Have Markets Hit Peak Optimism?

Our Head of Corporate Credit Research Andrew Sheets argues that while investor hopes are running high, corporate confidence isn’t.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Today I’m going to talk about optimism, how we measure it, whether it’s overly excessive and what lies ahead.

It's Friday January 24th at 2pm in London.

A central tenet of investing, including credit investing, is to be on the lookout for excessive optimism. By definition, the highest prices in a market cycle will happen when people are the most convinced that only great things lie ahead. The lowest prices, when you’d love to buy, happen when investors have given up all hope.

But identifying peak optimism, in real time, is tricky. It’s tricky because there is no generally agreed definition; and it's tricky because, sometimes, things just are good. Investors have been excited about the US Technology sector for more than a decade now. And yet this sector has managed to deliver extraordinary profit growth over this time – and extraordinarily good returns.

Yet this debate does feel relevant. The US equity market has soared over 50 per cent in the last two years. Equity valuations are historically high, both outright and relative to bonds. Credit risk premiums are near 20-year lows. Speculative investor activity is increasing. And so, have we finally hit peak optimism, a level from which we can go no further?

Our answer, for better or worse, is no. While we think investor optimism is elevated, corporate optimism is not. And corporations are really important in this debate, enjoying enormous financial resources that can invest in the economy or other companies. While we do think corporate confidence will pick up, it is going to take some time.

One of our favorite measures of corporate confidence is merger and acquisition activity. Buying another company is one of the riskiest things management can do, making it a great proxy for underlying corporate confidence. Volumes of this type of activity rose about 25 per cent last year, but they are still well below historical averages. And it would be really unusual for a major market cycle to end without this sort of activity being above-trend.

Another metric is the riskiness of new borrowing. Taking on new debt is another measure of corporate confidence, as you generally do something like this when you feel good about the future, and your ability to pay that debt off. But for the last three years the volume of low-rated debt in the US market has actually been shrinking, while the issuance of the riskiest grades of corporate borrowing is also down significantly from the 2017-2022 average. Again, these are not the types of trends you’d expect with excessive corporate optimism.

Uncertainties around tariffs, or the policies from the new US administration could still hold corporate confidence back. But the low starting point for corporate confidence, combined with what we expect to be a deregulatory push, mean we think it is more likely that corporate activity and aggressiveness have room to rise – and that this continues throughout 2025. Such an increase usually does present greater risk down the line; but for now, we think it is too early to position for those more negative consequences of increasing corporate aggression.

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