As we get deeper into earnings season it is clear that a strong dollar and lagging global growth are digging into the top and bottom lines of many companies. That’s why Bret Jensen is recommending these two all-American stocks that can take advantage of our strengthening domestic economy and will not be pressured by the strengthening dollar or faltering global economy.Â
A couple of themes are playing out as the market continues to hug the top end of a relatively tight trading range where it has spent most of 2015 within. The first is that there is a complete lack of earnings growth on a macro level. When second quarter earnings reports are tallied up; we are likely to see flat year-over-year earnings growth in the first two quarters of the year. This is despite most companies easily stepping over reduced quarterly profit estimates in both the first and second quarter. The primary factors in the dismal earnings performance are a tepid global economy, a strong dollar, and collapsing energy company earnings.
Revenue growth is nonexistent and is slightly negative at the moment. Factset is projecting we will not see year-over-year revenue growth for the S&P 500 until the first quarter of next year. Currency impacts are hitting American multinationals very hard, but thanks to stock buybacks and high historical operating margins, earnings are at least holding on to flat growth. One of the results of this is that investors are bidding up anything that is showing solid revenue growth to astronomical valuations.
Some of the best performing large cap stocks are selling at over 100 times forward earnings, that is, if they have earnings at all. Investors only seem to care about revenue growth at the moment. These well-known momentum stocks include Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). The five biggest stocks by market value account for all of the performance from the NASDAQ in 2015. Of those, only Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) sports a reasonable valuation.
