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A More Optimistic Outlook for Gold? Or Not?
Something interesting has been happening in gold over the last decade.
I know that sounds strange, but what has been happening is interesting in a very specific way: gold has been outperforming a priori expectations for returns, by a significant margin. So far, that’s still not very interesting since just about every asset class has been outperforming a priori expectations for returns for quite a while. That’s what excess liquidity provision will do (and is supposed to do), after all. But what’s interesting about gold is that for a very long time the relationship between the starting real price of gold and the subsequent real return has been very strong, and it still is – but the relationship seems to have shifted.
Naturally, the key to good long-term returns is buying at low prices and selling at high prices. But the question of what “high” and “low” prices are is the squishy part. In gold, though, it turns out that going back for quite a while the subsequent real return to gold has been strikingly regular. The chart below is snipped from Erb and Harvey’s “The Golden Dilemma,” an excellent paper published in 2013. It shows the subsequent 10-year annualized after-inflation return to gold, as a function of its starting real price (defined by E&H here as simply the gold price divided by the CPI Index).
The chart below shows this relationship as I’ve recreated it, but putting the prices relative to the current spot price (that is, adjusting past prices by the ratio of the current CPI price level index to the CPI Index at that time). This is for periods starting 1975-2000 and ending therefore 1985-2010. Unsurprisingly, it matches Erb & Harvey except for the different ending point, and the choice of how the x-axis is represented. I’ve also drawn a log regression line here. Obviously there should be a bit more curvature to the line but you get the idea. It’s a pretty decent fit: tell me the starting price in today’s dollars and I can give you a pretty accurate guess at the future real return. Lower prices lead to better subsequent real returns. The current price, though (where the vertical line is drawn), is not encouraging.
But here’s where the interesting part comes in. The next 10 years’ worth of starting points and ending points, after those plotted above, still fall on a very nice curve. But the curve is a lot higher.
This is much more encouraging! Whereas the original curve suggested that the expected real return to gold, starting from the current price, is presently about -8% per annum, the more recent curve suggests that the expectation should be roughly a 0% real return. That is, gold ought to approximately keep up with the price level. The curve in red is also more encouraging in that it suggests that while you can have great real returns by buying gold when it occasionally gets quite cheap, it shouldn’t drastically underperform inflation even when it gets kinda expensive. That’s great news for owners of gold, if we can believe it.
I have one mild concern, though – what caused this shift in curves? Clearly, gold has done wonderfully since 2001 partly because it started at a very low real price but also partly because the tremendous liquidity that has been a feature of the financial landscape for the last 13 years (at least) has raised all “real” boats. Because it turns out that gold – moreso than a lot of other commodities – also reacts fairly directly to real interest rates. In a study that we did as part of our work with Simplify Asset Management, we found that for one-year horizons gold has approximately 4 times as much duration with respect to real interest rates than it does to the price level, and the delta to the 10-year real interest rate is about 10x. That is, if real interest rates drop 1%, then that effect alone will influence gold to rise about 10%.
Thus, at least some of what is happening here is that the ‘new curve’ reflects the steady decline in 10-year real interest rates since the late 1990s, from a bit above 4% to the neighborhood of -1% now. Given the (current) starting real price of gold, our expectation for gold’s return over the next decade is that it should be roughly equal to the aggregate inflation over that time frame. The caveat, though, is significant. If real interest rates rise during that time, then gold will probably underperform inflation. Only if real interest rates fall appreciably further – which seems unlikely – can we concoct a scenario where we would think a priori that gold should beat inflation comfortably. And that means that even if you think the red dots in the plot above are a better basis for a forecast, the net message should still not be overly bullish for gold. The most optimistic guess would be that gold’s return equals the change in CPI, unless interest rates collapse further.
However, that circumstance is not damning to gold alone; just about every asset class is subject to the same law of liquidity/gravity. Take away liquidity, and real interest rates tend to rise. Take away liquidity, and prices of all sorts of assets decline – to some level where they’ll offer a better future return from a lower starting price.
Some Thoughts on Gold, Real Yields, and Inflation
TIPS-style inflation-linked bonds (more properly known as Canadian-style) pay a fixed coupon on a principal amount that varies with the price level. In this way, the real value of the principal is protected (you always get back an amount of principal that’s indexed to the price level, floored in the case of TIPS at the original nominal value), and the real value of the coupon is protected since a constant percentage of a principal that is varying with the price level is also varying with the price level. This clever construction means that “inflation-linked” bonds can be thought of as simply bonds that pay fixed amounts in real space.
