Over the past 96 years, the returns for small-capitalization stocks starting in May of a midterm year through the same October averaged negative 2.3%. The return over the following six months has been positive 19.2%.
RevPAR Recovery
The latest forecast for the U.S. hotel industry indicates that real, inflation-adjusted revenue per available room will not fully recover until 2025, despite RevPAR on a nominal basis recovering to pre-pandemic levels in 2022.
Work Hours
The top-earning 10% of men in the U.S. labor market logged 77 fewer work hours in 2022, on average, than those in the same earnings group in 2019, according to a new study of federal data by the economics department at Washington University in St. Louis. That translates to 1.5 hours less time on the job each workweek, or a 3% reduction in hours. Over the same three-year period, the top-earning 10% of women cut back time at work by 29 hours, which translates to about half an hour less work each week, or a 1% reduction.
Money-Market Inflows
Investors have added about $135 billion to global money-market funds over the past four weeks. That is the best stretch since the four-week period ended May 2020, when those funds logged roughly $175 billion in net inflows.
Business Travel
In the third quarter this past year, business travel reached 71% of prepandemic levels. That is up from 35% during the same quarter in 2021. Small and medium-size businesses are driving the recovery with transactions by this segment reaching 80% of prepandemic levels in the third quarter.
Banks New Payment Wallet
Big banks are teaming up to launch a digital wallet that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards. The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle will operate separately from Zelle.
SPACs
The average announced SPAC merger value has fallen to about $200 million so far in January, down from more than $2 billion for much of 2021 during the sector’s peak.
Hedge Fund Performance
For the first time since 2018, larger hedge funds outperformed smaller hedge funds. HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index, which gives equal weight to funds of all sizes, fell -4.25% in 2022, while the HFRI Asset Weighted Composite Index, which gives more weighting to the larger funds, rose: 0.97%.
Super Prime Discount
The average discount for “super-prime” luxury apartment units in Manhattan, defined as properties selling for $10 million or more, during the seconed half of last year was 12%.
Interest Rate Caps
The cost of insuring commercial real-estate loans against a rise in interest rates has exploded over the past year, raising the prospect of a market selloff since many property owners will no longer be able to afford these hedges. Property owners are paying 10 times as much to insure loans against rising interest rates as a year ago.