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Re-Blog: Volatility and Position Size
This is one of my favorites, and every few years I re-blog some portion of this article. The original, I wrote in 2010. The basic question is, what is the correct way to respond as an investor to increasing uncertainty? In the original blog and in various re-posting edits, I’ve applied a basic idea called the “Kelly Criterion” to explain why responding to market selloffs by trimming a position, rather than adding to it, is often the right strategy (in the sense of it being mathematically optimal, not in the sense of it always producing the best returns). The idea also applies to the question of what to do when the general level of uncertainty and volatility rises (or falls) in markets. With developing uncertainty in the Middle East and the US spiraling towards what looks to be a summer of crazy politics, it is rational – even optimal – to ‘take some chips off the table.’ Read on for why.
(“Kicking Tails” originally appeared February 12, 2018)
Like many people, I find that poker strategy is a good analogy for risk-taking in investing. Poker strategy isn’t as much about what cards you are dealt as it is about how you play the cards you are dealt. As it is with markets, you can’t control the flop – but you can still correctly play the cards that are out there.[1] Now, in poker we sometimes discover that someone at the table has amassed a large pile of chips by just being lucky and not because they actually understand poker strategy. Those are good people to play against, because luck is fickle. The people who started trading stocks in the last nine years, and have amassed a pile of chips by simply buying every dip, are these people.
All of this is prologue to the observation I have made from time to time about the optimal sizing of investment ‘bets’ under conditions of uncertainty. I wrote a column about this back in 2010 (here I link to the abbreviated re-blog of that column) called “Tales of Tails,” which talks about the Kelly Criterion and the sizing of optimal bets given the current “edge” and “odds” faced by the bettor. I like the column and look back at it myself with some regularity, but here is the two-sentence summary: lower prices imply putting more chips on the table, while higher volatility implies taking chips off of the table. In most cases, the lower edge implied by higher volatility outweighs the better odds from lower prices, which means that it isn’t cowardly to scale back bets on a pullback but correct to do so.
When you hear about trading desks having to cut back bets because the risk control officers are taking into account the higher VAR, they are doing half of this. They’re not really taking into account the better odds associated with lower prices, but they do understand that higher volatility implies that bets should be smaller.
In the current circumstance, the question merely boils down to this. How much have your odds improved with the recent 10% decline in equity prices? Probably, only a little bit. In the chart below, which is a copy of the chart in the article linked to above, you are moving in the direction from brown-to-purple-to-blue, but not very far. But the probability of winning is moving left.
Note that in this picture, a Kelly bet that is less than zero implies taking the other side of the bet, or eschewing a bet if that isn’t possible. If you think the chance that the market will go up (edge) is less than 50-50 you need better payoffs on a rally than on a selloff (odds). If not, then you’ll want to be short. (In the context of recent sports bets: prior to the game, the Patriots were given a better chance of winning so to take the Eagles at a negative edge, you needed solid odds in your favor).
Now if, on the other hand, you think the market selloff has taken us to “good support levels” so that there is little downside risk – and you think you can get out if the market breaks those support levels – and much more upside risk, then you are getting good odds and a positive edge and probably want to bet aggressively. But that is to some extent ignoring the message of higher implied volatility, which says that a much wider range of outcomes is possible (and higher implied volatility moves the delta of an in-the-money option closer to 0.5).
This is why sizing bets well in the first place, and adjusting position sizes quickly with changes in market conditions, is very important. Prior to the selloff, the market’s level suggested quite poor odds such that even the low volatility permitted limited bets – probably a lot more limited than many investors had in place, after many years of seeing bad bets pay off.
[1] I suspect that Bridge might be as good an analogy, or even better, but I don’t know how to play Bridge. Someday I should learn.
How Higher Rates Cause Big Changes in the Bond Contract
Two weeks ago I pointed out one of the effects of higher interest rates is that leveraged return strategies get swiftly worse as rates rise. Today, I want to talk about another result of higher interest rates which is, to me, much more fun and exciting. It involves the Treasury Bond cash-futures basis.
I know, that doesn’t sound so interesting. For many years, it hasn’t been. But lately, it has gotten really, really interesting – and institutional fixed-income investors and hedgers need to know that one of the major effects of higher interest rates is that it makes the bond contract negatively convex, not to mention that right now the bond contract also looks wildly expensive.
Some background is required. The CBOT bond futures contract (and the other bond contracts such as the Ultra, the (10y) Note, the 5y, and the 2y) calls for the physical delivery of actual Treasury securities, rather than cash settlement. Right now, thanks to ‘robust’ Treasury issuance patterns, there are an amazing 54 securities that are deliverable against the December bond futures contract. The futures contract short may deliver any of these bonds to satisfy his obligations under the contract, and may do so any time within the delivery month.
Now, if we just said the short can deliver any bond, the short would obviously choose the lowest-priced bond. The lowest-coupon bond is almost always going to be the lowest-priced; right now, the 1.125%-8/15/2040 sports a dollar price of 55.5.[1] But if we already know what bond is going to be deliverable, and it’s always the optimal bond to deliver, then the futures contract is just a forward contract on that bond, and it becomes very uninteresting (not to mention that liquidity of that one bond will determine the liquidity of the contract). So, when the contract was developed the CBOT determined that when the bond is delivered it will be priced, relative to the contract’s price, according to a conversion factor that is meant to put all of the bonds on more or less similar footing.[2] The price that the contract short gets paid when he delivers that particular bond is determined by the futures price, the factor, and the accrued interest on the delivery date…and not the price of the bond in the market.
Because the conversion factor is fixed, but the bonds all have different durations, which bond is cheapest-to-deliver (“CTD”) changes as interest rates change. When interest rates fall, short-duration bonds rise in price more slowly than long-duration bonds and so they get relatively cheaper and tend to become CTD. When interest rates rise, long-duration bonds fall in price more quickly than short-duration bonds and so tend to become CTD in that circumstance. And here’s the rub: when interest rates were well below the 6% “contract rate”, the CTD bond got locked at the shortest-duration deliverable, which also usually happened to be the shortest-maturity deliverable, because that bond got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as the market rose and rose and rose. The consequence is that the bond contract, as mentioned earlier, eventually did become just a forward contract on the CTD (and a short-duration CTD at that), which meant that the volatility of the futures contract was lower, the implied volatility of futures options was lower, and the price of the futures contract was uninteresting to arbitrageurs because it was very obviously the forward price of the CTD. And this situation persisted for decades. The last time the bond and 10-year note yielded as much as 6% (which is where all of the excitement is maximized, since after all the conversion factor is designed to make them all more or less interchangeable at that level) was 2000. [Coincidentally or not, that was right about the time I stopped being exclusively a fixed-income relative value strategist/salesman and started trading options, and then inflation.]