I have illustrated this in the past with a picture of a hypothetical “cake bond,” which pays in units of pastry. The coupons are all constant-sized cupcakes (although the dollar value of those cupcakes will change over time), and you get a known-sized cake at the end (although the dollar value of that cake might be a lot higher). That’s exactly what a TIPS bond is essentially accomplishing, although instead of cupcakes you get a coupon called money, which you can exchange for a cupcake. This is a useful characteristic of money, that it can be exchanged for cupcakes.
The beauty of this construction is that these real values can be discounted using real yields, and all of the usual bond mathematics work just perfectly without having to assume any particular inflation rate. So you can always find the nominal price of a TIPS bond if you know the real price…but you don’t need the nominal price or a nominal yield to calculate its real value. In real space, it’s fully specified. The only thing which changes the real price of a real bond is the real yield.
All TIPS have coupons. Many of them have quite small coupons, just like Treasuries, but they all have coupons. So in the cake bond, they’re paying very small constant cupcakes, but still a stream of cupcakes. What if, though, the coupon was zero? Then you’d simply have a promise that at some future date, you’d get a certain amount of cake (or, equivalently, enough money to buy that certain amount of cake).
Of course, it doesn’t have to be cake. It can be anything whose price over a long period of time varies more or less in line with the price level. Such as, for example, gold. Over a very long period of time, the price of gold is pretty convincingly linked to the price level, and since there is miniscule variation in the industrial demand for gold or the production of new gold in response to price – it turns out to look very much like a long-duration zero-coupon real bond.
And that, mathematically, is where we start to run into problems with a zero-coupon perpetuity, especially with yields around zero.
[If you’re not a bond geek you might want to skip this section.] The definition of Macaulay duration is the present-value-weighted average time periods to maturity. But if there is only one “payment,” and it is received “never,” then the Macaulay duration is the uncomfortable ∞. That’s not particularly helpful. Nor is the mathematical definition of Modified duration, which is Macaulay Duration / (1+r), since we have infinity in the numerator. Note to self: a TIPS’ modified duration at a very low coupon and a negative real yield can actually be longer than the Macaulay duration, and in fact in theory can be longer than the maturity of the bond. Mind blown. Anyway, this is why the concept of ‘value’ in commodities is elusive. With no cash flows, what is present value? How do you discount corn? Yield means something different in agriculture…
This means that we are more or less stuck evaluating the empirical duration of gold, but without a real strong mathematical intuition. But what we think we know is that gold acts like a real bond (a zero coupon TIPS bond that pays in units of gold), which means that the real price of gold ought to be closely related to real yields. And, in fact, we find this to be true. The chart below relates the real price of gold versus the level of 10-year real yields since TIPS were issued in 1997. The gold price is deflated by the CPI relative to the current CPI (so that the current price is the current price, and former prices seem higher than they were in nominal space).
When we run this as a regression, we get a coefficient that suggests a 1% change in real yields produces a 16.6% change in the real price of gold (a higher yield leads to a lower gold price), with a strong r-squared of 0.82. This is consistent with our intuition that gold should act as a fairly long-duration TIPS bond. Of course, this regression only covers a period of low inflation generally; when we do the same thing for different regimes we find that the real gold price is not quite as well-behaved – after all, consider that real gold prices were very high in the early 1980s, along with real yields. If gold is a real bond, then this doesn’t make a lot of sense; it implies the real yield of gold was very low at the same time that real yields of dollars were very high.
Although perhaps that isn’t as nonsensical as it seems. For, back in 1980, inflation-linked bonds didn’t exist and it may be that gold traded at a large premium because it was one of the few ways to get protection against price level changes. Would it be so surprising in that environment for gold to trade at a very low “gold real yield” when the alternative wasn’t investible? It turns out that during the period up until 1997, the real price of gold was also positively related to the trailing inflation rate. That sounds like it makes sense, but it really doesn’t. We are already deflating the price of gold by inflation – why would a bond that is already immunized (in theory) against price level changes also respond to inflation? It shouldn’t.
And yet, that too is less nonsensical as it seems. We see a similar effect in TIPS today. Big inflation numbers shouldn’t move TIPS higher; rather, they should move nominal bonds lower. TIPS are immunized against inflation! And yet, TIPS most definitely respond when the CPI prints surprise.
(This is a type of money illusion, by which I mean that we are all trained to think in nominal space and not real space. So we think of higher inflation leading to TIPS paying out “more money”, which means they should be worth more, right? Except that the additional amount of dollars they are paying out is exactly offset by the decline in the value of the unit of payment. So inflation does nothing to the real return of TIPS. Meanwhile, your fixed payment in nominal bonds is worth less, since the unit of payment is declining in value. Although this is obviously so, this ‘error’ and others like it – e.g. Modigliani’s insistence that equity multiples should not vary with inflation since they are paying a stream of real income – have been documented for a half century.)
