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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.
Swiss Jeez
The focus over the last few days has clearly been central bank follies. In just the last week:
- The Swiss National Bank (SNB) abruptly stopped trying to hold down the Swiss Franc from rising against the Euro; the currency immediately rose 20% against the continental currency (see chart, source Bloomberg). More on this below.
- The ECB, widely expected to announce the beginnings of QE tomorrow (Jan 22nd), have quietly mooted about the notion of buying approximately €600bln per year, focused on sovereign bonds, and lasting for a minimum of one year. This is greater than most analysts had been expecting, and somewhat open-ended to boot.
- The Bank of Canada announced today a surprise cut in interest rates, because of the decline in oil prices. Unlike the U.S., which would see an oil decline as stimulative and therefore something the central bank would be more inclined to lean against, Canada’s exports are significantly more concentrated in oil so they will tend to respond more directly to disinflation caused by oil prices. This explains the very high correlation between oil prices and the Canadian Dollar (see chart below, source Bloomberg).
Back to the SNB: the 20% spike in the currency provoked an immediate 14% plunge in the Swiss Market Index, and after a few days of volatility the market there is still flirting with those spike lows. The Swiss economy will shortly be back in deflation; the SNB’s addition of vast amounts of Swiss Francs to the monetary system had in recent months caused core inflation in Switzerland to reach the highest levels since 2011: 0.3% (see chart, source Bloomberg).
The good news for Europe, of course, is that the reversal will cause a small amount of inflation in the Eurozone – although probably not enough to notice, at least the sign is right.
Clearly the SNB had identified that trying to keep the Swissy weak while the ECB was about to add hundreds of billions of Euro to the system was a losing battle. In the long history of central bank FX price controls, we see failures more often than successes, especially when the exchange-rate control is trying to repress a natural trend.
But the point of my article today is not to discuss the SNB move nor the effect of it on local or global inflation. The point of my article is to highlight the fact that the sudden movement in the market has caused several currency brokers (including FXCM, Alpari Ltd., and Global Brokers NZ Ltd.) to declare insolvency and at least two hedge funds, COMAC Global Macro Fund and Everest Capital’s Global Fund, to close. More to the point, I want to highlight that fact and ask: what in God’s name were they doing?
Let’s review. In order to lose a lot of money in this trade, you need to be short the Swiss Franc against the Euro. Let’s analyze the potential risks and rewards of this trade. The good news is that the SNB is going your way, adding billions of Swissy to the market. The bad news is that if they win, it is likely to be a begrudging movement in the market – the underlying fundamentals, after all, were heavily the other direction which is why the SNB was forced to intervene – and if they lose, as they ultimately did, it is almost certainly going to be a sudden snap in the other direction since the only major seller of Swiss was exiting. Folks, this is like when a commodity market goes limit-bid, because everyone wants to buy at the market’s maximum allowable move and no one wants to sell. When that market is opened for trading again, it is very likely to continue to move in that direction hard. See the chart below (source: Bloomberg) of one of my favorite examples, the early-1993 rally in Lumber futures after a very strong housing number. The market was limit-up for weeks, most of the time without trading. If you were short, you were carried out.
Of course, there was at least a rationale for being short lumber in early 1993. No one knew that there was about to be a huge housing number. There’s very little rationale to being short Swiss Francs here that I can fathom. This is a classic short-options trade. If you win, you make a tiny amount. If you lose, then you blow up. If you do that with a tiny amount of money, and make lots of small bets that are not only uncorrelated but will be uncorrelated in a crisis (it is unclear how one does this), then it can be a reasonable strategy. But how this is a smart strategy in this case escapes me. And as a broker, I would not allow my margining system to take the incredibly low volatility in the Euro/Swiss cross as a sign that even lower margins are appropriate. VaR here is obviously useless because the distribution of possible returns is not even remotely normal. Again, as a broker I am short options: I might make a tiny amount from customer trading or carry on their cash positions; or I might be left holding the bag when the margin balances held by customers prove to be too little and they walk away.
And I suppose the bottom line is this: you cannot know for certain that your broker or hedge fund manager is being wise about this sort of thing. But you sure as heck need to ask.
Seasonal Allergies
Come get your commodities and inflation swaps here! Big discount on inflation protection! Come get them while you can! These deals won’t last long!
Like the guy hawking hangover cures at a frat party, sometimes I feel like I am in the right place, but just a bit early. That entrepreneur knows that hangover cures are often needed after a party, and the people at the party also know that they’ll need hangover cures on the morrow, but sales of hangover cures are just not popular at frat parties.
The ‘disinflation party’ is in full swing, and it is being expressed in all the normal ways: beat-down of energy commodities, which today collectively lost 3.2% as front WTI Crude futures dropped to a 2-year low (see chart, source Bloomberg),
…10-year breakevens dropped to a 3-year low (see chart, source Bloomberg),
…and 1-year inflation swaps made their more-or-less annual foray into sub-1% territory.
So it helps to remember that none of the recent thrashing is particularly new or different.
What is remarkable is that this sort of thing happens just about every year, with fair regularity. Take a look at the chart of 10-year breakevens again. See the spike down in late 2010, late 2011, and roughly mid-2013. It might help to compare it to the chart of front Crude, which has a similar pattern. What happens is that oil prices follow a regular seasonal pattern, and as a result inflation expectations follow the same pattern. What is incredible is that this pattern happens with 10-year breakevens, even though the effect of spot oil prices on 10-year inflation expectations ought to be approximately nil.
What I can tell you is that in 12 of the last 15 years, 10-year TIPS yields have fallen in the 30 days after October 15th, and in 11 of the past 15 years, 10-year breakevens were higher in the subsequent 30 days.
Now, a lot of that is simply a carry dynamic. If you own TIPS right now, inflation accretion is poor because of the low prints that are normal for this time of year. Over time, as new buyers have to endure less of that poor carry, TIPS prices rise naturally. But what happens in heading into the poor-carry period is that lots of investors dump TIPS because of the impending poor inflation accretion. And the poor accretion is due largely to the seasonal movement in energy prices. The following chart (source: Enduring Investments) shows the BLS assumed seasonality in correcting the CPI tendencies, and the actual realized seasonal pattern over the last decade. The tendency is pronounced, and it leads directly to the seasonality in real yields and breakevens.
This year, as you can tell from some of the charts, the disinflation party is rocking harder than it has for a few years. Part of this is the weakening of inflation dynamics in Europe, part is the fear that some investors have that the end of QE will instantly collapse money supply growth and lead to deflation, and part of it this year is the weird (and frustrating) tendency for breakevens to have a high correlation with stocks when equities decline but a low correlation when they rally.
But in any event, it is a good time to stock up on the “cure” you know you will need later. According to our proprietary measure, 10-year real yields are about 47bps too high relative to nominal yields (and we feel that you express this trade through breakevens rather than outright TIPS ownership, although actual trade construction can be more nuanced). They haven’t been significantly more mispriced than that since the crisis, and besides the 2008 example they haven’t been cheaper since the early days (pre-2003) when TIPS were not yet widely owned in institutional portfolios. Absent a catastrophe, they will not get much cheaper. (Importantly, our valuation metric has generally “beaten the forwards” in that the snap-back when it happens is much faster than the carry dynamic fades).
So don’t get all excited about “declining inflation expectations.” There is not much going on here that is at all unusual for this time of year.