So, now the long bond yields 4.96% and the deliverable bonds in the December bond contract basket have yields between 5.03% and 5.22%. This starts to get interesting. As of today, the CTD bond is the 4.75%-Feb 15, 2041. If you buy that bond and sell the contract,[3] then the worst possible case for you is that you deliver that bond into the contract and lose roughly 12/32nds after carry.
However.
Because you are short the futures contract, you can deliver whatever bond is most-advantageous to you at the time you elect to deliver. If any other bond is cheaper than the 4.75s-Feb41, then you buy that bond, sell the Feb41s, and deliver. And obviously, that’s a gain to you. And you can make that switch as often as you like, up until delivery.
Can you predict approximately when the bonds will switch? Sure, because we know the bonds’ durations we can estimate the CTD – and the value of switching – for normal yield curve shifts. While the steepening and flattening of the deliverable curve also matter, remember that anything that adds volatility to the potential switch point adds value to you, the futures short. Here is, roughly, the expected basis at delivery of that Feb41 bond.
Now isn’t this interesting? If the bond market rallies, then we know that shorter-duration bonds will become CTD, pushing the Feb 41s out. And if the bond market sells off, then we know that longer-duration bonds will replace the Feb 41s as CTD. Notice that this looks something like an options strangle? That’s because it essentially is. You own a strangle, and you’re paying 12/32nds for that strangle. (Spoiler alert: you can sell a comparable options position in the market for roughly 28/32nds, making the basis of that bond about half a point cheap, or equivalently the futures are about half a point rich.
Okay – if you’re not a fixed-income relative value strategist…and let’s face it, they’re a dying breed…then why do you care?
If you’re a plain old bond portfolio manager, you may use futures as a hedge for your position; you might use futures to get long bonds quickly without having to buy actual bonds, or because you aren’t allowed to repo your physical bonds but you can get some of the same benefits by buying the futures contract. You might buy options on futures to get convexity on your position, or to hedge the negative convexity in your mortgage portfolio.
Well guess what! None of that stuff works the same way it did 15 months ago!
Because longer-duration bonds are CTD now, the contract has more volatility. Which means the options on those futures have more implied volatility. Also, the bond contract is no longer guaranteed to be within a tick of fair value because the CTD is locked. When I worked for JP Morgan’s futures group, we thought if the futures contract got 6 ticks rich or cheap it was exciting. Well, we’re looking at a futures contract that’s a half-point mispriced![4]
Finally – as I said, the bond contract now has negative convexity, which means that when you are long the contract you will underperform in a rally and underperform in a selloff (while earning the net basis of 12 ticks, in a best case). Because when you own the bond contract you have the opposite position I’ve illustrated above: you’re short a strangle. If you’re long the contract then as the market sells off the bond contract will go down faster and faster as it tracks longer and longer duration deliverables. And if the market rallies, the contract will rise slower and slower as it tracks shorter duration deliverables. The implication is that especially because the bond contract is rich, it is great as a hedge for long cash positions at the moment, and a pretty bad hedge for short positions. And it’s great to hedge long mortgage positions, since when you sell the contract you also pick up some convexity rather than adding to your short-convexity position.
This all sounds, I’m sure, very “inside baseball.” And it is, because most of the people who used to trade this stuff and understood it are retired, have moved to corner offices, or are old inflation guys who just wonder why we don’t have a deliverable TIPS contract. But just as with my article two weeks ago, it’s something that I think it important to point out. We’re so obsessed with the ‘macro’ implications of higher rates, we stand to miss some of the really important implications on the ‘micro’ side of things!
[1] I’m using decimals to make this more accessible to non-bond folks, but we all know that this really means 55-16.
[2] The conversion factor is the answer to the question, “what would the price of this bond be if, on the first day of the delivery month, it were to yield exactly 6% to maturity”? So the aforementioned 1-1/8 of Aug-40s have a conversion factor into the December contract of 0.4938 while the 3-7/8 of Aug-40 has a conversion factor of 0.7794.
[3] I am abstracting here from the more technical nuances of how one weights a bond basis trade, again for brevity and accessibility.
[4] There’s a big caveat here in that the yield curve dynamics in my model for the shape of the deliverable bond yield curve are out-of-date, as I haven’t used this model in years…so the contract might be anywhere from 10 ticks to 20 ticks rich. But it’s rich!
Higher Rates’ Impact on Levered Strategies
I am old enough (fortunately??) to be able to remember when interest rates were last at this level. Even higher – I can remember in my first job, at technical analysis firm Technical Data, being tasked with updating the point-and-figure chart of the 10 3/8 – 2012 as it rallied from 9%! I mention this because, as interest rates have headed back higher I have noticed that a lot of people don’t remember some of the investment implications of higher rates. So, I want to review one of them today. Next week, I’ll write about how the rise in rates will tend to make bond futures negatively convex after years of positive convexity…there aren’t many bond basis traders left, because it’s been years since there has been a shift in bond deliverables, but it makes a lot of things more interesting and I suspect will resurrect some old relative-value trades that haven’t been seen in a dog’s age.
But today, I want to point out one big effect on the hedge fund industry: higher interest rates leads to lower hedge fund risk-adjusted returns, directly and significantly. If you’re a hedge fund, you already know this. If you’re an allocator, you may or may not realize that you need to carefully monitor any changes in the risk-taking of your existing hedge fund portfolio, and start to ask tougher questions of hedge funds touting high returns.
The dirty little secret of hedge fund returns is that you can make a good edge look like a fantastic return if leverage is cheap enough and if you lever enough. If I buy a bond yielding 5% with $100, and then borrow $90 at a 0% borrowing rate, by pledging that bond as collateral…and invest in another bond yielding 5%, then magically I have turned a simple bond-buying strategy into one that yields 9.5% (5% on 100, plus 5% on another 90, divided by the 100 in unlevered principal). Yes, I have almost doubled my risk but I have created a return that looks really nice.
