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Alternative Risk Premia in Inflation Markets
I’m going to wade into the question of ‘alternative risk premia’ today, and discuss how this applies to markets where I ply my trade.
When people talk about ‘alternative risk premia,’ they mean one of two things. They’re sort of the same thing, but the former meaning is more precise.
- A security’s return consists of market beta (whatever that means – it is a little more complex than it sounds) and ‘alpha’, which is the return not explained by the market beta. If rx is the security return and rm is the market return, classically alpha is
The problem is that most of that ‘alpha’ isn’t really alpha but results from model under-specification. For example, thanks to Fama and French we have known for a long time that small cap stocks tend to add “extra” return that is not explained by their betas. But that isn’t alpha – it is a beta exposure to another factor that wasn’t in the original model. Ergo, if “SMB” is how we designate the performance of small stocks minus big stocks, a better model is
Well, obviously it doesn’t stop there. But the ‘alpha’ that you find for your strategy/investments depends critically on what model you’re using and which factors – aka “alternative risk premia” – you’re including. At some level, we don’t really know whether alpha really exists, or whether systematic alpha just means that we haven’t identified all of the factors. But these days it is de rigeur to say “let’s pay very little in fees for market beta; pay small fees for easy-to-access risk premia that we proactively decide to add to the portfolio (overweighting value stocks, for example), pay higher fees for harder-to-access risk premia that we want, and pay a lot in fees for true alpha…but we don’t really think that exists.” Of course, in other people’s mouths (mostly marketers) “alternative risk premia that you should add to your portfolio” just means… - Whatever secret sauce we’re peddling, which provides returns you can’t get elsewhere.
So there’s nothing really mysterious about the search for ‘alternative risk premia’, and they’re not at all new. Yesteryear’s search for alpha is the same as today’s search for ‘alternative risk premia’, but the manager who wants to earn a high fee needs to explain why he can add actual alpha over not just the market beta, but the explainable ‘alternative risk premia’. If your long-short equity fund is basically long small cap stocks and short a beta-weighted amount of large-cap stocks, you’re probably not going to get paid much.
For many years, I’ve been using the following schematic to explain why certain sources of alpha are more or less valuable than others. The question comes down to the source of alpha, after you have stripped out the explainable ‘alternative risk premia’.
As an investor, you want to figure out where this manager’s skill is coming from: is it from theoretical errors, such as when some guys in Chicago discovered that the bond futures contract price did not incorporate the value of delivery options that accrued to the contract short, and harvested alpha for the better part of two decades before that opportunity closed? Or is it because Joe the trader is really a great trader and just has the market’s number? You want more of the former, which have high information ratios, are very persistent…but don’t come around that much. You shouldn’t be very confident in the latter, which seem to be all over the place but don’t tend to last very long and are really hard to prove. (I’ve been waiting for a long time to see the approach to fees suggested here in a 2008 Financial Analysts’ Journal article implemented.)
I care about this distinction because in the markets I traffic in, there are significant dislocations and some big honking theoretical errors that appear from time to time. I should hasten to say that in what follows, I will mention some results for strategies that we have designed at Enduring Intellectual Properties and/or manage via Enduring Investments, but this article should not be construed as an offer to sell any security or fund nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or fund.
- Let’s start with something very simple. Here is a chart of the first-derivative of the CPI swaps curve – that is, the one-year inflation swap, x-years forward (so a 1y, 1y forward; a 1y, 2y forward; a 1y, 3y forward, and so on). In developed markets like LIBOR, not only is the curve itself smooth but the forwards derived from that curve are also smooth. But this is not the case with CPI swaps.[1]
- I’ve also documented in this column from time to time the fact that inflation markets exaggerate the importance of near-term carry, so that big rallies in energy prices not only affect near-term breakevens and inflation swaps but also long-dated breakevens and inflation swaps, even though energy prices are largely mean-reverting.
- We’ve in the past (although not in this column) identified times when the implied volatility of core inflation was actually larger than the implied volatility of nominal rates…which outcome, while possible, is pretty unlikely.
- Back in 2009, we spoke to investors about the fact that corporate inflation bonds (which are structured very differently than TIPS and so are hard to analyze) were so cheap that for a while you could assemble a portfolio of these bonds, hedge out the credit, and still realize a CPI+5% yield at time when similar-maturity TIPS were yielding CPI+1%.
