Under the hood of broad stock indexes (00:19) for the week ended Feb. 13, Macro Asset Allocation Strategist Ryan Kimmel and Analyst Mark Kimbrough see ongoing rotation from knowledge-economy sectors such as financials, communication services and tech as well as consumer discretionary into old-economy sectors such as utilities, materials, real estate, consumer staples and energy. These money flows largely continued the stock-market leadership of the prior week. Ryan and Mark also note a change of the guard, year-to-date, in investment styles with equal-weighted large caps outperforming market-weighted large caps and value outperforming growth. In fixed income (4:06), bull curve-flattening lifted the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index, with Agency mortgage-backed securities outperforming investment grade corporates and Treasuries. In risky credits, emerging markets debt kept up with Agency MBS. Commodities (6:54) weakened, while in precious metals, silver stabilized and gold recovered above $5,000 per troy ounce.
A heavy week for macro news (8:22), retail sales came in somewhat weak. Encouraging news on inflation arrived with the Employment Cost Index for 4Q2025 and the Consumer Price Index for January. Nonfarm payrolls for the month came instrong versus expectations. Mark cautions that the bulk of the new hires were concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, and Ryan is taking a wait-and-see attitude given this data series’ history of downward revisions. Looking ahead to the abbreviated holiday week (22:09) of Feb. 17-20, Ryan and Mark will be on the lookout for the Wednesday release of minutes of the Jan. 28 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee and Friday’s release of the Personal Consumption Expenditure Deflator report for December.
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Mr. Kimbrough joined DoubleLine in 2012, where he worked primarily on Agency Mortgage Backed Securities and the Fixed Income Asset Allocation process as a member of the Risk Analyst team. He transitioned to his current role in 2019 where he serves as an Analyst on the Macro Asset Allocation team. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Kimbrough was at Western Asset Management working on systems monitoring and development within the Risk Department. He holds a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Real Estate Finance and a minor in Economics from the University of Southern California. Mr. Kimbrough is a CFA® charterholder.
Mr. Kimmel joined DoubleLine in 2013. He is a Strategist on the Macro Asset Allocation team and Fixed Income Asset Allocation (FIAA) and Global Asset Allocation Committees. He also co-hosts DoubleLine’s weekly Minutes (Twitter @DLineMinutes, Minutes@Doubleline.com) podcast. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Kimmel was a Proprietary Trader at Gelber Group, trading currencies for the Foreign Currency Group. Prior to that, he was an Investment Banking Analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Mergers and Acquisitions Group. Mr. Kimmel holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and holds an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
