Insights from SWS Partners

With the “recovery shape” guessing game firmly in the rearview (happy to say goodbye to whether “K-shaped” should join ranks of “V-” and “L-shaped” in the economist vernacular), the YTD period is evidence of the difficulty in pricing future outcomes at this particular market juncture. Companies lifting the hood to their recent quarter’s results are doing so at a time when the year-ago snapshot captures one of the most precipitous drops in public markets history. Trying to level-set our true run-rate, while simultaneously deciphering what’s next for equity investors, seems to be an effort stuck in “work-in-progress” mode. As we head into the holiday weekend, we saw the opportunity to offer some food for thought to accompany that which is earmarked for the grill or cooler, all in the effort to help illuminate our path forward as equity investors.

The following is an excerpt from our recently published SWS Growth Equity 1Q2021 strategy update, which is available in its entirety via pdf or audio stream. In the full piece, we provide our take on sifting through an increasingly volatile equity market backdrop, while assessing the strategic merits of our internally managed strategy for public growth-style equity.

After enduring a year of drastic outcome disparities in public equity, we're reminded of an often-misconstrued aspect to large cap investing. The asset class tends to garner perceptions that higher "efficiency" translates into an inability to generate sustainable and attractive returns, either relative or absolute. The cited culprits range from a disproportionately higher amount of sell-/buy-side analyst eyeballs, deeper pools of liquidity, tighter bid/ask spreads, or name-brand awareness by investors among the blue chips. The embedded implication behind these factors is that large-cap cash flows are somehow easier to predict than that of more obscure or smaller cap issuers.

The following is an excerpt from our recently published SWS Growth Equity 4Q strategy update, which is available in its entirety here. In the full piece, we provide our take on thinking through various sources of macro uncertainty as investors, in addition to assessing the strategic merits of our internally managed strategy for public growth-style equity.

Coming off a recession-triggering year in the throws of a global health crisis creates a challenging backdrop for any market forecaster. In effort to chart our forward path, we find it helpful to borrow from our fundamental investment process, seeking simplicity among chaos. Here, we isolate our investment premise: exploiting the market’s inefficiency of pricing long-term competitive disruption, specifically that which is enabled by disruptive innovation. As we study the evidence that’s filtered through the macroeconomic noise, it’s clear that the global pandemic response accelerated many mis-pricings that we were readily poised to exploit in 2020. As we study the opportunity landscape going forward, we also see ample runway for attractive excess returns over the coming years.

The following is our view on how to navigate this week’s heavy political slate, which is an excerpt of our Growth Equity quarterly update.

Political risks are particularly challenging for investors, especially in economic areas where cash flows can be impacted by shifting political winds. Thanks to the fungibility of capital, we see opportunities for the main cylinders of our economic engine to continue to fire. The exercise just requires increased fundamental rigor.

The Market’s Dynamic Adjustments to Probability

The only thing certain about political uncertainty: it comes in many forms and can be tough to predict. The House subcommittee’s efforts are one aspect, while November moves us closer to solidifying compositions of both executive and legislative branches. Given that this particular exercise recurs on four- (presidential) and two-year (midterm) cycles, the market is no stranger to digesting, and seeing through, this newsflow. The market’s embedded probability-weighing mechanism will not wake up on November 4th and flip from 0% to 100% should the underdog win; probabilities shift daily in one way or the other with prices adjusting in anticipation of the changing outcomes.

The following is an excerpt from our recently published SWS Growth Equity 3Q strategy update, which is available in its entirety here. In the full piece, we provide our take on how to think through various sources of political uncertainty as investors, in addition to assessing the strategic merits of our internally managed strategy for public growth-style equity.

We view our quarterly updates as accountability milestones. The main goal is for the embedded analysis to act as the ultimate arbiter on whether our premise remains valid while assessing our efforts to deliver results. Despite what feels like a year’s worth of market-impacting news squeezed into a single quarter—we take a stab at deciphering some of this later in our Market Perspective section—3Q2020 was accretive in both relative and absolute terms, and we remain optimistic on continuing our quest for sustainable alpha delivery. We also see strong odds that the output of these efforts could satisfy two important investor bases, the ever-discerning relative performance seekers and those more focused on absolute outcomes. The details behind this reveal that long-term capital is well served by focusing on the sources of disruptive innovation.