- One of my favorite arbs available to retail investors was in 2012, when I-series savings bonds from the US Treasury sported yields nearly 2% above what was available to institutional investors in TIPS.
But aside from one-off trades, there are also systematic strategies. If a systematic strategy can be designed that produces excess returns both in- and out- of sample, it is at least worth asking whether there’s ‘alpha’ (or undiscovered/unexploited ‘alternative risk premia’) here. All three of the strategies below use only liquid markets – the first one, only commodity futures; the second one, only global sovereign inflation bonds; and the third one, only US TIPS and US nominal Treasuries. The first two are ‘long only’ strategies that systematically rebalance monthly and choose from the same securities that appear in the benchmark comparison. (Beyond that, this public post obviously needs to keep methods undisclosed!). And also, please note that past results are no indication of future returns! I am trying to make the general point that there are interesting risk factors/alphas here, and not the specific point about these strategies per se.
- Our Enduring Dynamic Commodity Index is illustrated below. It’s more volatile, but not lots more volatile: 17.3% standard deviation compared to 16.1% for the Bloomberg Commodity Index.
That’s the most-impressive looking chart, but that’s because it represents commodity markets that have lots of volatility and, therefore, offer lots of opportunities.
- Our Global Inflation Bond strategy is unlevered and uses only the bonds that are included in the Bloomberg-Barclays Global ILB index. It limits the allowable overweights on smaller markets so that it isn’t a “small market” effect that we are capturing here. According to the theory that drives the model, a significant part of any country’s domestic inflation is sourced globally and therefore not all of the price behavior of any given market is relevant to the cross-border decision. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
- Finally, here is a simple strategy that is derived from a very simple model of the relationship between real and nominal Treasuries to conclude whether TIPS are appropriately priced. The performance is not outlandish, and there’s a 20% decline in the data, but there’s also only one strategy highlighted here – and it beats the HFR Global Hedge Fund Index.
I come not to bury other strategies but to praise them. There are good strategies in various markets that deliver ‘alternative risk premia’ in the first sense enumerated above, and it is a good thing that investors are extending their understanding beyond conventional beta as they assemble portfolios. I believe that there are also strategies in various markets which deliver ‘alternative risk premia’ that are harder to access because they require rarer expertise. Finally, I believe that there are strategies – but these are very rare, and getting rarer – which deliver true alpha that derives from theoretical errors or systematic imbalances. I think that as a source of a relatively unexploited ‘alternative risk premium’ and a potential source of unique alphas, the inflation and commodity markets still contain quite a few useful nuggets.
[1] I am not necessarily claiming that this can be exploited easily right now, but the curve has had such imperfections for more than a decade – and sometimes, it’s exploitable.
The Important Trade Effects Are Longer-Term
The question about the impact of trade wars is really two questions, and I suppose they get conflated a lot these days. First, there’s the near-term market impact; second is the longer-term price/growth impact.
The near-term market impact is interesting. When the market is in a bad mood (forgive the anthropomorphization), then trade frictions are simply an excuse to sell – both stocks and bonds, but mostly stocks. When the market is feeling cheerful, and especially around earnings season, trade wars get interpreted as having very narrow effects on certain companies and consequently there is no large market impact. That is what seems to have happened over the last few weeks – although trade conflicts are escalating and having very concentrated effects in some cases (including on markets, such as in commodities, where they really oughtn’t), it hasn’t dampened the mood of the overall market.
In fact, the risk in these circumstances is that a “happy” market will take any sign of a reduction in these tensions as broadly bullish. So you get concentrated selloffs in single names that don’t affect the market as a whole, and when there’s any sign of thawing you see a sharp market rally. We saw a bit of that in the last day or so as Mexico’s President-elect and US President Trump both expressed optimism about a ‘quick’ NAFTA deal. Honestly, the broad market risk to trade in the near-term is probably upwards, since any increase in tensions will have a minor and concentrated effect while any thawing (especially with China) at all will cause a rally.
But beware in case the mood changes!
