Why investors should be paying attention to TSA checkpoint data and OpenTable data

Michael Antonelli, Baird PWM Market Strategist, joined Yahoo Finance's The Final Round to discuss why he's paying attention to TSA checkpoint data, credit card spending data, and OpenTable data.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Mike, yesterday, and I think continuing today, certainly a sense that this is just a complete FOMO environment in the market right now. Is that what you're hearing from folks, that everyone now is starting to admit that they might have been wrong by looking for that retest of the lows, not just in early April, but all the way through this rally?

MICHAEL ANTONELLI: Yeah. Two things going through my mind right now. Number one is that, you know, where we are, where the market is, we just broke the 200 day moving average. It's a highly watched average. Institutions which I used to cover in my former role look at a 10 month moving average.

So at the end of last month, we got a close back above the 10 month moving average. So what that does is it kicks in all the people who use trend following systems. They want to be kind of underweight equities below the 10 month moving average on a monthly close. Remember, not daily, a monthly close. So it kicked them back into the market.

So that's a lot of buying power right there. And then, frankly, if you've held onto a bearish retest position all the way through this, and you're a professional money manager, it's got to be really tenuous to still hold out right now.

MYLES UDLAND: And you know, Mike, you mentioned that 10-month moving average is kind like the Meb Faber stuff that he talks about.

MICHAEL ANTONELLI: Yeah.

MYLES UDLAND: Maybe for like our audience he doesn't think about how institutions move money quite as much, I mean, how much trend following as a basic template for your allocation strategy, how much is that part of the way institutions who, again, are controlling billions and billions of dollars on a daily basis, how much is that part of their process?

MICHAEL ANTONELLI: Yeah. It's probably not a lot. So the institutions I used to cover were pension funds and hedge funds and asset managers kind of all over the world, and you know, none of them were really engaging in those strategies. I think those strategies are-- they might be the purview of RIAs. They might be the purview of a little bit more retail slant.

I know it is a popular way to try to avoid some of the downside. You know, you do miss the bounces. You do miss kind of some of the dividend collection in sell-offs. But you know, it's just something that popped into my head, you know, as a take.

Because all of us are sitting here saying, this makes no sense. In fact, the number one question asked by hundreds of clients to me almost on a-- like a daily basis is, this makes no sense. But you know what, rallies don't have to make sense.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. And I think, you know, I was talking to John Stoltz on this earlier. It's like this feels in so many ways like what happened in March '09. And if you came back and looked at the market in March 2015, people were having the same conversation. The argument about whether the market should be going up never really changed.

So let's talk a little bit about what is happening right now with respect to reopening, with respect to the spread of the virus. What are some things that you're looking at right now to maybe help back into an explanation?

MICHAEL ANTONELLI: Yeah. So number one, I-- you know, this probably gets minimized because none of us are doctors or scientists, but certainly, vaccine news. You know, maybe, and this is just a take, maybe the market is sniffing out that we're closer to the vaccine than most people think. I don't know. I don't have experience in that matter, but maybe, right? Maybe that's one of the reasons. So vaccine news.

You know, there's a lot of high frequency data that I think all you guys on this wonderful Yahoo Finance program people should be talking about, which is, you know, TSA checkpoint data, credit card spending data, OpenTable data. Which may not be the most robust in the world, but OpenTable data, are people going back to restaurants? You know, these are the kind of things that I'm looking at. Visa just came out and said credit card spending is basically back to where it was last year.

So you know, I'm not a V-shaped recovery guy. I'm more of kind of a long U. I do think we will get back to where we started. But I think that we can't look at manufacturing right now. We can't look at earnings estimates. We need to be looking at hotel occupancy and credit card spending data and those kind of things.