For now, then, we can think of gold as having a very large real duration, along with a price-level duration of roughly one (that is just saying that the concept of a real price of gold is meaningful). Which means that higher inflation is actually potentially dangerous for gold, given low current real yields, if inflation causes yields (including real yields) to rise, and also means that gold bugs should cheer along with stock market bulls for yield curve control in that circumstance. Inflation indeed makes strange bedfellows.
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.
Gold and TIPS – Related or Not?
Because I spend so much time digging into inflation data and learning about how inflation works (and how securities and markets work, in different inflation regimes), I am always delighted when I come across something new, especially something simple and new that I could have previously stumbled on, but didn’t.
Recently, a friend sent me a link to an article by Scott Grannis (aka Calafia Beach Pundit). I occasionally read Scott’s stuff, and find it to be good quality. I’m not writing this article to either criticize or support most of his column, but rather to point to one particular chart he ran that amazed me. Specifically, he showed the 5-year TIPS yield against the nominal price of gold. Here is his chart:
He also showed the price of gold versus TIPS on a longer-term basis. I’ve replicated that here, although I’ve deflated gold by the CPI since the longer the time frame, the less the nominal price of gold will resemble its real price. It’s still basically the same picture:
This is an amazing chart, even allowing for the divergence in the 2000s (which some people would call prima facie evidence that the Fed eased too much back then). And it just tickles me because I’ve never noticed the correlation at all, and yet it’s really quite good. But here’s the really amazing part: there is no immediately obvious reason these two series should be related at all.
One of them is a price index. In Scott’s version, which isn’t adjusted for inflation, it should march upward to the right forever as long as the general price level continues to rise. Obviously, real yields will not march ever lower forever. When we adjust for the general level of prices, the real price of gold should, like real yields, oscillate (since the long-term real return to gold is approximately zero) so we have removed the tendency for nominal prices (unlike yields) to have a natural drift. But even in real terms, apples-to-apples, it’s an astonishing chart. What this chart seems to say is that when expected growth is poor, gold is worth more and when expected growth is strong, gold is less valuable. But that seems a bit crazy to me.
Okay, one possible interpretation is this: when expected returns from other asset classes such as stocks and bonds and inflation-linked bonds are low, then the expected return from gold should also be low, which means its price should be high. That makes sense, although it is hard to find many gold investors who think as I do that the expected forward-looking real return to gold right now is negative. Heck, I wrote about that last month (see “The Gold Price is Not ‘Too Low’”). It makes some sense, though. But the implication is that as inflation rises, and yields – both real and nominal – rise, then gold prices should fall. I think you’d discover it difficult to find an investor in gold who would think the gold price should fall if inflation picks up!
Where you would think to see more of a relationship is in inflation expectations versus gold. When inflation expectations are high, you’d think you would see gold prices high and vice-versa. But that chart has really nothing suggestive at all, possibly since inflation expectations have really been fairly grounded for the last twenty years. Gold prices, however, have not!
So going back to the original Grannis chart, I am still very suspicious. Fortunately, some time ago we developed a very long history of real interest rates, using a more advanced approach than had previously been applied (you can see the long-term series in this article). That series is derived, rather than observed as the TIPS series is, but it’s probably pretty close to where TIPS yields might have traded had they existed during that period. And when we look at real gold prices versus 5y TIPS yields…
…we get a pretty disappointing chart. What I see is that in the 1970s and early 1980s, high gold prices were associated with high real yields; in the 2000s and 2010s, a high gold price was associated with low real yields.
So, this is a bit of a bummer in one sense but a relief in another sense. That initial chart suggested some very weird dynamics happening between real yields, inflation expectations, and the price of a real commodity. I think this latter chart indicates that the relationship we saw was not some fundamental previously-undiscovered truth – sadly, I guess – but rather something more prosaic: an illustration of how the relative values of all assets tend to move more or less together. TIPS are expensive. Bonds are expensive. Stocks are expensive. Gold is expensive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that tells us a lot that we didn’t already know (although I have strong opinions about the relative ordering of the richness/cheapness of those asset classes).
The Gold Price is Not ‘Too Low’
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Before I start today’s article, let me say that I don’t like to write about gold. The people who are perennially gold bulls are crazy in a way that is unlike the people who are perennial equity bulls (Abby Joseph Cohen) or perennial bond bulls (Hoisington). They will cut you.
That being said, they are also pretty amusing.