As an inflation guy, I’m far more interested in the longer-term impact. And there, the impact is unambiguous and bad. I’ve written about this in the past, in detail (see this article, which is probably my best on the subject and first appeared in our private quarterly), but the salient point is that you don’t need a trade war to get worse inflation outcomes than we have seen in the last 20 years. You only need for progress on advancing global trade to stop. And it seems as though it has.
Not all of the forces pressing on inflation right now are bullish, although most are. Apartment rents have slowed their ascent, and the delayed effect of the dollar’s rally will have a dampening effect next year (arrayed against that, however, are the specific effects of tariffs on particular goods) although globally, FX movements are roughly zero-sum in terms of global inflation. Money growth has slowed, to levels that would tend to contain inflation if velocity were also to remain stable at all-time lows. But velocity recently started to uptick (we will find out on Friday if this uptick continued in Q2) and as interest rates gradually increase around the globe money velocity should also quicken. The chart below (source: Enduring Investments) shows our proprietary model for money velocity.
At this point, trade is pushing inflation higher in two ways. The first is that arresting the multi-decade trend towards more-open markets and more-numerous trade agreements fundamentally changes the inflation/growth tradeoff that central banks globally will face. Rather than having a following wind that made monetary policy relatively simple (although policymakers still found a way to louse it up, potentially beyond repair, largely as a result of believing their own fables about the powerful role that central banks played in saving the world first from inflation, and then from deflation), there will be a headwind that will make monetary much more difficult – more like the 1960s and 1970s than the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The second way that trade conflict is pushing inflation higher is mechanical, by causing higher prices of recorded goods as a direct result of tariff implementation.
But this second way, while it gets all the ink and causes near-term knee-jerk effects in markets, is much less important in the long run.
Gold Has Barely Beaten Inflation, and That’s About Right
Okay: I’ve checked my door locks, made sure my kids are safe, and braced myself for the inevitable incendiary incoming comments. So, I feel secure in pointing this out:
Gold’s real return for the last 10 years has been a blistering 1.07% per year. And worse, that’s higher than you ought to expect for the next 10 years.
Here’s the math. Gold on July 19, 2008 was at $955. Today it is at $1223, for a gain of 28.1%. But the overall price level (CPI) was at 218.815 in June 2008, and at 251.989 in June 2018 (we won’t get July figures for another month so this is the best we can do at the moment), for a 15.2% rise in the overall price level.
1.07% = [(1+28.1%) / (1 + 15.2%)] ^ 0.1 – 1
It might be even worse than that. Gold bugs are fond of telling me how the CPI is manipulated and there’s really so much more inflation than that; if that’s so, then the real return is obviously much worse than the calculation above implies.
Now, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. You start with a pile of real stuff, which doesn’t grow or shrink for ten years…your real return is, at least in units of that real stuff, precisely 0%. And that’s what we should expect, in the very long run, from the holding of any non-productive real asset like a hard commodity. (If you hold gold via futures, then you also earn a collateral return of course. And if you hold warehouse receipts for physical gold, in principle you can earn lease income. But the metal itself has an a priori expected real return of zero). Indeed, some people argue that gold should be the measuring stick, in which case it isn’t gold which is changing price but rather the dollar. In that case, it’s really obvious that the real return is zero because the price of gold (in units of gold) is always 1.0.
So, while everyone has been obsessing recently about the surprisingly poor performance of gold, the reality is that over the longer time horizon, it has done about what it is supposed to do.
That’s actually a little bit of a coincidence, deriving from the fact that at $955 ten years ago, gold was reasonably near the fair price. Since then, gold prices soared and became very expensive, and now are sagging and getting cheaper. However, on my model gold prices are still too high to expect positive expected returns over the next decade (see chart, source Enduring Intellectual Properties).
The ‘expected return’ here is derived from a (nonlinear) regression of historical real prices against subsequent real returns. To be sure, because this is a market that is subject to immense speculative pressure both in the bull phases and in the bear phases, gold moves around with a lot more volatility than the price level does; consequently, it swings over time from being very undervalued (1998-2001) to wildly overvalued (2011-2013). I wouldn’t ever use this model to day-trade gold! However, it’s a useful model when deciding whether gold should have a small, middling, or large position in your portfolio. And currently, despite the selloff, the model suggests a small position: gold is much more likely to rise by less than the price level over the next decade, and possibly significantly less as in the 1980-1990 period (although I’d say probably not that bad).