But if instead of borrowing at 0% I am borrowing at 2.5%, then levering to buy that bond doesn’t add as much. The $90 spent on that 5% bond now costs me 2.5%, for a net 2.5% return on that piece. I still have the risk, but my return has gone down to 7.25%. If I can borrow another 90, and do the trick again, I’ll get back to my 9.5% return but now I’m 3x levered instead of 2x. (Naturally, most hedge fund strategies are more complex but this is the basic concept).
Now, for small changes in financing rates this is of course a small effect. And for decreases in financing rates, it’s a positive effect. But when you have large increases in interest rates, it has a big effect on returns:
Yes, I know this is overly simplistic but the easiest way to think about this is with a bond strategy where you’re leveraging up a simple yield. The significance of a change in the cost of leverage, though, is felt across many hedge fund categories. There’s an exception with many CTA strategies because there is no money required to hold the natural underlying. The longs and shorts are exchanging daily P&L, and no one actually needs to hold the underlying instrument because there isn’t any. Similarly, long/short bond and equity strategies, in principle, only care about the spread between the financing of the long position (which is paid) and the financing of the short position (which is earned) rather than its level, assuming equal notionals on long and short. But most long/short strategies – including fixed-income arbitrage, weirdly – are highly correlated to stocks, which suggests that in most cases there’s net long exposure. Here are charts of the CS long/short equity hedge index, and the Bloomberg Fixed-Income Arb index, against the S&P 500.
Managed futures, not so much, although there’s a decent correlation to commodity indices (not as much as in the above examples relating long/short returns to equity returns).
If a futures strategy or a long/short strategy holds unencumbered cash, they should get some benefit from higher rates…but most such strategies don’t tend to have a lot of unencumbered cash. In the same way, commodity futures indices such as the Bloomberg Commodity Index or the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (and many others) get some benefit in expected returns because they earn more on the collateral they hold against futures positions, and they do hold a lot of cash and Tbills.
However you slice it, the sharply higher financing rate environment we are now in is likely to have a meaningful effect on the returns (and the risks, if more leverage is used to chase a higher return) of many hedge fund strategies. All else being equal, this will be a lower penalty on less-levered strategies; which means investor money should flow to less-levered strategies for a better risk-reward tradeoff.
Inflation Volatility Tells Us This is Probably Not Over
In the course of this inflation cycle – and I do think this is a cycle, and not necessarily a one-off, although the subsequent peaks may not surpass this year’s peak in Median CPI for some years – the typical topic has of course been the level of inflation, and/or its acceleration or deceleration (not to mention, many uneducated suppositions about the cause, which we know good and well boils down to profligate spending and unprecedented provision of money). I’ve also written and talked about the oft-overlooked fact that when inflation rises for some time above about 2.5%-3%, stocks and bonds become correlated rather than inversely correlated, and this has a significant effect on portfolio risk that insightful investment managers will take into account.
What I haven’t written about much is the fact that problems are also caused by the volatility of inflation. While this tends to go hand-in-hand with higher inflation, the problems caused by inflation’s volatility are somewhat different than those caused by its level.
The current episode follows a 15-year period during which inflation was both low and stable. The thirty years prior to that, from 1973-2003, the level of inflation was a bit more than twice the 2004-2018 period average but the volatility of inflation was tripled.
The importance of inflation volatility is that it operates on inflation expectations in a very different way than the inflation level does. (We know that inflation expectations do not have the center-stage role in ‘anchoring inflation’ that previously-discredited theory claimed it did, but I do think there is a psychological tendency that adds some inertia to inflation by affecting businesses’ beliefs about how easy it will be to increase prices.) Inflation volatility tends to increase consumers’ perceptions of inflation through the behavioral tendencies towards loss aversion and attribution bias (as I argued in a 2012 paper published in Business Economics). But it has other effects as well.
Quantitatively, higher variance makes it harder to reject the null hypothesis that inflation is staying high; an uncertain worker is therefore less likely to accept a lower wage that may not suffice and a business is less likely to hold the line on prices that may be continuing to rise elsewhere. When you don’t know the true competitive pricing situation, both businesses and their employees are likely to err on the conservative side. This also gives momentum to inflation.
Higher inflation volatility is what causes the inflation factor to carry more weight in the minds of consumers and investors, which in turn is what induces the aforementioned positive correlation between stocks and bonds. When inflation is low (but more importantly stable), the importance of inflation to investors is also low and variations in inflation are given less weight than variations in growth. Since stocks and bonds behave similarly with respect to inflation, but inversely with respect to economic growth, the dampening of the inflation factor is the reason that stocks and bonds are inversely-correlated in low-and-stable inflation regimes.
Also, although investors seem not to incorporate this understanding into prices, higher inflation volatility should increase the value of a “tail outcome” in inflation, and increase the value of holding that option by being long breakevens, or long TIPS instead of nominal bonds. That is, when inflation isn’t going to vary too much then it’s hard to win big by owning TIPS over nominals; but if inflation varies a lot then there should be a fairly large premium built into breakevens since you’d much rather be long them (and long that tail) than short them (and short the tail). However, as I said this seems not to actually be incorporated in inflation markets, which trade far below the level they ought to if inflation tails have even a small value.
So, how volatile has inflation been?
When I started thinking about this blog post I was originally going to point out that the volatility of Used Car CPI is so much higher than it used to be. We almost never spent a lot of time thinking about how much Used Cars would add or subtract from core. Here is a chart of the rolling 12-month volatility of y/y Used Cars CPI.
Not surprisingly, the volatility of CPI for Used Cars and Trucks reached nearly double the level it did in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, when the “cash for clunkers” program and the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina both had major impacts on the market for used cars. But it goes beyond that.
The unusual volatility of the food and beverages group, partly as a result of the war in Ukraine and the spikes in fertilizer prices, has been documented previously. It seems to be receding but remains quite high historically.
Heck, let’s look at three of my ‘Four Pieces’ (leaving aside energy). Here’s Core Goods.
Even though the level of core goods inflation has come way back down, the volatility of core goods means that consumers can’t get terribly comfortable with prices (nor can producers).
How about ‘supercore’?
This is also high, but the interesting part is how tame it had been for most of the post-GFC period. Remembering that this is the category where the wage-price feedback loop is felt most strongly, I think this says something about the flaccidity of labor power during that decade. Well, that’s back – and perhaps we’ve re-entered an extended period of volatility in that group?
Here is the volatility of Owners’ Equivalent Rent (which looks about the same as Primary Rents, for what it’s worth, so I didn’t feel I needed to show them both).
