The second week of October 2018 was one of the most interesting for the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) in quite some time.
For our purposes, to qualify as interesting, the S&P 500 needs to change in value by 2% or more on any given day, and Week 2 of October 2018 had two days that met that simple threshold, Wednesday, 9 October 2018, when it fell by more than 3% and Thursday, 10 October 2018 when it continued to fall by another 2%.
In doing so, investors moved the market by shifting their forward-looking focus from 2019-Q1 toward the more distant future of 2019-Q3. Through the end of the week on Friday, 12 October 2018, the level of the S&P 500 in our dividend futures-based model indicates that investors are splitting their attention between these two quarters, putting a slightly heavier weighting on the nearer term future of described by the expectations associated with 2019-Q1 than they are for 2019-Q3.
Why focus on 2019-Q3 at all? Starting with basic fundamentals, the dividend futures for the S&P 500 associated with this upcoming quarter have been flat at $14.00 per share since 12 July 2018, where they represent a deceleration in the year-over-year rate of growth of trailing year dividends per share for the index. As such, the expectation that the rate of growth of S&P 500 dividends, and by extension, U.S. economic growth, will slow during this future quarter has been baked into investor considerations for quite some time.
Since there has been no change in these fundamental expectations, we can rule out any growing fear of a stalling stock market and economy at this time as a causal factor behind the S&P 500’s latest Lévy flight event. Ditto for any news items related to the ongoing low-level trade war between the U.S. and China, which for all the noise in the news it has generated since it began earlier this year, has not produced a noticeable impact on dividend futures to date.
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