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Proprietary Data Insights Top Stocks and ETF Searches This Month
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Apple: Why It Still Matters To Investors
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Before we shift focus next week and into 2024 to the changing definition of retirement, let’s do a quick look back on 2023 via Trackstar, our proprietary sentiment indicator. As we end the year, things are back to where we started in Trackstar, with Apple (AAPL) and Tesla (TSLA) firmly regaining the top most-searched ticker spots from Nvidia (NVDA). We find Apple’s persistence at the top somewhat curious. Earlier this month, The Juice considered slowing growth at Apple. As we looked back on that story and the year, we had a few more thoughts about Apple, and its possible position in your portfolio. But first, it’s interesting to look at financial advisor searches in Trackstar. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) ranks first among financial pros with nearly twice the search volume #2 Nvidia, #3 Apple and #4 Tesla. Taken together, this setup in Trackstar helps us further refine an investing approach The Juice thinks can work in 2024. We’ll tweak this approach specific to retirement planning (even if you think you’ll never retire) when we kick off next year’s ongoing series on retirement. But, now, let’s flesh out our basic sentiment about where it might be a good idea to put your money going forward, using some of these big Trackstar names as landmarks. Start with a broad-based approach focused on the US economy. At the very least, all signs point to a soft landing for the economy in 2024. What does that mean? Here are the key components we listed when we defined soft landing earlier this month. The Juice basically suggested a soft landing last week as we discussed the relationship between inflation and the stock market: What matters is that the stock market looks forward. And it likes what it sees:
Wall Street loves this picture. If you’re an investor, who just so happens to live on Main Street, maybe you do, too. Goldman Sachs agrees. The investment bank wrote a piece last week predicting a soft landing. We still agree. Except change that “probably” to a “most definitely” on rate hikes. The consensus as we’re seeing it appears to be a recession or close to it across Europe and a sound and stable, if not growing economy in America. This is where SPY comes in. If you do nothing else in 2024, consider investing in SPY. It gets you exposed to the drivers of this economy. After that, add the Invesco QQQ ETF (QQQ) to your portfolio. This gives extra, tech-focused exposure to the economy. No matter what happens with the Presidential election we think this is the move. From there, we like dividend-paying stocks as the interest rate you can get on your cash slowly declines in 2024 and beyond. And this is where Apple comes in. It’s really an ideal transition stock, if you will, between the tech stocks we still consider high growth, such as Nvidia, and dividend-paying stalwarts. For a while, it appeared Apple straddled the line. Now it looks like Apple is more stalwart than high flier. The Juice hopes Apple gets more aggressive with its dividend going forward. While the company has increased its dividend for 12 consecutive years (it will certainly get to 25 years and dividend aristocrat status), the pace of these increases has been weak, relative to Apple’s strong cash position. Ideally, we want to see closer to double-digit dividend growth at Apple. Something that looks more like Microsoft’s pace. Microsoft’s 3-year dividend growth rate is around 10%. Apple’s is closer to 5%. There’s no reason why Apple can’t close this gap or do better on it. But, even if Apple doesn’t do what we hope, we still like the stock as a dividend play for long-term investors. We made our case for dividend growth investing last week and we’re doubling down on it. It’s really the perfect bridge between broad market ETF investing and our third suggestion: Keep adding tech’s biggest story stocks. Buy the leaders in AI, led by NVDA, Microsoft (MSFT) and even Meta Platforms (META). Buy the story stocks in tech and the tech-centric consumer spaces. We’re talking Tesla for the EV market, Amazon.com (AMZN) for the online retail space and our top picks that crushed it in 2023 — Uber (UBER) and DoorDash (DASH) — as they continue to build impressive Amazon-like ecosystems. The Bottom Line: The three links in that last paragraph — and this one that focuses on SPY and QQQ — come together to form the perfect example of keeping investing refreshingly simple and straightforward. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And we don’t think this approach to the stock market is broke:
In fact, we think it’s just in the early innings. Next week, we start relating many of the themes (on housing, on investing, on ETFs) to retirement. An elusive concept for many Americans. But, count on The Juice to help demystify it! We’re excited about this series and we hope it can help you make sense of a concept that isn’t the same as it was when your parents were younger. |
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