Not as terrible as I would have thought, although to be fair this is typically a less-volatile category anyway. Again, though, look at the amazingly boring period post-GFC. (As an aside, that’s when a certain inflation specialist was trying to get attention for Enduring Investments.)
In a second I’ll show all-items CPI, but first let’s look at Medical Care.
This is the only category of the ones I’ve shown where volatility is still increasing. That’s largely because of Health Insurance, which as I’ve documented/complained about for some time has endured one of the most massive swings in any imputed category. That will not plummet soon, though, since in October the Health Insurance drag of -4% or so annualized will reverse to +1% or so.
Last but not least, here is headline CPI’s volatility.
I will just say that it is a good thing that inflation dealers no longer really trade inflation options. Because, if they did, they not only would be generally short a whole lot of in-the-money inflation cap delta in the book but also would be short a bunch of vega too and implied vol would probably be a lot higher. But the importance of this picture is that while headline inflation has been receding (largely due to energy) and core inflation has been dropping too (not-insignificantly due to Health Insurance and Used Cars), the volatility of inflation does not yet look like it’s calming down in a decisive way.
Until it does, I think it would be cavalier to assume that we are heading back to the low-and-stable inflation regime, even if the last few months’ out-turns for CPI have been agreeable. Volatility, and not just the level of inflation, matters.
Is Inflation Dead…Again?
I am not the first person to point out that the stock market, at outlandish multiples, is not behaving consistently with commodities markets that are flashing imminent depression. If we insist on anthropomorphizing the markets, it really makes no sense at all unless we posit that “the market” suffers from a split personality disorder of some kind. But that sort of thing happens all the time, in little ways.
But here is something that seems very weird to me. Prices of short-dated inflation swaps in the interbank market suggest that NSA headline inflation is going to rise less than 0.9% for the entire balance of 2023 (a 1.45% annualized rate). And actually, most of that rise will be in the next 2 months. The market is pricing that between June’s CPI print and December’s CPI print the overall price level will rise 0.23%…less than ½% annualized!
Now, eagle-eyed readers will notice that there was also a flat portion of 2022, covering roughly the same period. Headline inflation between June and December last year rose only 0.16%, leading to disappointing coupons on iBonds and producing proclamations that inflation was nearly beaten. Here’s the thing, though. The second half of 2022 it made perfect sense that headline inflation was mostly unchanged. Oil prices dropped from $120/bbl the first week of June, to $75 by mid-December. Nationwide, average unleaded gasoline prices dropped from $5 to $3.25 during that time period.
A comparable percentage decline would mean that gasoline would need to drop to $2.32 from the current $3.58 average price at the pump. To be sure, the gasoline futures market is in much steeper backwardation than normal, with about 44c in the curve from now until December compared with 28c from June to December 2024.[1] So that can’t be the whole source of this insouciance about inflation. If gasoline does decline that much, the inflation curve will be right…but there’s an easier way to trade that, and that’s to sell Nov or Dec RBOB gasoline futures.
So the flatness must be coming from elsewhere. It can’t be from piped gas, which has recently been a measurable lag, because Natural Gas prices have already crashed back to levels somewhat below the norm of the last 10 years. Prices of foodstuffs could fall back more, which would help food-at-home if it happened, but food-away-from-home tracks wages so it’s hard to get this huge of an effect from food.
Ergo…this really must be core. Except there, the only market where you can sort of trade core inflation rather than backing into it, the Kalshi exchange, has the current prices of m/m core at 0.35% in May, 0.32% in June, 0.57% in July, 0.45% in August, 0.35% in September, 0.18% in October, and 0.22% in November. (To be sure, those markets especially for later months are still fairly illiquid but getting better). That’s not drastically different from the 0.41% average over the last six months.
Markets, of course, trade where risk clears and not necessarily where “the market thinks” the price should be. I find it hard to understand though who it is who would have such an exposure to lower short-term prices that they would need to aggressively sell short-term inflation…unless it is large institutional owners of TIPS who are making a tactical view that near-term prints would be bad. Sure seems like a big punt, if so.
Naturally, it’s possible that inflation will suddenly flatline from here. I just don’t feel like that’s the ‘fair bet’. That is after all a key function of markets: offer attractive bets to people who don’t have a natural bias in the market in question, to offset the flows of those people who are willing to pay to reduce their risk in a particular direction. (This should not be taken to suggest that I don’t have a natural bias in the market; I do.)
There’s another reason that this matters right now. Recently, markets have also been starting to price the possibility that the Federal Reserve could continue to hike interest rates, despite fairly clear signals from the Chairman after the last meeting that a ‘pause’ was in the offing. That certainly makes sense to me, since 25bps or 50bps makes almost no difference and after one of the most-aggressive hiking cycles in history, putting rates at approximately long-term neutral at the short end, it would seem to be prudent to at least look around. If, in looking around, the Fed were to notice that the balance of the market is suggesting that inflation has a chance of going instantly and completely inert, it would seem to be even stranger to think that the FOMC is about to fire up the rate-hike machine again for another few hikes.
[1] N.b. – June to December on the futures curve isn’t the exact right comparison since prices at the pump lag wholesale futures prices, but it gives you an idea.
Season(al)’s Greetings
As we move into 2023, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more frequently on the blog and post podcasts more frequently. I have a list of topics that is certainly long enough. When I was writing commentary for Bankers Trust, and for Barclays, and for Natixis, I wrote every day and somehow I never ran out of words…
Sometimes, as with today’s article, I am going to refer to pictures and observations that I have previously made on the private/subscription Twitter channel. You can subscribe to the Private Twitter feed at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ . Not only that, but as of January 2023 I have marked the price down from $99 to only $69, which is a 30% nominal decline in the subscription price – and a 35% or so real decline. (Those of you who subscribed at the $99 price unfortunately will have to cancel and re-subscribe to get the lower price because there’s no way for me to edit a recurring subscription’s price, which annoys me as much as it annoys you but I suppose it’s to keep unscrupulous sellers from raising the price without your permission).
Today I want to present some oldie-but-goodie charts that I developed years ago to look at the seasonality of inflation breakevens. In updating the charts, what was amazing is that…the seasonality hasn’t changed much. Fairly consistently, breakevens rise in the early part of the year, and then decline from May to October. It’s not a guarantee,[1] but it is a pretty consistent tendency. The chart below shows, in black, the percentage of the time (1999-2021, so 22 years of history) in which 10-year breakevens increased in the 60 days following that date. So, on January 3rd, the number was about 70% which means that in 70% of those years, breakevens were higher 60 days after January 3rd than on January 3rd. The average increase (including years in which it decreased) is in red, and shows about 10bps on average. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an average of over 22 years. Buying breakevens early in the year is typically a good idea.