To listen to a gold bull, you would think that no matter where gold is priced, it is a safe haven. Despite the copious evidence of history that says gold can go up and down, certain of the gold bulls believe that when “the Big One” hits, gold will be the most prized asset in the world. Of course, there are calmer gold bulls also but they are similarly dismissive of any notion that gold can be expensive.
The argument that gold is valuable simply because it is acceptable as money, and money that is not under control of a central bank, is vacuous. Lots of commodities are not under the control of a central bank. Moreover, like any other asset in the world gold can be expensive when it costs too much of other stuff to acquire it, and it can be cheap when it costs lots less to acquire.
I saw somewhere recently a chart that said “gold may be forming a major bottom,” which I thought was interesting because of some quantitative analysis that we do regularly (indeed, daily) on commodities. Here is one of the charts, approximately, that the analyst used to make this argument:
I guess, for context, I should back up a little bit and show that chart from a longer-term perspective. From this angle, it doesn’t look quite like a “major bottom,” but maybe that’s just me.
So which is it? Is gold cheap, or expensive? Erb and Harvey a few years ago noticed that the starting real price of gold (that is, gold deflated by the price index) turned out to be strikingly predictive of the future real return of holding (physical) gold. This should not be terribly shocking – although it is hard to persuade equity investors today that the price at which they buy stocks may affect their future returns – but it was a pretty amazing chart that they showed. Here is a current version of the chart (source: Enduring Investments LLC):
The vertical line represents the current price of gold (all historical gold prices are adjusted by the CPI relative to today’s CPI and the future 10-year real return calculated to derive this curve). It suggests that the future real return for gold over the next decade should be around -7% per annum. Now, that doesn’t mean the price of gold will fall – the real return could be this bad if gold prices have already adjusted for an inflationary future that now unfolds but leaves the gold price unaffected (since it is already impounded in current prices). Or, some of each.
Actually, that return is somewhat better than if you attempt to fit a curve to the data because the data to the left of the line is steeper than the data to the right of the line. Fitting a curve, you’d see more like -9% per annum. Ouch!
In case you don’t like scatterplots, here is the same data in a rolling-10-year form. In both cases, with this chart and the prior chart, be careful: the data is fit to the entire history, so there is nothing held ‘out of sample.’ In other words, “of course the curve fits, because we took pains to fit it.”
But that’s not necessarily a damning statement. The reason we tried to fit this curve in the first place is because it makes a priori sense that the starting price of an asset is related to its subsequent return. Whether the precise functional form of the relationship will hold in the future is uncertain – in fact, it almost certainly will not hold exactly. But I’m comfortable, looking at this data, in making the more modest statement that the price of gold is more likely to be too high to offer promising future returns than it is too low and likely to provide robust real returns in the future.
TIPS and Gold – Cousins, Not Brothers
A longtime reader (and friend) today forwarded me a chart from a well-known technical analyst showing the recent correlation between TIPS (via the TIP ETF) and gold; the analyst also argued that the rising gold price may be boosting TIPS. I’ve replicated the chart he showed, more or less (source: Bloomberg).
Ordinarily, I would cite the analyst directly, but in this case since I’m essentially calling him out I thought it might be rude to do so! His mistake is a pretty common one, after all. And, in fact, I am going to use it to illustrate an important point about TIPS.
The chart shows a great correlation between TIPS and gold, especially since the beginning of the year. But here’s the problem with drawing the conclusion that rising inflation fears are boosting TIPS – TIPS are not exposed to inflation.
Bear with me, because this is a key point about TIPS that is widely misunderstood. Recall that nominal interest rates represent two things: first, an amount that represents the return, in real terms, that the lender needs to realize in order to defer consumption and instead lend to the borrower. This is called the real interest rate. The second component of the nominal interest rate represents the compensation the lender demands for the fact that he will be paid back in dollars that (in normal times) will be able to buy less. This is the inflation compensation.[1] Irving Fisher said that nominal interest rates are approximately equal to the sum of these two components, or
n ≈ r + i
where n is the nominal interest rate, r is the real interest rate, and i is the inflation compensation.[2]
In a world without TIPS, you can only trade nominal bonds, which means you can only access the whole package and nominal interest rates may change when real rates change, expected inflation changes, or both change. (And when interest rates are negative, this leads to weird theoretical implications – see my recent and fun post on the topic.) Thus changes in real interest rates and changes in expected inflation affect nominal bonds, and roughly equally at that.
