coatings company that's a big consumer of commodity chemicals, reported, and I thought it was a pretty negative number. It said raw costs remain a persistent, bad problem. And what happens? PPG rallies nearly 3%. You don't need to be a rocket scientist or a chemist to figure out that the market is speaking here, and it's calling a top in these key commodity chemicals. The market sees lots of new plants coming online, and that means prices should come back down in 2022. Most of the commentators who talk about inflation are big-picture people. They look at giant aggregate numbers, usually government statistics. They're allergic to the kind of granularity I bring to you. I eat granularity for breakfast, and breakfast tastes bad, like those lousy rice cakes I eat. But it's good for the rest of us.
How about steel? I like Nucor, the biggest and best deal maker. But there are many bears prowling around Nucor and its steel compadres, arguing they've seen peak pricing. We're going to talk about that later, with Whirlpool. Nucor did miss estimates, and those estimates were set not that long ago. That gave the bears the evidence they needed to call a top, and it's why the stock got slammed. We told club members we don't think that. We think it's an opportunity. But I see when people say the steel cycle has run its course because Nucor misses its numbers. So let's say there is a peak in chemicals. I think there may be. Let's say there's a peak in steel. I don't think so, but you know what, the market says I'm wrong.
All right, one more, the biggest of all: the semiconductor shortage, total horror show, right? How have the memory makers been doing? Micron cascading lower. Meanwhile, you listen to the semiconductor capital equipment makers, as I did on their conference calls. It sure doesn't sound like the shortage is going to last forever. Neither Lam Research nor ASML gave you a sense that businesses are on fire. I was surprised at that. In fact, Lam embraced the midpoint of pretty much every range of estimates. I was hoping to come in and tell you to buy that one. So when you hear people predicting that the chip shortage should last well into 2023, ask yourselves why the chipmakers aren't buying new equipment like crazy to take advantage of that. I get the feeling there's been a lot of double ordering in the system, all the way down the food chain, and that's why capital expenditures aren't going off the charts. The industry seems to expect a surfeit of semiconductors coming all over the place, not just in the cheapest commodity chips like DRAMs or flash. Those are Micron's bread and butter. Yet price increases are either becoming baked in or not coming through at all.
So again, like I did with the commodity chemicals going into PPG, let's look at it another way. Look at Ford Motor. You might be wondering how Ford's stock could rally 3% today, only two bucks from where it was 10 years ago, even though it's a huge buyer of all the commodities I mentioned and totally hostage to the chip shortage. I think the rally in Ford stock says the tyranny of the supply chain may be coming to an end, even as I told members of the investment club to be careful, because it's been up big two straight days.
That said, there's one inflationary item I don't have an answer for, and that's the labor shortage. We're beginning to see more people return to the workforce with these vaccine requirements. But the profound loss of 700,000 people in our great country, coupled with the victims of long COVID and the remaining unvaccinated, gives you plenty of reasons not to go back to the office. At the same time, there's this widespread reassessment of life itself. You know what, I'm willing to get existential. Why? Because we had the same thing happen after the Civil War, after World War I and World War II, where we had major labor shortages and a lot of plain old partying. It's happening again as the COVID era winds down. People are trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They will figure it out, and when they do, I think things will end fine, the way they did in the 1950s.
Of course, not all deflation is good deflation. Look at Snap, down more than 20% in after-hours trading, because Apple's new privacy rules make its targeted advertising a lot less precise and therefore less valuable. Talk to the owners of Snap about that. However, with the exception of labor, there are suddenly a lot of bullish pieces in the inflation puzzle that I want you to see. If you wait for these prices to finally come down, if you wait for the mosaic or the jigsaw puzzle to be completely finished, you'll end up waiting too long.
Let me give you the bottom line. Jumping the gun is a mistake in almost every single human endeavor, except for the stock market. The averages have been jumping the gun on peak inflation for the last 10 days, because the big guys cannot afford to wait to get in. Soon, neither can you.
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