The next chart steps back and shows the average for the full year, properly de-trending the data so that any drift over time falls out (since breakevens have gone basically nowhere for a quarter-century, this doesn’t do much but it’s the right way). So, breakevens start the year below the level that will subsequently be the average, and by May they’re well above that level. Ergo, it has historically been good to be long into the first part of May. And then I guess you sell in May and go away, to coin a phrase.
None of this is guaranteed, as I said, but seasonal patterns which are consistent are valuable tools. The way I look at seasonals is that I want to see a move of some decent economic value, but mainly I want to see the consistency. And personally I won’t do a trade just to take advantage of the seasonal trend, but if I want to sell and the market shows a strong tendency to rally then I might consider “flat” the same as selling in that environment. Conversely, a market which has a strong tendency to rally when I want to buy is likely to make me be more aggressive getting in rather than trying to steal a tick on the bid/offer by hanging out on the bid. If you’re bearish on breakevens, then I don’t think you should be a buyer just because it’s a good time of the year to buy. But between the low level of breakevens, and the seasonal trend itself…I would be cautious about being aggressively short.
[1] …and some of it is an artifact: in the early part of the year, a breakeven buyer often has negative carry from bad inflation prints in November and December; as that carry passes, breakevens rise. But this only explains part of the early-season seasonality, not the whole thing.
Oil Be Home For Christmas
As a general rule, don’t trade on pre-holiday thin-liquidity sessions. There can be amazing-seeming opportunities, but price can still get shoved in your face by whoever it is who feels like pushing markets around.
A prime example today is the energy market, where front-month oil prices are down nearly 4% at this writing. Recently, energy futures have been regularly jammed lower overnight in low-liquidity conditions and then have recovered during the day. There is a structural shortage of energy globally at the moment, and inventories are low…but sentiment is also very poor and as I’ve shown before, open interest has been in a downtrend for years – aggregate open interest in NYMEX Crude hasn’t been lower since 2012.
So, it’s a market ripe for pushing around and the day before Thanksgiving is probably not the day to take a stand by getting long even when the reasons given for the selloff are nonsense. Today, the story is again about the price cap on Russian oil that is being implemented soon by the US and EU. Market participants seem to struggle with Econ 101 here. A price cap has one of two effects in the market under consideration: if the price cap is set above the market-clearing price, it has no effect. If the price cap is set below the market-clearing price, it leads to shortages as suppliers – in this case, Russia – won’t supply as much oil (if any) to the capped market when there are other uncapped markets (say, China and India). There is probably an area near the price cap where the cost of switching to delivering oil in other markets is higher than the gain from switching deliveries, but that’s only in round 1 of the game theoretic outcome.[1]
In this case, since only the price from one supplier is capped, the result should be higher prices in the markets than otherwise since once price exceeds the cap, one supplier is lost. The chart below shows the classic outcome. Below the cap, the supply curve is normal. Above the cap, the supply curve is left-shifted.
This leads, at least in a frictionless market (which this isn’t), to prices being discontinuous around the cap. As demand shifts from left to right, prices behave normally and rise as they normally would, until abruptly jumping higher once the capped producer is removed. In any case, price is more volatile than it would otherwise be…but, and this is important, it is never lower in a market where some or all of the suppliers are capped, than it is in an uncapped market. At best, prices are the same if the caps aren’t in play. At worst, a combination of shortages and higher prices obtain.
Speaking of shortages…it seems that people are growing calmer about the chances of a bad energy outcome over the winter in Europe. This seems, to me, to be related to the fact that inventories of gas are reasonably flush thanks to conservation efforts and vigorous efforts to replace lost Russian pipeline supply (see Chart, source Gas Infrastructure Europe via Bloomberg).
That’s great, but the problem is that since the pipelines are not flowing Europe needs more gas going into the winter than they otherwise would have – because it’s not being replenished by pipeline during the winter, either. We certainly hope that Europe doesn’t run out of heat this winter, but the level of gas inventories is not exciting.
Putting downward pressure on both of these markets, but especially Crude, is the idea that the world will enter a global recession in 2023. As I’ve been saying since early this year, that’s virtually a sure thing: we’ve never seen interest rates and energy prices rise this much and not had a recession. But I have thought that the recession would be relatively mild, a ‘garden variety’ recession compared to the last three we’ve had (the tech bubble implosion, the global financial crisis, and the COVID recession). What worries me a bit is that the consensus is now moving to that conclusion. It seems that most forecasts are for a mild recession (although predictably, economists are all over the map on inflation depending on the degree to which they understand that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and not a growth phenomenon). I’m still in that camp, but that concerns me, because the consensus is usually wrong.
[1] In round 2, after oil delivery from Russia is switched to the uncapped markets, the available price in the capped market will need to be appreciably above the market clearing price in the uncapped market in order to cause the switch back.
Tight Spreads’ Cost: Orderly Markets
In this article I am taking a brief break from writing about inflation. There have been lots of great stories and anecdotes recently about inflation. I loved the Wall Street Journal article about how “Inflation and Other Woes Are Eating Your Girl Scout Cookies”, and we have seen several contributions from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that are worth reading. One was an opinion piece in the Washington Post (“Opinion: The stock market liked the Fed’s plan to raise interest rates. It’s wrong.”) and one was a very good NBER working paper on “The Coming Rise in Residential Inflation,” in which he confirms and extends the normal way inflation people forecast rents and comes up with even higher numbers than I’ve been working with for a while. Incidentally, if you haven’t seen these stories before now, consider installing the Inflation Guy mobile app. I don’t curate every single inflation story; just the ones worth curating.
Moreover, the Fed increasingly sounds like they want to be aggressive with rates. That’s half the battle, though on the more important half (the balance sheet reduction) they don’t yet have a plan. I should note that saying hawkish things on half the plan isn’t really all that hawkish, especially when your notion of “pushing rates above neutral” means 3%: a level well below inflation. But it’s progress that these folks have finally realized that inflation is a real phenomenon and not just due to port congestion. They still don’t seem to see the role of money growth in causing that phenomenon, but it’s nice we’re making baby steps.
As I said, though, in this article I’m going to talk about market structure, and the deal with the devil we have made to seek ever-tighter-spreads at a cost of orderly markets.
