Market Call: The Front-Cover Curse Already?

The front cover of this week's Barron's shows the horns of a bull apparently charging through a big white sheet of paper. Only the horns are visible in the picture. Usually a bull appearing on the front cover of a major financial magazine rings alarm bells for contrarians, who view such events as major sell signals. However, the editors of Barron's might have dodged this front-cover curse by hiding the bull's face.

To their credit, our friends at Barron's ran a remarkably prescient cover story on October 27, 2023 titled "It's Time to Stop Crying About Bonds and Buy Them Instead." That was truly among the great calls in financial market forecasting history. We started to like bonds at 4.25% last year before they spiked up to 5.00% near the end of October. We then thought that buyers would be attracted to such a high yield. They were and now the yield is back down to 4.09% (chart). We are neutral on bonds figuring they will trade between 3.75% and 4.25% for a while.

Semiconductor stocks took a breather on Friday as Nvidia dropped $51.41 (5.6%) to $875.28 (chart). That same day, our friend Cathy Wood told Bloomberg Businessweek Radio that semiconductors are due for a correction. We've previously observed that the industry is prone to double and triple ordering when there are shortages of popular chips. That sends their prices up. Then supply catches up with demand and prices come back down. Cathy observed that supply of the GPUs that run AI software programs may be increasing relative to demand.