But once you introduce TIPS, then you can now separate out the pieces. By buying TIPS, you can isolate the real interest rate; and by trading a long/short package of TIPS and nominal bonds (or by trading an inflation swap) you can isolate the inflation expectations. This is a huge advance in interest rate management, because an investor is no longer constrained to own a fixed-income portfolio where his exposure to changes in real rates happens to be equal to his exposure to changes in inflation expectations. Siegel and Waring made this argument in a famous paper called TIPS, the Dual Duration, and the Pension Plan in 2004,[3] although it should be noted that inflation derivatives books were already being managed using this insight by then.
Which leads me in a roundabout way to the point I originally wanted to make: if you own TIPS, then you have no exposure to changes in inflation expectations except inasmuch as there is a (very unstable) correlation between real rates and expected inflation. If inflation expectations change, TIPS will not move unless real rates change.[4]
So, if gold prices are rising and TIPS prices are rising, it isn’t because inflation expectations are rising. In fact, if inflation expectations are rising it is more likely that real yields would also be rising, since those two variables tend to be positively correlated. In fact, real yields have been falling, which is why TIP is rising. The first chart in this article, then, shows a correlation between rising inflation expectations (in gold) and declining real interest rates, which is certainly interesting but not what the author thought he was arguing. It’s interesting because it’s unusual and represents a recovery of TIPS from very, very cheap levels compared to nominal bonds, as I pointed out in January in a piece entitled (argumentatively) “No Strategic Reason to Own Nominal Bonds Now.”
Actually (and the gold bugs will kill me), gold has really outstripped where we would expect it to go, given where inflation expectations have gone. The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows the front gold contract again, but this time instead of TIP I have shown it against 10-year breakevens.
No, I don’t hate gold, or apple pie, or America. Actually, I think the point of the chart is different. I think gold is closer to “right” here, and breakevens still have quite far to go – eventually. The next 50bps will be harder, though!
[1] I abstract here from the third component that some believe exists systematically, and that is a premium for the uncertainty of inflation. I have never really understood why the lender needed to be compensated for this but the borrower did not; uncertainty of the real value of the repayment is bad for both borrower and lender. I believe this is an error, and interestingly it’s always been very hard for researchers to prove this value is always present and positive.
[2] It’s technically (1+n)=(1+r)(1+i), but for normal levels of these variables the difference is minute. It matters for risk management, however, of large portfolios.
[3] I expanded this in a much less-famous paper called TIPS, the Triple Duration, and the OPEB Liability: Hedging Medical Care Inflation in OPEB Plans in 2011.
[4] What the heck, one more footnote. I had a conversation once with the Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Markets, who was a bit TIPS booster. I told him that TIPS would never truly have the success they deserve unless the Treasury starts calling ‘regular’ bonds “Treasury Inflation-Exposed Securities,” which after all gets to the heart of the matter. He was not particularly amused.
Commodities Beat-Down Continues
The recent commodities sell-off has been breathtaking. This is especially true since the most-recent downturn occurred from a level where the expected future returns from commodity index investment were reasonably good – and, as a spread above expected equity or bond returns, probably around the best levels ever.
But investors have a strong tendency to use the current level, rather than some esoteric measure of value, as the level from which expected market moves are evaluated. What I mean by that is this: in theory, if some event happens in the capital markets, the reaction in the market should depend on whether that event has already been “discounted” in the current price. That is, if we are all expecting Microsoft to raise its dividend, then the price of Microsoft should reflect that change already, and when it subsequently actually happens it should have no effect on price. Indeed, if the market has overestimated the change in fundamental value, then the price of Microsoft should retrace somewhat when the news is actually announced. From that, we get the old saw that one should “buy the rumor, sell the news.”
The fact that this isn’t really what happens is not exactly news. In the early 1980s, Bob Shiller demonstrated that the volatility in the equity marketplace was much greater than the changes in the real underlying values should support.
In practice, investors don’t behave rationally. The same event can be discounted over, and over, and over again. Each investor, it seems, hears news and assumes the current price does not incorporate that news, no matter what has happened previously to the price. Based on my own unscientific observation, I think this is more true now that there are more retail investors, and news outlets that benefit from making everything sound like new information. If my supposition is true, one implication is that markets can deviate further and further from fundamental values. In other words, we get more bubbles and inverse bubbles than we would otherwise.
As a great current example, we might consider commodities. The slowdown in China’s economic activity is discounted anew almost every day, as more information comes out from that country that its economic engine is (at least) sputtering. One would think that China was the only consumer of industrial metals and energy, and that its consumption is going to zero, based on the behavior of these markets. And with every tick higher in the dollar, every commodity seems offered. It’s risk-off, then risk-off again, then risk-off again, ad infinitum.
