In 2023, we witnessed a series of dramatic changes in global capital markets. The United States experienced the banking crisis, and the continued increasing interest rates cumulatively by 100 basis points of the whole year. However, the Nasdaq index surged by an impressive 43.42%, setting a new record in the history. What new trends will the global capital markets present in 2024? Would the U.S. stock market maintain its upward momentum? Three economists from renowned institutions provide their interpretations for us.
The IPO market may recover sharply in 2024
SFC Markets and Finance: The Nasdaq is known for technology listings, but in 2023 it is a relatively slow year for IPO listings, do you think the trend will continue to 2024?
Phil Mackintosh: I don't think so. If you even look at some more granular like month-by-month listings day, you're starting to see companies coming into the market. Some really big listings came through late last year. If you talk to the private equity businesses, there's a lot of investments that they've been holding on for longer than they normally want to. So there's a good pipeline of IPOs ready to come to market people that need some equity market cash. We've got markets close to all-time high, so valuations are holding it back,and volatility is lower. So I think the environment is pretty constructive for the IPO market to come back and be a bit stronger than, hopefully a lot stronger than last year.
SFC Markets and Finance: What reasons do you think that cause 2023 was not a very good year for IPOs?
Phil Mackintosh: I think it's uncertainty, generally. If you look at the bond market with interest rates getting to their peaks, but no one was really sure whether the Fed was completely finished or about to cut. And all of the indicators about consumer spending may be running out of money. There was a lot of uncertainty that we might have a recession. And so that I think it made a lot of companies nervous about coming into the market IPO, if the very next year they'd have a recession to deal with. As the soft landing is more and more likely, I think that's, again, even more constructive to get companies into public markets, which is great for investors, because it offers more growth companies for us to buy and hold on and participate in their growth as well.
Prefer bonds over equity this year
SFC Markets and Finance: You said you prefer bonds to equities in an interview. Why bonds will be more attractive?
Arend Kapteyn: Mainly because we're going to start to reverse the tightening cycle. In level terms, yields are not historically high, but they're certainly back to where they were 15, 20 years ago. The central banks generally perceive themselves to be well above neutral levels, so as they start to go back towards neutral, the bond yields will decline, and bond prices will rally. As an entry point, the market is already responding to that. But I think that is sort of the most straightforward thing this year, is that when inflation comes down, bonds do well. That's the simplest thing to do this year. If you do anything, that's what you want to do.
And equity, I think it is difficult, in part because risk premia are so compressed. If you go back in history, and you look at how do equity markets perform in a year when credit spreads are this low, when volatility measures are this low, they generally don't do so well. So equity markets do well when your starting point is very bad and then there's something to recover from. But the starting point in this case, is that things are not so bad, and then it's difficult to sort of do well. So for that reason we prefer this year bonds over equity. But that's really sort of a recommendation for 2024. It's not a medium-term recommendation. It's just the tactical recommendation.
SFC Markets and Finance: The Samp;P 500 performed very well in the past two months. How do you think about the U.S. stock market this year?
Arend Kapteyn: The Samp;P 500 is really split between the Magnificent Seven, the big tech stocks, and everything else. And the everything else is not doing so well. So the earnings for the non tech sector we think is going to be flat in the first quarter. It's severely underperformed tech stocks in the fourth quarter. So the Samp;P is this average of these two different parts of the economy. Now looking at what's going to happen this year, we still think the Samp;P will go up despite the recession, but not by very much. So what we think is going to happen, if you listen to our equity strategist, is that the market will for now, continue to go up.
If the recession happens, there would be a drawdown. This always happens in recessions. And then there would be a quick recovery if the Fed starts cutting. And then by the end of the year, you're back above where you started. If there were no recession, we'd be a lot higher than what we're forecasting.
Defensive sectors will be a general recommendation
SFC Markets and Finance: Which sectors do you prefer?
Arend Kapteyn: So right now because we're worried about that recession, we prefer to be in defensive sectors or high-quality sectors, which means firms that have a resilience to weaker demand, so that are not so sensitive to weaker demand. So in general, we like defensives versus cyclicals, healthcare stocks, utilities, things like that. That's sort of a general recommendation, not just for the U.S. but also for Europe. If you're looking at it globally, we're actually neutral on tech globally. But we like North Asia tech, we like China internet as we spoke about.
SFC Markets and Finance: If the Fed begins to cut rates, will the emerging market have more opportunities?