Since the 1970s, the cost of trading equities has moved from a bid/offer spread of a half point or a quarter point ($0.50 or $0.25 per share), on round lots, plus large brokerage fees, to sub-penny spreads on any size trade, often with zero brokerage costs. The cost of bond execution has similarly declined, as has the cost of futures and swaps brokerage. Volumes, across all markets, have responded to the decrease in costs. Some of this improvement in the median cost of trading has come from increased transparency, and a lot from increased competition.
Those improvements have not come without a cost, but at most times the cost is less apparent. The way the stock market used to be structured was around a number of market-making firms whose job it was to maintain orderly markets – including the distasteful task of being the buyer when everyone else is selling. What this means for the profit of a market-maker is that they generally made steady, small profits (a quarter of a point on every share, day in and day out) and occasionally lost huge amounts in market panics. It’s a classic “short gamma” position of picking up nickels before the bulldozer, and well-understood by the market-makers to be so. But that was the deal: you let the market-maker take his spread as an insurance premium, and collect on that premium when a calamity hits. Primary dealers in the government bond markets worked the same way: in exchange for the privilege of building an auction book (and being able to bid on the auction with that knowledge) and making spreads as a market-maker most of the time, it was understood that they were supposed to work to keep markets liquid in the bad times.
Then, we decided that we didn’t like paying all of these insurance premiums, which we called the “cost of trading” but could also be considered “the cost of providing continuous liquidity in bad times.” So stock prices were decimalized, which immediately started narrowing spreads. Electronic trading made the deal even worse because anyone could jump in front of the market-maker and be the bid or the offer, meaning that the market-maker wasn’t earning the spread. In many cases, there wasn’t any spread left to earn.
There is a parallel to something else I’ve written about recently, and that’s the trend over the years to lower and lower costs, and longer and longer supply chains, in manufacturing. Such a system is lower cost, but the price of that cost-savings is fragility. A long, international supply chain gets snarled much more easily and much worse than a short, domestic one. That cost/fragility tradeoff is the bargain that manufacturers made, although not thoughtfully.
Similarly, the price of the cost-savings from sub-penny equity spreads is fragility in the market-making system. It is difficult to find dealers who will accept the responsibilities of being the buyer or seller of last resort, and maintaining orderly markets, when that cost is not counterbalanced by an increase in profit opportunities during placid times.
As with international trade, we have begun to see the downside of this tradeoff when trading risks increase. Not that this is the first time, but it seems these days that liquidity conditions get sketchier more quickly now than they used to. Of course, we saw this as recently as March 2020, when trading in credit got so bad that the Fed had to step in and backstop corporate bond ETFs by buying corporate bonds and ETFs under the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility.[1] Recently, the Nickel market basically broke when prices went vertical and the resulting margin calls would have put some LME brokers out of business (conveniently, the LME decided to just cancel the trades that they didn’t like, which means those brokers are still in business but probably won’t have a market to broker). Prices went vertical partly because there are fewer highly-capitalized market-maker shops to stand in the middle and make orderly markets. Also recently, the European Federation of Energy Traders pleaded for “emergency funding mechanisms” so that they can continue to trade energy markets that have had greatly increased volatility recently.[2]
Now, the disturbing thing is that we are starting to see declines in liquidity even in fairly unremarkable periods. The last seven months’ worth of volatility in interest rate markets was higher than we’d seen in some years, but not exactly unprecedented. This month, 10-year Treasury yields are up 57bps. In 2002, 10-year yields fell 170 bps between May and October, in something close to a straight line driven by mortgage convexity. In about 6 weeks from May to June in 2003, yields dropped 81bps and then immediately reversed 129bps higher over the ensuing 6 weeks (same reason, different direction). I mention those two episodes because I was making markets in rates options and remember them not-very-fondly.
But these recent 57bps have been a lot more stressful on the market with fewer strong hands responsible for maintaining order. The chart below shows the BofA MOVE index, which measures normalized implied volatility on 1-month Treasury options. Recently, that index reached its second-highest level since the Global Financial Crisis. The highest prior level was in the March 2020 shutdown crash…understandable… and during the GFC banks were undercapitalized and in risk of failure. What’s the reason now?
We also see it in various market ecosystems. For example, there are roughly two dozen “Lead Market Makers” in the ETF ecosystem. In order to launch an ETF, you need to find someone to be the LMM. The function of the LMM is to make markets in virtually all conditions. But it is exquisitely hard to get an LMM signed up nowadays because the math for them works out badly. If your fund is very small, they make a decent spread but on tiny volume so it’s not very lucrative. As soon as your fund gets large, everyone else jumps in front of your markets, because they can and there’s money there to be made, so the LMM either makes no spread at all or makes a very small spread. Of course, those other Johnny-come-latelies will scatter the first time there is volatility, leaving the LMM there all alone to make orderly markets. So the market-making itself is a bad deal for the LMM in almost all circumstances. Their models are only tenable if they are able to make money on the relationship with the ETF issuer in other ways – being a broker for fund rebalancing, etc. This means that fewer good ETFs come to market than otherwise would. I have lamented this elsewhere. And the root cause and ultimate result are the same: we’ve engineered a very low-cost, high fragility system for investors to deal in.
The bottom line is that as any insurance agent can tell you people really hate paying for insurance. But no one expects insurance companies to provide insurance without being paid at least a fair premium. What would happen if we did? Well, then we wouldn’t have any insurance. Financially speaking right now, we don’t have much insurance because it’s too costly to stand in the middle. That looks like a win, until something catches on fire.
[1] For the Fed to buy corporate bonds was long held to be impermissible, since the Federal Reserve Act listed the assets the Fed was authorized to buy and that list did not include corporates and equities. Clearly, this was meant to follow Bagehot’s dictum that a central bank, to avert panic, “should lend early and freely, to solvent firms, against good collateral, and at ‘high rates’”, but thanks to clever lawyers who note that the Act does not explicitly prohibit the Fed from buying these things the Fed has in recent years decided that since it wants to, what could go wrong?
[2] A sad aside is that the movement to remove “pricey, greedy market-makers” and replace them with bailouts provided by central bank or treasury is the opposite of what Dodd-Frank was supposedly trying to do in ensuring that systemically-important institutions were adequately capitalized. They’re adequately capitalized now, but they don’t provide the market-braking function they used to because that’s ‘speculative activity’ that penalizes capital severely.