DISCLOSURE: Quantitative/systematic funds managed by Enduring Investments have short positions in gold, silver, and platinum this month.
Developed Country Demographics are Inflationary, not Deflationary
I’m a relatively simple guy. I like simple models. I get suspicious with models that seem overly complicated. In my experience, the more components you add to a model the more likely it is that one of them ceases having explanatory power and messes up your model’s value. In this it is like (since tonight is Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game I thought I’d use a baseball analogy) bringing in relievers to a game. Every reliever you bring in has some chance that he just doesn’t have it tonight, so therefore you ought to bring in as few relievers as you can.
Baseball managers don’t seem to believe this, so they bring in as many relievers as they can. Similarly, economists don’t seem to believe the rule of parsimony. The more complexity in the model, the better (at least, for the economist’s job security).
Let’s talk about demographics and inflation.
Here’s how I think about how an aging population affects inflation:
- Fewer workers in the workforce implies a lower unemployment rate and higher wages, c.p.
- A higher retiree/active worker ratio implies lower saving, which will tend to send interest rates higher and equity prices lower, and tend to increase money velocity, c.p.
- A higher retiree/non-retiree ratio probably implies lower spending, c.p.
It seems to me that people who argue that aging populations are disinflationary don’t really have a useful model in mind. If they do, then it revolves only around #3, and the idea that spending will diminish over time; if you believe that inflation is related to growth then this sounds like stagnation and deflation. But if there’s lower spending, that doesn’t necessarily indicate a wider output gap because of #1. The best you could say about the effect on the output gap of an aging population is that it is indeterminate: potential output growth should decline because of workforce decline (potential output growth » growth in the # of workers + growth in productivity per worker), while demand growth should also decline, leading to uncertain effects on the output gap.
I think that most people who think the demographic situation of developed nations is disinflationary are really just extrapolating from the single data point of Japan. Japan had an aging population; Japan had deflation; ergo, an aging population causes deflation. But as I’ve argued previously, the main cause of deflation in Japan was overly tight monetary policy.
The decrease in potential growth rates due to the graying of the population is real and clearly inflationary on its face, all else equal. Go look at our MVºPQ calculator and see what happens when you lower the annual real growth assumption, for any other set of assumptions.
So, my model is simple, and you don’t need to have a lot of extraneous dynamics if you simply say: slower potential growth implies higher potential inflation, and demographics implies lower potential future growth. Qed.
One other item I would point out about the three points above: all three are negative for stock markets. If you truly believe that the dominant effects are lower spending, less savings, and higher wages the you can’t possibly think that demographics are anything other than disastrous for equity valuations in the future.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (July 2018)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guyPV and get this in real time, by going to PremoSocial. Or, sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Investors with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments or Enduring Intellectual Properties. Plus…buy my book about money and inflation. The title of the book is What’s Wrong with Money? The Biggest Bubble of All; order from Amazon here.
- OK, 15 minutes to CPI. Here goes.
- Last mo, we had an 0.17% on core m/m, exactly on expectations but after a weak 0.10% in April.
- The Dec/Jan 0.24%/0.35% seem far away, but even farther away are the 0.14%s of last June and July. That is, comps remain relatively easy.
- Really no big surprises last month. Still haven’t seen core goods acceleration or any sign of tariff effects. Core ex-housing is rising but still quite low.
- In fact, I think the big story going forward, not this month per se but for the balance of the year and 2019, is what happens to core goods prices. With trucking prices rising aggressively, tariffs up and globalization down, I’d expect to see movement there.
- In that vein, keep an eye on Apparel, which though small is an important signal on core goods.
- This month, economists are looking for 0.18% on core, pushing y/y JUST BARELY to 2.3% with rounding. The consensus nailed it last month.
- My thesis is that we should be seeing more core inflation than that going forward. So far, that thesis has been unrewarded but I really didn’t expect a whole lot to come through until the second half. This first half was just catching up from base effects of 2017.
- You can see that median is basically back on the slow uptrend from 2014-15-16-17. Inflation will keep rising. The only question (which would be a scary outcome) is whether it accelerates past that former trend into a new self-feeding inflation cycle. No sign of that yet.