Arend Kapteyn: I think the local fixed income, which is our favorite sector in emerging markets. So the way I'd frame that is emerging markets tightened more than develop markets and they did it earlier, and we're at higher levels historically than developed markets. Inflation is falling faster in emerging markets, which is interesting. So everyone had an inflation shock, but it's actually correcting faster in emerging markets than developed markets. What that means is that the central banks reverse those level of interest rates actually faster than the developed markets. So that is a sector that's really going to outperform, local fixed income, bond markets, we think is sort of the safest place to be in emerging markets.
Equity, much more tricky. So emerging market equity identified a few sectors, but if you take the entire asset class, when do emerging market equities outperform? It's when commodity prices go up. They're not going up. It's when credit spreads can compress, they're already very low. It's when growth differentials improve, yes, that's going to happen, but it's not that straightforward. And if the Samp;P does have a drawdown, so a correction because of a recession, emerging markets are going to go down more than the Samp;P. So that's the problem for equity. If you look at currencies, they actually look pretty expensive. So again, we'd prefer to stay clear of those for now.
This year's elections could greatly impact markets
SFC Markets and Finance: To what extent will the geopolitical conflicts affect the market?
Arend Kapteyn: It's not having much of an impact. There's a conflict in Russia, Ukraine, obviously, there's a conflict in the Middle East. That did not have a big impact even on oil markets, which is interesting. So it's always a risk, I think oil prices going up is definitely one of the risks to our forecasts.
I think, as a political risk, what's coming into focus is much more on some of the elections that we have this year. So, there's a whole range of countries with important elections, the most important one being the U.S. . The U.S. election later this year is becoming a major debating point whether or not we get a second Trump presidency. I think that would have a big impact potentially on markets.
SFC Markets and Finance: Will these elections cause Black Swan?
Arend Kapteyn: On one level, there's a lot of conventional wisdom around U.S. election, where people say that if Trump wins, then it's good for equity and bad for bond markets. It's good for equity, because people think they're gonna get a repeat of the last time, where you get deregulation, lower taxes, things like that. But it's bad for bond markets because the deficits don't come down. But that's sort of a little bit simplistic. Because if you go back to 2016, when Trump was elected the first time, we didn't actually know at that time how aggressive he was going to be on tariffs. So I think the way his potential victory would be interpreted this time could well be different from last time when the markets rallied. So I think we have to wait and see. People are definitely nervous. There's a lot of conversation about what that would really mean. But that is probably the biggest political events at least that the market is going to try to trade this year.
There are lots of uncertainties in global economy
SFC Markets and Finance: People are calling 2024 the super election year. How will these elections, especially the US presidential election, influence the world?
Brian Coulton: Also something people are gonna be watching very closely. There's lots of different aspects of this. Obviously, under the question that we receive a lot from investors, if there was a victory from President Trump, what would that mean for US policy? And how would that affect the rest of the world? Obviously, his first term, there were some significant tariffs were placed on China, which have not been removed. There were lots of threats of tariffs on other countries, including Mexico, for instance. So, that is one concern that we see more protectionist policies coming.
I think one issue that we will be watching quite closely is one development that you saw under President Trump's first term, before the pandemic, was a very sharp slowdown in US net immigration. Now the US labor market at the moment is tight, but things kind of eased a bit on the supply side of the US labor market in 2023 because we saw a big recovery in net immigration. So we didn't really have an improvement in labor force participation, the share of people over 16 that were working in the economy didn't really move up very much. That sort of ratted down after the pandemic is not really recovered. But there was an improvement in immigration. And that was a factor that was helping employment growth and helping GDP, and preventing wage growth rising much more rapidly. If we were to see a sharp slowdown in immigration, that could mean that the US labor market conditions are tightened even further, which will be a problem for the Fed.
SFC Markets and Finance: Will these elections be the biggest uncertainty in 2024?
Brian Coulton: Unfortunately, there's lots of uncertainties this year,with conflicts going on in various parts of the world.So I thinkthere are lots of key risks of which that is one. Obviously, U.S.economic policy is hugely important to the rest of the world. So clearly it will be very much in focus. But China's growth outlook,the prospects for the European economy,the weakness in Germany's economy,the global implications of the rise interest rates in the Bank of Japan,so there are lots of issues, lots of uncertainties out there, which adds another level of complexity.
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