DoubleLine Portfolio Manager Eric Dhall and Macro Asset Allocation Strategist Ryan Kimmel on April 24 review a market week with U.S. stocks nearing all-time highs (0:56), led by rampaging tech, in the teeth of Washington and Tehran’s “double embargo” of the Persian Gulf. Semiconductor hunger (2:58) fed historic rallies in chipmakers and in the South Korean and Japanese stock markets. Fixed income (4:18) staged no big moves, with investment grade sectors slightly lower amid steepening in the belly of the yield curve. Commodities (6:18) moved higher, led by energy, alongside a stronger dollar and weaker gold. Ryan explains the interesting month-long correlation between two-year Treasury yields and WTI prices.
Macro news (8:16) was light for the week. Eric points out that retail sales and S&P Global manufacturing signal a U.S. economy “humming along” notwithstanding the wartime shock to energy prices. With Kevin Warsh having “dodged any flak” during his Tuesday congressional testimony and the Justice Department Friday dropping its investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, “the path is pretty much clear” for Warsh’s succession to the chairmanship, Eric says. For the week ahead (15:05), with Wednesday’s FOMC likely promising a nothing burger for Powell’s last session presiding over the rate-setting body, Eric and Ryan will be on the watch for the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller house price indices, durable goods order, personal income & spending, the PCE Price Index.
Mr. Dhall joined DoubleLine in 2013. He is a Portfolio Manager on the Macro-Asset Allocation team where he works with portfolio management performing analysis and trading for derivatives-based and multi-asset strategies. Mr. Dhall’s research and analysis has contributed to the team’s development of DoubleLine’s smart-beta suite of strategies. Prior to DoubleLine, he worked at Capital Group performing quantitative analysis in fixed income. Prior to Capital Group, Mr. Dhall was an instructor in finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research instructor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Previous to that, he worked in International Finance at Gulf Machinery Company. Mr. Dhall holds a B.S. in Physics with a secondary emphasis in Business from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in Financial Engineering from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
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.
