Weekly Warm-up: The Broadening Out Shifts to a Quality Rotation as Early Cycle Phase Ends

Research evidence excerpt

Weekly Warm-up: The Broadening Out Shifts to a Quality Rotation as Early Cycle Phase Ends

IdeaM

A Shift Toward Quality Suggests Early Cycle Is Over

The market is beginning to rotate toward quality, a classic mid-cycle transition as the

business cycle matures. From here, margin expansion is likely to depend less on early-

cycle operating leverage and more on AI adoption, reinforcing our quality thesis. The S&P

500 is already a high-quality, mega-cap-dominated benchmark: high-quality cohorts

represent roughly 42% of the index versus about 28% for low quality. Near-term

consolidation and even further downside toward 7000 remains possible if the war

continues to escalate and/or the Fed unexpectedly hikes this week, but the quality

rotation should ultimately support index resilience and even broad participation, albeit

with different leadership. The current setup resembles early-to-mid 2021, when leadership

shifted toward quality after an early cycle rebound post-covid. Weak balance sheets, high-

beta growth, and low quality earnings factors started to underperform even as the S&P

500 advanced and growth strengthened. Today looks similar: our factor work favors high

free-cash-flow yield, low EPS variability, strong balance sheets and high margins. See

Exhibit 11 for a screen on this front.

Exhibit 1: Quality Factor Performance Starting to Rebound, Like It Did in 2021

Quality Composite (High vs Low)

1.4

1.3

Low Quality,

Early Cycle

1.2 Leadership Higher

Quality,

Mid Cycle

1.1 Rotation

1.0

0.9

Leadership

Higher Quality,

Mid Cycle Rotation

0.8

2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026

Source: Compustat, Morgan Stanley Research.

Another similarity is that headline inflation/CPI is on the rise again and lines up with 2021

almost exactly.