Professional money managers have turned sharply bearish in their outlook for the stock market and the economy, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s December survey of more than 240 professional investors around the globe.
53% of those surveyed see the global economy deteriorating over the next twelve months, up from 44% in November, the highest share of those surveyed since Oct. 2008.
This bearishness has resulted in fund managers saying that the most crowded trade right now is long the U.S. dollar, after 10 straight months in which the most popular smart-money trade was long FAANG+BAT stocks, an acronym that stands for the fast growing U.S. tech firms Facebook Inc FB, +2.48% , Apple Inc.. AAPL, +1.30% , Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +2.01% , Netflix Inc. NFLX, +3.10% , and Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOG, +1.20% , plus the Chinese tech giants Baidu Inc. BIDU, -1.32% Alibaba Holding Group Ltd. BABA, -2.19% and Tencent Holdings Ltd TCEHY, +0.39%
It has been common in recent years for money managers to report the dollar as the most crowded trade, such as a 12-month period from Oct. 2014 through Sept. 2015. But in those cases, it was belief in the Federal Reserve’s long-term plans for tighter monetary policy relative to the rest of the globe that drove such interest.
This time around, according Bank of America chief investment strategist Michael Harnett, the fact that the dollar trade is crowded against a backdrop of bearishness towards stocks and global growth and the belief that the Federal Reserve is near the end of its tightening cycle means that investors see a “recession coming,” Harnett wrote in an analysis of the survey.
This newly cautious stance has helped fuel a stampede from growth stocks into safer investments, as the December survey showed the biggest ever one-month rotation into bonds, along with large moves into defensive stocks like staples and utilities.
Meanwhile, the share of cash in surveyed investors’ portfolios rose from 4.7% in November to 4.8% in December, though this level is ”not enough to trigger a contrarian buy signal for risk assets,” according to Harnett.
Eric Wiegand, senior portfolio manager at U.S. Bank, concurs with the results of the survey, telling MarketWatch that he has reduced risk in his client portfolios as he waits for more certainty on global growth, trade policy and the path of Fed monetary policy. “Institutional investors have retraced and taken a more guarded position,” he said.
Wiegand argues that the best bet for helping improving investor sentiment is a fresh round of healthy corporate earnings when fourth-quarter earnings season begins in just less than a month.
But even strong fourth-quarter numbers could be overwhelmed by a deteriorating global economy, exacerbated by U.S.-China trade tensions, as little concrete progress has been made on a deal to eliminate the threat of higher tariffs in 2019.
Fund managers surveyed by Bank of America agree, as 37% of them say that trade-war dynamics are the biggest risk to the economy in the coming months, twice as many as those who named either quantitative tightening or a slowdown of the Chinese economy.