Trust Masters, not Models
Normally, when I write about markets, I try to point at models but there is a lot of guesswork and gut-work in analysis. When times are sort of normal, then models can be a big part of what drives your thinking. But times have not been ‘normal’ for a very long time, and this is part of what drives big policy errors (and big forecasting errors): if you are out of the ‘normal’ range, then to make a forecast or comment usefully on what is going on you need to have a good feel for what the model is actually trying to capture. You need to know where the model goes wrong.
When I was a rates options trader – stop me if I’ve told this story before – I found that I preferred to use a simple Black-Scholes pricing model instead of some fancy recombining-trinomial-tree-with-heteroskedastic-volatility-model. That was because even though Black Scholes doesn’t match up super well with reality, I at least had a good feel for where it fell short. For example, the whole reason we have a volatility smile is because real-world returns have fat tails, but pricing models like Black Scholes are based on the normal distribution. When the smile flattens, it means returns are becoming more like they’re being drawn from a normal distribution; when it steepens it means that the tails are becoming fatter. So that’s easy to understand.
If you understand why an option model works, then it’s easier to think about how to price something esoteric like an option on an inflation swap (which can trade at a negative rate, but actually isn’t a rates product at all but rather is a way of trading a forward price), and not mess it up. But if you just apply and try to calibrate a bad model – especially if it’s really complicated – then you get potentially really bad outcomes. And that is, of course, exactly where we are today.
We haven’t been ‘normal’, I guess, for a couple of decades. Central banks, and in particular the Federal Reserve, have dealt in the markets with a heavier and heavier hand. Nowadays, the Fed not only has expanded its balance sheet by trillions in a very short period of time, but it has expanded the range of markets it is involved in from Treasuries to mortgages to ETFs and now individual corporate bonds. And, since the whole point of this is because the Fed wants to make sure the stock market stays elevated (they are preternaturally terrified at the notion of a wealth effect from a market crash, even though historically the wealth effect has been surprisingly small) I suspect it is only a matter of time before they directly intervene in equity markets.[1] C’est la vie. There is no normal any more.
But at least the ‘normal’ we have had over the last decade was just modestly outside of the prior normal. Things didn’t work right according to the ‘traditional’ way of thinking about things; momentum became ascendant in a way we’ve never seen before and value almost irrelevant. We are now, though, working on a whole different part of the number line. This means that economists will continue to be surprised at almost everything they see, and it means that any model you look at needs to be informed by a good intuition about how the hell it works.
So, for example, let’s consider the money supply. Over the last 13 weeks, M2 is up at a 63% annualized rate. With two weeks left in the quarter, it looks like we will end up with something like a 10.25%-10.50% growth in the money supply for the quarter. The Q2 average money supply, compared to Q1 (important in looking at the MV=PQ equation), is going to be about 13.85% higher. That’s not annualized! Remember, the old record in M2 growth for a year was a bit above 13%, in 1976.
The current NY Fed Nowcast for 2nd Quarter GDP – keeping in mind that no one has any idea, this is as good a guess as any – is -19.03%. I really like the .03 part. That’s sporty. That would mean q/q growth of -4.75%.
If we want the price deflator to come in around 1.75% (+0.44% q/q), which is where it was for the year ended in Q1, then that means money velocity needs to fall about 16% for the quarter. (1-4.75%)*(1+0.44%)/(1+13.85%)-1 = -15.97%. If money velocity falls less, and that GDP estimate is correct, then inflation comes in higher. If money velocity falls more, then inflation comes in lower. If GDP growth is actually better than -19% annualized, then inflation is lower; if GDP is worse, then inflation is higher. We don’t need to worry much about the M2 numbers themselves, as they’re almost baked in the cake at this point.
The biggest amount that money velocity has ever fallen q/q is about 5%. But clearly, these are different times! We’ve also never seen a 19% decline in growth.
Weirdly, our model has M2 money velocity for Q2 at 1.159, which would be a 15.6% decline in money velocity. Let me stress that that is a total coincidence, and I put almost zero weight on that point estimate. Contributing to that sharp decline, in our model, is the small decline in interest rates from Q1, the increase in the non-M1 part of M2, the small increase in global negative-yielding debt, and (most importantly) a large increase in precautionary demand for cash balances due to economic uncertainty. (This is why it’s hard to get velocity to stay down at this level. The current low levels depend on low interest rates, which will probably persist, but also on dramatic precautionary savings, which are unlikely to). Small changes in money velocity will have big effects on inflation: if our model estimate for velocity was right, we’d see annualized inflation for Q2 at 4.3% or so. Here’s how confident I am in our model: for Q3, it is seeing unchanged velocity (approximately), which with money trends and the GDP Nowcast figures from the NY Fed would imply that y/y inflation would rise to 6.22%, about 17.5% annualized for the quarter. Not going to happen.
Here’s where knowing a bit about the underlying process and assumptions really matters. Velocity is effectively a plug number, in that bureaucrats are good at measuring money and pretty good at measuring GDP and prices, but really bad at measuring velocity directly. So velocity is solved for. And our model (along with every other model, probably) treats the response of money velocity to the input variables as more or less instantaneous. For small changes in these variables – movements in money growth from 4% to 6%, or GDP from 2% to 0% – the assumption about instantaneity is pretty irrelevant. The economy adjusts prices easily to small changes in conditions. But that’s not true at all for big changes. On the available evidence, many prices (if not most) accelerated a bit in Q2, which surprised almost everyone including us. But no matter what the model says, prices are not going to drop 5% in a quarter, or rise 5% in a quarter, for the entire consumption basket. Price changes take time – heck, rents don’t change every month, and it takes time to rotate through the sample. Also, manufacturers don’t tend to make large changes in prices overnight, preferring to drip it in and see consumer response. But here’s the point: the model doesn’t know this. So I suspect we will see money velocity this quarter around 1.14-1.17…not because I believe our model but because I think prices will accelerate by a little bit and I think the real uncertainty surrounds the forecast of GDP. Over time, velocity and inflation will converge with our model, but it will take time.
For what it’s worth, I think that GDP growth will be a little lower than the NY Fed thinks, for a different model reason: the model assumes that changes in various economic data can be mapped to changes in GDP. But that assumes a fairly stable price level…what they’re really mapping this data onto is the nominal price level, and assuming that the price level doesn’t change enough to matter. So I think some of the dollar improvement in durable goods sales, for example, reflects rising prices and not growth, which would be manifested in a slightly lower GDP change and a slightly higher GDP deflator change.
