The U.S. stock market has been doing surprisingly well so far in 2023 despite evidence of slowing economic growth, uncertainty about the direction of the Federal Reserveās monetary policy, troubles in the regional-banking sector, and the politics of the debt ceiling in Congress.
The S&P 500
SPX,
has advanced 7% year-to-date, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
has recovered 17.9% so far this year and the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
has shed 0.4%, according to FactSet data.Ā
So why has the stock market failed to drop on bad news?
Tom Essaye, founder of Sevens Report Research, said negative expectations from both institutional and retail investors were āinadvertently supporting stocksā as the marketās failure to decline on bad news prompts buying by investors who are underweight equities.
āThat dynamic has largely continued and itās one of the biggest reasons stocks seemingly canāt drop on negative news,ā he wrote in a Tuesday note.Ā
The dynamic Essaye described is a market concept called the āpain tradeā which sometimes occurs when a majority of market participants have positioned themselves in a particular direction, but an unexpected market reversal causes significant losses for those who are caught on the wrong side.
The concept is based on the idea that the stock market has a higher probability of moving in the opposite direction to a prevailing consensus and a tendency to extract the maximum pain from as many investors as possible.
See: Why bears canāt keep the stock market down despite bad news
The S&P 500 index fell to a two year low in October 2022 as investors worried about elevated inflation and aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. However, even though the broad market index has recovered some ground in 2023 as inflation has eased and the Fed refrained from raising interest rates further in May, the stock market still sees other persistent worries in the rearview mirror.
Over the past year, institutional investors have removed nearly $340 billion in assets from the stock market, while individual investors have pulled nearly $30 billion, according to the S&P Global Market Intelligence. Meanwhile, money market assets have soared to a record high of $5.3 trillion, according to data from the Investment Company Institute.Ā
Meanwhile, only about one-third of actively-managed mutual funds outperformed the large-cap S&P 500 during the first quarter of 2023, said Essaye, citing data from the Bank of America.
The recovery in the S&P 500 has left investors and many active managers āunderinvested and underperformingā the S&P 500, wrote Essaye.Ā
In this case, the pain trade is for stocks to move higher when a mass of market participants still remain bearish.Ā
āThatās why the pain trade remains solidly higher and the net result is that the longer the lengthy list of what ācouldā go wrong ādoesnātā go wrong, the more the pain felt by underinvested and underperforming managers will intensify, and the more upward āfuelā a market rally will have, as these managers chase stocks higher to increase allocations.āĀ
See: Hereās the big thing holding up the stock market, says Bank of America
As a result, if investors do get material negative news, for example a hard landing for the economy, a bounce back in inflation, another rise in Fed interest rates, or a debt-ceiling breach, thenĀ ānone of this sentiment stuff matters ā the S&P 500 will drop, and drop hard,ā said Essaye.
However, if all the bad things do not materialize, the ability for the stock market to rally remains stronger as itāll be fueled by traders who are underinvested, setting up the market to jump higher, said Essaye.Ā
U.S. stocks finished sharply lower on Tuesday as investors weighed data on April retail sales while awaiting another round of debt-ceiling talks between President Biden and Republican policymakers.