Now, there is no doubt that commodities in 2008 were overvalued, and arguably in 2011 they were also expensive. But the four-year beat-down of commodities – pretty much the only asset class that has declined in value over that time period – is breathtaking in its depth and, as it turns out, its breadth. I was curious about whether the recent break of major commodities indices to new lows – below the lows of 2008, when it felt like the world was ending (see chart above, source Bloomberg) – was broader, in that it seemed like every commodity was participating. So I put together a chart that shows the proportion of commodities (considering only the 27 major traded commodities that are in the Bloomberg Commodity Index) that were above their 200-day moving averages. The chart is below (Source: Enduring Investments).
It isn’t quite as bad as I had thought. The recent slide has taken the proportion back to 18% (meaning 82% are below their 200-day moving averages), but commodity prices have been sliding for so long that the 200-day averages are now generally declining pretty smartly. Notice in general the post-2011 average, compared to the pre-2008 average. Even without seeing the price chart, you can tell the 2011-2015 bear market from the 2002-2008 bull market!
One other observation about commodities, to be fair. The chart I showed, above, of the Bloomberg Commodity Index, incorporates carry in commodities. That is, it adds the futures roll, and collateral return, to the movement in spot commodities. Over the last few years, the collateral return hasn’t been very good and the roll return has actually been substantially negative, so that the return of spot commodities has in fact been better than the return to commodity indices. The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows the Bloomberg Spot Commodity Index; you can see that we are still above the 2008 lows.
Being “above the 2008 lows” doesn’t strike me as a strong performance. Stocks are also above the 2008-09 lows, by 200% or so. LQD, the investment-grade bond ETF, is about 45% higher. HYG, the high-yield ETF, is 41% higher. Heck, M2 money supply is around 50% higher than it was in early 2009.
And yet, every time we hear more news about China, investors behave as if it is new information, and sell commodities off some more. As I said above, these moves can last longer these days than they did in the past – but this is unsustainable. With commodities, an added complexity is that investors don’t know how to evaluate expected return (since there are no cash flows), and so it is hard for them to compare “value” to other asset classes. But the value is there.
Proper Seasonal Gold Chart
In an excellent (and free!) daily email I receive, the Daily Shot, I ran across a chart that touched off my quant BS alert.
This chart is from here, and is obviously a few years out-of-date, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that the chart suggests that gold prices rise 5.5% every year. If you buy gold in January, at an index value of 100, and hold it through the flat part of January-June, then you reap the 5% rally in the second half of the year.
No wonder people love gold! You can get a 10% annual return simply by buying in July and selling in December!
The problem is that this is not the way you should do a seasonal chart. It has not be detrended. We detrend data because that way, we can express the expected return for any given day as (the normal expected return) plus (the seasonal component). This is valuable because, as analysts, we might have a general forecast for gold but we will want to adjust that forecast to a holding period return based on a seasonal pattern. This is very important, for example, with TIPS yields and breakevens, because inflation itself is highly seasonal.
Now, the seasonal chart done correctly still suggests that the best time to own gold is in the second half of the year, but it no longer suggests that owning gold is an automatic winner. (It is a separate argument whether we can reject the null hypothesis of zero seasonality altogether, but that’s not my point here).
If I was doing this chart, I would also include only full calendar years, so if I move the start date back to January 1, 1982 and the end date to December 31, 2014 here is what I get:
Frankly, I would also use real prices rather than nominal prices, since it is much easier to make a statement about the expected real return to gold (roughly zero over time, although it may be more or less than that based on current valuation metrics) than it is to make a statement about the expected nominal return to gold, since the latter includes an embedded assumption about the inflation rate, which I would prefer to strip out. And I would also include data from the 1970s.
Commodities Re-Thunk
I want to talk about commodities today.
To be sure, I have talked a lot about commodities over the last year. Below I reprise one of the charts I have run in the past (source: Bloomberg), which shows that commodities are incredibly cheap compared to the GDP-adjusted quantity of money. It was a great deal, near all-time lows this last summer…until it started creating new lows.
Such an analysis makes sense. The relative prices of two items are at least somewhat related to their relative scarcities. We will trade a lot of sand for one diamond, because there’s a lot of sand and very few diamonds. But if diamonds suddenly rained down from the sky for some reason, the price of diamonds relative to sand would plummet. We would see this as a decline in the dollar price of diamonds relative to the dollar price of sand, which would presumably be stable, but the dollar in such a case plays only the role of a “unit of account” to compare these two assets. The price of diamonds falls, in dollars, because there are lots more diamonds and no change in the amount of dollars. But if the positions were reversed, and there were lots more dollars, then the price of dollars should fall relative to the price of diamonds. We call that inflation. And that’s the reasoning behind this chart: over a long period of time, nominal commodities prices should grow with as the number of dollars increases.