- Just 5 minutes til showtime.
- 16% m/m on core, just barely pushing y/y to 2.3%, 2.255% to three decimals on the NSA core index…
- Bloomberg being really slow posting subcomponent info.
- Here’s the last 12 core CPIs. Certainly nothing seems terribly alarming here on the surface.
- OK, Bloomberg. Gonna scrape the data myself. BRB.
- Breakevens are unimpressed. 10y breaks were +1 before the number, mostly a reaction to the energy plunge and rebound, and are +0.5 now. But sometimes takes a bit for people to dive into the numbers.
- ..so we see Used cars and trucks are +0.72% m/m, yay! Finally some movement. Still -0.66% y/y, so not showing the inflation of the private surveys. Private surveys have noted some shift in used car composition, and it may be that the BLS just isn’t correcting for that.
- Owners’ Equivalent Rent was +0.25% m/m for the second month in a row, but that caused y/y to decelerate to 3.37% from 3.41%. That’s interesting because last month the rise in OER was a big chunk of the rise that we got so…something else was moving this month.
- Primary Rents also decelerated, to 3.58% from 3.63%. That’s actually lower than the y/y has been for a while as this continued to decelerate. But it’s not going to collapse while housing prices continue to boom.
- Medical Care accelerated further, to 2.45% from 2.38% y/y. That’s not as big a jump as last month, but it’s the right sign. Still low. Pharma retreated a bit but doctor’s services picked up the slack.
- Apparel dropped on the month, pushing y/y down to 0.6% from 1.4%. So canary on core goods is still chirping.
- Bloomberg still hasn’t updated the core goods and core commodities figures…odd. Anyway, they’re -0.2% on core goods (tiny acceleration) and 3.1% on core services (tiny acceleration) on a y/y basis.
- Lodging Away from Home, which surged last month to 4.4% y/y, plunged to 1.6% y/y this month.
- Core ex-shelter rose to 1.41%, highest since mid-2016. That’s still low, but it’s what we want to watch along with core goods. It hasn’t been above 2% since 2012. Hasn’t even been close.
- This is interesting…wireless telephone services inflation is positive. It’s not like that NEVER happens but this time we might go higher. After you go to infinite data…how do you improve quality dramatically? And it’s quality that drives this series lower.
- Core goods’ rise is encouraging for inflation…but still a ways to go before it gets to +1%. However it’s on model at the moment.
- Will have the four-pieces charts in a moment. But while I’m waiting on the calculator…this month’s data is interesting because it was not housing. Some of the rise in core was due to new and used cars rebounding, but not enough to offset the deceleration in housing. >>
- That may mean that inflation is broadening to more categories outside of the ones that have been driving inflation for a while. Core ex-shelter’s rise is something to watch. That’s what inflation actually looks like – it’s not dramatic, and not isolated in a few categories.
- inflation markets are tres unimpressed. 10y breakevens now down on the day.
- We’re not really seeing a broadening in this diffusion measure, so it may just be that the left-tail deflationary stuff is going away. A tightening of the distribution, that is.
- OK four pieces. Piece 1: Food & Energy. Good for owners of TIPS, but mean-reverting so we mostly ignore for forecasting.
- Core goods, Piece 2, I’ve already shown. Rising and will keep rising.
- Piece 3: Core services less rent of shelter. Starting to look interesting. The 3% level is key.
- Piece 4: Rent of Shelter. Still elevated. It’s done the heavy lifting on inflation for a while and probably won’t do much more for a while. Continued acceleration in core will rely on ex-shelter core services, and on core goods. Both of which seem to be rising.
- Bottom lining: Once again, no big surprises here and nothing that will alter the Fed’s trajectory. But the underlying pressures here are pretty clear and show no signs of waning. We are not going to gently converge on 2% core PCE.
- What I said at the beginning remains the key question: are we just going back to the rising – but slowly rising – inflation trend from 2014-2017, or will we start to accelerate above that trend?
- Acceleration above that trend would be very concerning, unless it was caused by one-offs (like cell phones and other one-offs caused the 2017 departure on the downside). It would indicate that inflation has moved into a self-reinforcing phase.
- I suspect that’s where we are headed. But so far, the evidence that we are there doesn’t exist (there’s no contrary evidence either – it’s just unknown at this point).
