Leuthold Weeden Capital Management

Portfolio Manager Doug Ramsey, The Leuthold Group, offers his outlook, with CNBC's Jackie DeAngelis.

This March, the Leuthold Group, a Minneapolis-based financial research firm, published a report entitled “Valuing the Stock Market: Do Interest Rates Matter?” In it, author and Leuthold chief investment officer Doug Ramsey revealed that the BEER ratio had zero predictive value for stock performance when yields on Treasury bonds were below 6 percent from 1878 through March 2013.

A study by the Leuthold Group found that high-quality stocks have beaten the overall stock market over more than 25 years. From 1986 through April 30, high-quality stocks returned an annualized 11.8%, compared with 10.2% for the overall stock market, according to the study, by Jun Zhu, a Leuthold analyst, and Eric Weigel, the Minneapolis firm's research director.

Readers of this byline appreciate its ardor for “Perception,” the data and joke-rich investing monthly put out by The Leuthold Group. The April book crunched surprising data that got me thinking about parallel drivers of long-term market performance: the significance of dividends to total return, and exposure to smaller-cap companies.

Leuthold Group CIO Douglas Ramsey previews today's markets and discusses his investment strategy. He speaks with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television's "In The Loop."

Doug Ramsey, Leuthold Group, discusses where the markets go from here.

Japan’s new Prime Minster Shinzo Abe made more of an impact on the market than anyone else last month. In what the market has dubbed “Abenomics,” Abe not only launched a new fiscal stimulus, but also pushed the Bank of Japan to raise its inflation target from 1% to 2% AND agree to a new open-ended QE program.

The idea that buying last year’s losers for a win this year is a perennial for investors who think they can benefit from a quick rebound.

Eric Weigel, director of research for the Leuthold Group in Minneapolis, says you have to be careful with how you play the "China effect." Buying baskets of commodities through managed index funds can skew results because of the funds' weightings. The Dow Jones/UBS index, for example, has twice as much invested in agricultural commodities than the rival S&P/Goldman Sachs Commodities Index, which has more than 60 percent of its holdings in energy.

First, consider the macro picture: Eric Weigel, director of research at the Leuthold Group, notes that the broad-based inflation that typically drives prices higher is nowhere in sight. Plus, commodities haven't yet shown they're unlinked from recent years' tight correlation with stocks, reducing their use as diversifiers.