Obviously, this has sent a poor signal for a while, and I have been looking for some other reasonable way to compute the expected return on commodities.[1] Some time ago, I ran across an article by Erb and Harvey called The Golden Dilemma (I first mentioned it in this article). In it was a terrific chart (their Exhibit 5) which showed that the current real price of gold – simply, gold divided by the CPI price index – is a terrific predictor of the subsequent 10-year real return to gold. That chart is approximately reproduced, albeit updated, below. The data in my case spans 1975-present.
The vertical line indicates the current price of gold (I’ve normalized the whole series so that the x-axis is in 2015 dollars). And the chart indicates that over the next ten years, you can expect something like a -6% annualized real return to a long-only position in gold. Now, that might happen as a result of heavy inflation that gold doesn’t keep up with, so that the nominal return to gold might still beat other asset classes. But it would seem to indicate that it isn’t a great time to buy gold for the long-term.
This chart was so magnificent and made so much sense – essentially, this is a way to think about the “P/E ratio” for a commodity” that I wondered if it generalized to other commodities. The answer is that it does quite well, although in the case of many commodities we don’t have enough history to fill out a clean curve. No commodities work as well as does gold; I attribute this to the role that gold has historically played in investors’ minds as an inflation hedge. But for example, look at Wheat (I am using data 1970-present).
There is lots of data on agricultural commodities, because we’ve been trading them lots longer. By contrast, Comex Copper only goes back to 1988 or so:
Copper arguably is still somewhat expensive, although over the next ten years we will probably see the lower-right portion of this chart fill in (since we have traded higher prices, but only within the last ten years so we can’t plot the subsequent return).
Now the one I know you’re waiting for: Crude oil. It’s much sloppier (this is 1983-present, by the way), but encouraging in that it suggests from these prices crude oil ought to at least keep up with inflation over the next decade. But do you know anyone who is playing oil for the next decade?
For the sake of space, here is a table of 27 tradable commodities and the best-fit projection for their next 10 years of real returns. Note that most of these fit a logarithmic curve pretty reasonably; Gold is rather the exception in that the historical record is more convex (better expectation from these levels than a pure fit would indicate; see above).
I thought it was worth looking at in aggregate, so the chart below shows the average projected returns (calculated using only the data available at each point) versus the actual subsequent real returns of the S&P GSCI Excess Return index which measures only the return of the front futures contract.
The fit is probably better in reality, because the actual returns are the actual returns of the commodities which were in the index at the time, which kept changing. At the beginning of our series, for example, I am projecting returns for 20 commodities but the 10-year return compares an index that has 20 commodities in 1998 to one that has 26 in 2008. Also, I simply equal-weighted the index while the S&P GSCI is production-weighted. And so on. But the salient point is that investing in spot commodities has been basically not pretty for a while, with negative expected real returns for the spot commodities (again, note that investing in commodity indices adds a collateral return plus an estimate 3-4% rebalancing return over time to these spot returns).
Commodities are, no surprise, cheaper than they have been in a long while. But what is somewhat surprising is that, compared to the first chart in this article, commodities don’t look nearly as cheap. What does that mean?
The first chart in this article compares commodities to the quantity of money; the subsequent charts compare commodities to the price level. In short, the quantity of money is much higher than has historically been consistent with this price level. This makes commodities divided by M2 look much better than commodities divided by the price level. But it merely circles back to what we already knew – that monetary velocity is very low. If money velocity were to return to historical norms, then both of these sets of charts would show a similar story with respect to valuation. The price level would be higher, making the real price of commodities even lower unless they adjusted upwards as well. (This is, in fact, what I expect will eventually happen).
So which method would I tend to favor, to consider relative value in commodities? Probably the one I have detailed here. There is one less step involved. If it turns out that velocity reverts higher, then it is likely that commodities real returns will be better than projected by this method; but this approach ignores that question.
Even so, a projected real return now of -2% to spot commodities, plus a collateral return equal to about 1.9% (the 10-year note rate) and a rebalancing return of 3-4% produces an expected real return of 2.9%-3.9% over the next decade. This is low, and lower than I have been using as my assumption for a while, but it is far higher than the expected real returns available in equities of around 1.2% annualized, and it has upside risk if money velocity does in fact mean-revert.
I will add one final point. This column is never meant to be a “timing” column. I am a value guy, which means I am always seen to be wrong at the time (and often reviled, which goes with the territory of being a contrarian). This says absolutely nothing about what the returns to commodities will be over the next month and very little about returns over the next year. But this analysis is useful for comparing other asset classes on similar long-term horizons, and for using useful projections of expected real returns in asset allocation exercises.