- Early look at median…my estimate is 0.23% m/m. If I am right, this takes the y/y to 2.80%. This will be really dramatic!
Tariffs Do Not Cause Price Declines
Adding to a good’s price does not make its price decline.
It’s worth repeating that a couple of times, because it seems to be getting lost in the discussion about tariffs – in particular, in the discussion about tariffs levied on US commodities. Grains prices have been plummeting, as the chart below showing front corn and soybean prices (source: Bloomberg) illustrates.
There are many reasons that grains prices may be declining, but if “tariffs have been levied on US production” is one of them then there is some really weird economics happening. Corn and soybeans are commodities. Specifically, this means that they are essentially fungible – corn from site “A” is essentially the same as corn from site “B.” So what does this mean for the results of a tariff?
If China stops buying soybeans from the US altogether, it means that unless they’re going to stop eating soybeans they will buy soybeans from Brazil. But if Brazil sells all of their soybeans to China, it means that Germany can no longer soybeans from Brazil. So where does Germany buy its soybeans from? Well, it seems that the US has beans that are not spoken for in this scenario…in other words, when we are talking about commodities a tariff mostly just reorganizes the list of who is buying from whom. If soybean prices are falling because China isn’t buying our soybeans, it means a great deal for Russia or Germany or whoever else is going to buy beans from us instead of from China’s new supplier. More than that, if global soybeans prices are falling because of tariffs then it means that everyone is getting cheaper soybeans because China is changing who they’re buying from. If that’s the case, then we really need to slap tariffs on everything and watch prices decline!
Let’s go back to elementary microeconomics. Adding a tariff is reflected in our product market supply and demand curves as a shift in the supply curve to the left: the quantity that producers are willing to supply at any price declines, because the price to the producer declines. Put a different way, the market price required to induce any particular quantity supplied rises by the amount of the tariff. Now, whether that causes market prices to rise a lot or a little, or quantity supplied to fall by a lot or a little, depends on the elasticities of supply and demand. If demand if fairly inelastic (which seems reasonable – you may be able to substitute for “beans” but it’s hard to substitute for “grains”), then you will see more of a price response than a quantity response, at least in the short run where the supply of beans is fairly inelastic. But that price response is up, not down.
By the way, this gets a little hard to illustrate with supply and demand curves, because with a tariff what you have are now two separate markets and separate prices for the same good. This is what confuses some people – if China is no longer buying from the US, doesn’t that mean that demand for US beans has declined, and therefore prices should decline? The crucial point is that we are talking here about commodity goods, and supplies are fairly interchangeable. If we are talking about Harley Davidson motorcycles, the answer is different because if Europe stops buying Harleys, they have to buy a different product altogether. In that case, the global price of “motorcycles” might be relatively unaffected, but the price of Harleys will rise (and the output decline) relative to other motorcycles. So, a tariff on Harley-Davidson motorcycles definitely hurts the US, but a tariff on soybeans – or even “US soybeans” since that is not a universal distinction – should have virtually no effect on US producers. And certainly, no effect on the global price of soybeans.
There are other reasons that grains prices may be declining. Since Brazil is a major producer of beans, the sharp decline in the Brazilian Real has pushed the US dollar price of beans lower (see chart, source Bloomberg). In the chart below, the currency is shown in Reals per dollar, and inverted. This is a much more important factor explaining the decline in grains prices, as well as one that could easily get worse before it gets better.
I think the discussion of the effects of tariffs has gotten a bit polluted since the decline in grains seems to coincide with the announcement of tariffs from China. I think the price decline here has fed that story, but it’s bad economics. Piecemeal tariffs on commodity products are not likely to appreciably change the supply and demand outcome, although it will result in rearranging the sources of product for different countries. Tariffs on non-commodity product, especially branded products with few close substitutes, can have much larger effects – although we ought to remember that from the consumer’s perspective (and in the measurement of consumer inflation), tariffs never lower prices faced by consumers although they can lower prices received by producers. This is why tariffs are bad – they cause higher prices and lower output, and the best case is no real change.
DISCLOSURE: Quantitative/systematic funds managed by Enduring Investments have both long and short positions in grains, and in particular long positions in Beans and Corn, this month.
