Despite the sea change in Washington, D.C., "everyone is investing as if Barack Obama were still president," Wintergreen Advisers CEO David Winters told attendees at the third annual Invest In Women conference in Dallas on Wednesday morning.
For the last six years or so, FANG and Friends—a group of 10 stocks including Microsoft, Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and Salesforce—have accounted for 75 percent of the returns in the S&P 500.
"I'm not saying they aren't great companies," Winters said. His problem is that they are selling at "beyond nosebleed valuations" that no longer make sense. "Go back in history," Winters warned. "Nothing goes to the moon," except maybe NASA's Apollo project.
In the age of Trump, every day there is a new surprise, but the markets remain mired in the past. Thanks to the indexing rage, "all the money in the world [is] in the S&P and 10 companies," Winters said.
For about two months following the election in November, value stocks surged as President-elect Trump stressed bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. But so far in 2017, the gains in old economy equities have moderated while the sexy stocks of the Obama era have resumed their merry ascent.
Singling out executive compensation programs and corporate stock buybacks, Winters charged that investors in S&P 500 ETFs also were paying 4.1 percent in hidden expenses. Since the S&P 500 has a market value of about $20 trillion, this 4.1 percent translates into $800 billion in annual costs, or roughly the equivalent of the widely despised TARP bailout during the Great Recession.
And that's every year. TARP, in contrast, was a one-time event. While buybacks can make sense when equities are as cheap as they were seven or eight years ago, today many companies are borrowing to repurchase highly valued stock to increase their earnings per share—and CEO bonuses—rather than reinvest in their businesses.
The other panelists—Kathleen Gaffney of Eaton Vance and Lori Keith of Parnassus Investments—agreed that at some point markets were likely to shift, probably in a direction that favored active managers. Keith acknowledged that most stocks are relatively expensive today, but she said regulatory reform and infrastructure spending could benefit some of the holdings in her fund, the Parnassus Mid-Cap Fund.
"We're not betting on this," Keith cautioned. "The market got ahead of itself. We're making sure we can protect clients on the downside in case there is a downturn."
Quite a few industrial stocks meet Parnassus's criteria of being able to generate sustained growth over the next three years. Keith cited water infrastructure plays like Pentair and recurring revenue generators like Waste Management as two holdings she considered well-positioned for the Trump era.