[1] In what follows, I will focus on the expected return to individual spot commodities. But remember that an important part of the expected return to commodity indices is in rebalancing and collateral return. Physical commodities should have a zero (or less) real return over time, but commodity indices still have a significantly positive return.
Big Trade, Little Door
In ordinary times, the terrorist attack at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (officials are being careful not to call it “terrorism,” but I’m not an official so I can operate in the reality sphere) would absolutely trump anything that happened in the markets today and, in fact, would likely have been the cause of any market movement that actually occurred. That’s because most of the time markets echo the framework of the rest of reality: most of the universe is space, and most market activity is just empty noise.
This is the reason that traders who are continuously transacting in the markets are called “noise traders.”
But on Monday, there was plenty of market action and it had nothing to do with Boston, nor with the slightly-earlier ultimatum from North Korea to South Korea, which stated that military action would “start immediately.” (N.b.: There were many losers today, but one of them surely must be reckoned as Kim Jong-un. A tin-pot dictator makes a threat, and is almost immediately knocked off the front page of the New York Times by events in Boston. That must really annoy him.)
Before the attack in Boston, however, there was already plenty of financial pain. The carnage in the precious metals pits came right on cue after the negative sell-side reports of late last week had a chance to work on the psyches of investors. Gold fell 10%, and silver nearly 14%. This represents the worst two-day fall in gold in thirty years. And, while yesterday I pointed out that the commodity “super-cycle” certainly doesn’t look like one, I can understand how the picture of gold in real terms looks like it may be completing something big (see chart of gold expressed in December 2012 dollars using CPI, source Bloomberg).
There is considerable concern tonight that these losses may provoke selling in related markets as investors raise funds to meet margin calls. This is possible, although significant thumpings in the past in precious metals (it isn’t like this is the first time we’ve seen volatility in a commodity) didn’t provoke dramatic related-market action. To be sure, the avalanche is much more loaded now than it has been in the past, with equity markets sharply overvalued and investors already reaching a level of disgust with commodities. But I don’t think it goes too far. (Those may be my famous last words!)
What happened in gold and silver is a function of the big trade/little door syndrome, more than anything else. News outlets blamed the weak data yesterday in the U.S. and the small miss in Chinese GDP (7.7% versus 8.0% expected, but keep in mind that we all know these are made-up numbers) for setting off the wave of selling, but that’s just the latest straw. The break of technical levels on Friday, combined with the suddenly-burning desire of hedgies to not be the last one through the little door, is what led to such a dramatic move today. It may well continue until everyone who wants to get through the little door has done so. Or, it may not – but I would admonish an investor who wants to buy gold here to think like a trader rather than a playground monitor: don’t try to break up the fight. If the hedgies want to eat each other in a fight to get to the door, let them.
And, incidentally, remember that the big trade/little door syndrome is not limited to gold and silver. Think about equity exposures too. If you’re long by policy, fine. But if you’re long stocks and feeling uncomfortable about it, then “sell down to the sleeping point” at least.
The irony of the timing of the gold rout is potentially juicy, with CPI tomorrow. The decline in precious metals is happening partly because so many investors are abruptly convinced that inflation has truly been defeated. It is incredible to me that this belief is so widespread, but perhaps this is the sine qua non for the next washout in financial markets and the setup for the long-awaited up-move in commodities (for, although the “super-cycle” is evidently just now ending according to some observers, commodities prices have been in general decline for the last two years).
Growth is falling short of expectations, but that doesn’t have any implications for inflation. Tomorrow’s CPI is forecast to be flat and +0.2% on core, holding core inflation constant at 2.0%. Sentiment appears to be favoring a shortfall in those figures, but it is my belief that we are on the cusp of the next sustained move higher in core inflation, to be led by housing. Remember that the last two CPI figures haven’t exactly been soothing. Two months ago, core inflation was +0.3% when the market was expecting +0.2%. Last month, all eight major subgroups of CPI accelerated on a year-on-year basis, the first time that has ever happened since the current 8 subgroups have been in existence. I am loathe to pick the month where we’re going to see Owners’ Equivalent Rent finally break higher, because econometric lags are not written in stone. But it ought to be soon.
When it happens, expect sell-side economists and pundits of all stripes, to say nothing of the Federal Reserve, to downplay the significance of it. I wouldn’t expect a sudden rally in commodities or a rebound in breakevens (10-year breakevens are at the lows of the year, mainly because rates on the whole are declining – 10y TIPS yields are also within 3bps of the year’s low), but it might help stop the bleeding.