What does this mean and why does it matter?
For one thing…and you already knew this…models are currently trash. They mean almost nothing by themselves. You should ignore it all. I give very little credence to the NY Fed’s forecast. I am pretty sure Q2 GDP growth will have a minus sign, but I couldn’t tell you between -15% and -25% and neither can they. Which is why the -19 POINT OH-THREE is so sporty. But by the same token, you should listen more to the model-builder, and to people who understand what’s going on behind the models, and to people who are taking measurements directly rather than taking them from models. Because this is going back to the art of forecasting, and away from the science. We are over-quanted in this world, and we are over-committed to models, and we are overconfident in models, and we are over-reliant on models. They have a place, just as the autopilot has a place when conditions are placid. When things get rough, you want a real pilot holding the controls.[2]
There used to be a couple of guys in Boston who were auto mechanics and had a radio show. People would call up and describe the noises their cars made, and the guys would ask whether it made the noise only turning left, or both directions, and whether it got worse when it was humid, and other things that sounded crazy to you and me. And then they would diagnose the problem, sight-unseen. Those are the people you want to take your car to. They’re the ones who understand how it really works, and they don’t need to hook your car up to a computer to tell you what the problem is. I took my car to them, and they really were geniuses at it. So look for those people in market space: the ones who can tell by the sound of the squeal what is really going on under the hood. They won’t always be right, but they will have the best guesses…especially when something unusual happens.
[1] Ironically, I think that something else they are considering would have a much bigger effect on equity markets than if they directly bought equities, but I don’t want to talk about that in this space because it also has big implications for inflation-related markets and would create some really delicious relative value trades that I don’t want to discuss here.
[2] Although I didn’t think I’d remark on this in today’s comment: this is also why the Trump Administration’s move today to loosen the Volcker Rule to let banks take more risks with their capital is very timely. There is a lot of bumpy flight ahead of us and we should want seasoned traders making the markets with actual capital behind them, not robots looking to scalp an eighth.
You Haven’t Missed It
A question I always enjoy hearing in the context of markets is, “Have I missed it?” That simple question betrays everything about the questioner’s assumptions and about the balance of fear and greed. It is a question which, normally, can be answered “no” almost without any thought to the situation, if the questioner is a ‘normal’ investor (that is, not a natural contrarian, of which there are few).
That is because if you are asking the question, it means you are far more concerned with missing the bus than you are concerned about the bus missing you.
It usually means you are chasing returns and are not terribly concerned about the risks; that, in turn – keeping in mind our assumption that you are not naturally contrary to the market’s animal spirits, so we can reasonably aggregate your impulses – means that the market move or correction is probably underappreciated and you are likely to have more “chances” before the greed/fear balance is restored.
Lately I have heard this question arise in two contexts. The first was related to the stock market “correction,” and on at least two separate occasions (you can probably find them on the chart) I have heard folks alarmed that they missed getting in on the correction. It’s possible, but if you’re worried about it…probably not. The volume on the bounces has diminished as the market moves away from the low points, which suggests that people concerned about missing the “bottom” are getting in but rather quickly are assuming they’ve “missed it.” I’d expect to see more volume, and another wave of concern, if stocks exceed the recent consolidation highs; otherwise, I expect we will chop around until earnings season is over and then, without a further bullish catalyst, the market will proceed to give people another opportunity to “buy the dip.”
The other time I have heard the angst over missing the market is in the context of inflation. In this, normal investors fall into two categories. They’re either watching 10-year inflation breakevens now 100bps off the 2016 lows and 50bps off the 2017 lows and at 4-year highs (see chart, source Bloomberg) and thinking ‘the market is no longer cheap’, or they just noticed the well-telegraphed rise in core inflation from 1.7% to 2.1% over the last several months and figuring that the rise in inflation is mostly over, now that the figure is around the Fed’s target and back at the top of the 9-year range.
Here again, the rule is “you didn’t miss it.” Yes, you may have missed buying TIPS 100bps cheap to fair (which they were, and we pointed it out in our 2015Q3 Quarterly Inflation Outlook to clients), but breakevens at 2.17% with median inflation at 2.48% and rising (see chart, source Bloomberg), and still 25bps below where breakevens averaged in the 5 years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, says you aren’t buying expensive levels. Vis a vis commodities: I’ve written about this recently but the expectations for future real returns are still quite good. More to the point, inflation is one of those circumstances where the bus really can hit you, and concern should be less about whether you’ve missed the gain and more about whether you need the protection (people don’t usually lament that they missed buying fire insurance cheaper, if they need fire insurance!).
(In one way, these two ‘did I miss it’ moments are also opposites. People are afraid of missing the pullback in stocks because ‘the economy still looks pretty strong,’ but they’re afraid they missed the inflation rally because ‘the economy is going to slow soon and the Fed is tightening and will keep inflation under control.’ Ironically, those are both wrong.)
My market view is this:
- For some time, TIPS have been very cheap to nominal bonds, but rich on an absolute Negative real yields do not a bargain make, even if they look better than other alternatives when lots of asset classes are even more expensive. But as real yields now approach 1% (70bps in 5y TIPS, 80bps in 10y TIPS), and with TIPS still about 35bps cheap to nominal bonds, they are beginning to be palatable to hold on their own right. And that’s without my macro view, which is that over the next decade, one way or the other, inflation protection will become an investment theme that people tout as a ‘new focus’ even though it’s really just an old focus that everyone has forgotten. But the days of <1% inflation are over, and we aren’t going to see very much <2% either. We may not see 4% often, or for long, but at 3% inflation is something that people need to take into account in optimizing a portfolio. I think we’re at that inflection point, but if not then we will be in a year or two. And TIPS are a key, and liquid, component of smart real assets portfolios.
- Stocks have been outrageously expensive with very poor forward return expectations for a long time. However, these value issues have been overwhelmed by strong momentum (that, honestly, I never gave enough credit to) and the currently in-vogue view that momentum is somehow better than value. But perennially strong momentum is no longer a foregone conclusion. Momentum has stalled in the stock market – the S&P has broken the 50-day, 100-day, and (a couple of times, though only briefly so far) 200-day moving averages. The 50-day has now crossed below the 100-day. And the longer that the market chops sideways the weaker the momentum talisman becomes. Eventually, the value anchor will take over. There may be more chop to come but as I said above, I think another leg down is likely to come after earnings season.
And so, in neither case have you “missed it.”
