Goldman Sachs: After 20% Valuation De-Rating, Overweight Equities and Long-Duration Bonds
nashnova research
Global equity forward P/E ratios have quietly contracted by roughly 20%. Goldman maintains its equity overweight, shifts to overweight 10-year government bonds, and cuts credit — a combination that bets entirely on inflation continuing to cool.
What is Goldman recommending right now?
At both 3-month and 12-month horizons: overweight equities, underweight credit. At 3 months, overweight cash; at 12 months, shift to overweight 10-year government bonds.
This means → Goldman no longer treats corporate credit as a hedge. Instead it pairs equities with bonds, gold, and low-volatility assets to balance the portfolio.
In plain terms = equities stay in the portfolio for returns; long-duration bonds catch the portfolio if markets fall. Credit sits awkwardly in between, so Goldman drops it entirely.
Stock prices barely fell — so why has valuation already shrunk 20%?
Goldman calls it a "silent de-rating": prices held up, but the 12-month forward P/E fell roughly -20% because earnings growth carried the entire weight.
The numbers: dividend yield plus one-year forward EPS growth reached nearly +40% — earnings outran prices by so much that the P/E compressed passively.
This means → there was no crash-style deleveraging. Profit growth quietly absorbed the valuation premium. Goldman argues this de-rating now provides an valuation cushion to stay long equities.
Which sectors got hit hardest — and which actually rallied?
The deepest de-rating hit capex-driven tech hardware: U.S. AI infrastructure, European semiconductors, Korea's KOSPI, and the SOX index all fell roughly 20%–30% in dollar terms — despite delivering double-digit or even 20%+ earnings contributions.
By contrast, "AI-enabled revenue" and "AI productivity" names re-rated upward, gaining roughly 15%–25%.
In plain terms = the market has stopped paying up for companies that burn cash building infrastructure when the sustainability of those earnings is still in question. Google and Amazon were punished this week for surging capex — the same logic. What the market rewards is companies that already make money from AI.
Why has risk appetite dropped into negative territory?
Goldman's Risk Appetite Indicator (RAI) fell from above +1 at its intra-year high to -0.5. The main drag: the monetary-policy factor (PC2) collapsed.
Markets now price the Fed on a persistent rate-hike path. The probability of a December hike sits at roughly 80%; the 10-year Treasury yield hovers near 5.00%.
This reflects a key point: the largest source of market stress is not earnings or geopolitics — it is rates staying high. Goldman's back-tests show the S&P 500 typically rebounds after the monetary-policy factor bottoms — but 2022 was the exception, and the current path closely mirrors 2022, a year when the Fed hiked persistently through an inflation shock.
What is the biggest risk to this bullish framework?
Goldman describes the 2026 business cycle as "Goldilocks to reflation and back." Its growth score stays positive all year, but the policy score has dropped sharply and is projected to fall further into negative territory before 2027.
S&P 500 earnings growth peaked at roughly 40% year-over-year — about three times nominal GDP growth. Goldman forecasts it will slow to roughly 10% by 2027.
This means → the entire framework rests on one core bet: inflation momentum keeps falling. Market-level inflation indicators have already peaked and turned down, but hard macro data has not yet followed. Goldman itself acknowledges that "a renewed decline in inflation momentum would mark a shift to a more supportive macro backdrop" — if that premise fails, the overweight-equities-plus-overweight-long-bonds combination faces pressure on both sides simultaneously.
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