An Economic Theory that Leads to Smart Investing

 

The single most asked question I get at investment conferences is, “Do you have a list of money managers who invest guided by the Austrian School of economics?” The question is a good one. After all, the Austrian School stands alone in predicting the fall of the Soviet Union and the housing and financial crash.

Anyone with a retirement account has been whipsawed by the stock market over the past few decades. Fidelity’s Peter Lynch told everyone to buy stocks and hold. Everything would work out great. Diligent savers would even end up millionaires, courtesy of an ever-expanding stock market. The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) provided intellectual support for the idea. The market reflects all information, so there’s no way to beat it, said the economists.

Now everyone knows better. Or at least they should.

The average person’s 401(k) was turned into a 201(k) in 2000, and was destroyed again in 2008 if they were brave enough to stay or get back in the market. Many people swore off stocks after the last crash only to watch the S&P 500 triple. Now the Fed’s zero interest policy has pulled them back just in time for the next market train wreck.

Those educated in the Austrian School understand how the central bank creates the business cycle’s booms and busts. And they know there is a better way than just buying, holding, and hoping. But how does one apply it using Friedrich Hayek’s and Ludwig von Mises’ theories to make money in the market?

In a very readable 107 pages, Roger McKinney shows you how to turn theory into profit and financial survival in his book Financial Bull Riding.

Now is the perfect time to read McKinney’s book. Stocks are trading at all-time highs. More margin debt is outstanding than ever before. Price/earnings ratios are stretched, with market darlings like Netflix and Amazon trading at P/Es of 196 and 581, respectively.

However expensive it may be, if you’ve missed this market move, every day it goes up, you feel the regret and are tempted to jump in. If already fully invested, you’re rationalizing away any concerns.

Eugene Fama may have shared the Nobel Prize for his EMH work, but McKinney disposes of the idea using a folksy story from a serially successful investor — Warren Buffett — that strict adherents to EMH would deny the existence of.

Buffett finished his story about coin-flipping orangutans with “I think you will find that a disproportionate number of successful coin flippers in the investment world came from a very small intellectual village that could be called Graham-and-Doddsville.”

Common sense still makes sense in the plains.

Buffett has a point. Even in the speculative world of junior resource investing, the legendary Rick Rule is an ardent adherent to the teachings of Ben Graham and David Dodd.

McKinney’s book may be about beating the markets, but the author gains his clear perspective not just through the lens of Austrian economics but from operating as a financial adviser far, far away in the flatland of Oklahoma. His perspective isn’t clouded by the canyons of Wall Street. Common sense still makes sense in the plains.

Bull Riding is Rothbardian in its scope of history used to support the book’s premise. Richard Cantillon is not a household name, but McKinney provides a brief, enlightening history of the man who made a fortune in the crash of John Law’s Mississippi Bubble in 1720 France.

And how many books on investing mention the University of Salamanca as the beginning of the marginal revolution? “Had [Adam] Smith been more familiar with the writings of the Salamanca scholars, he would not have made that mistake.” “That mistake” being the labor theory of value.

Readers shouldn’t worry about the author getting too bogged down in theory or history. He condenses these matters, as well as the Keynesian takeover. He then quickly gets into explaining the Austrian business cycle theory as the bedrock for investment timing.

Hayek’s and Mises’ insight was that monetary intervention by a central bank forces interest rates below their natural rate. This fools entrepreneurs into believing savings have increased and demand has shifted from consumer goods to higher-order (investment) goods. Of course, savings haven’t increased, and this misdirected capital becomes what Austrians call malinvestments, to be liquidated in the downturn.

Selecting good companies to invest in is important, but timing is everything. “If we can predict with some accuracy when profits will change in the business cycle,” McKinney writes, “we should have some idea of when stock prices will change.”

The author follows the money and, in turn, the profits of various business sectors, providing a road map to help investors determine entry and exits points in the market. It’s what he calls avoiding the “business cycle horns.”

Investors have different temperaments and risk tolerances. Very few are all-around cowboys. McKinney lays out three strategies for this investment rodeo depending upon what kind of cowboy you are.

You may be a calf roper, with plenty of skill and, most importantly, plenty of patience. But calf ropers don’t make as much as other cowboys. Steer wrestlers make more, but timing is more critical, while less patience is required.

The big money in any rodeo is made by bull riders, who risk life and limb for an eight-second thrill ride. The investment bull rider will try to ride all market fluctuations using margin, options, and futures. Bumps and bruises should be expected, but the rewards can be enormous for a successful ride. Especially if you use Austrian business cycle as a big-picture guide, with technical analysis to navigate the market’s daily bucking.

The best freedom is financial freedom. Rather than hand your hard-earned savings to a broker or money manager whose primary interest is to generate commissions or increase money under management, take control of your own nest egg.

Sincerely,

Doug French
for The Daily Reckoning

Inverted Yield Curve Doesn’t Cause Recessions, But It Predicts Them

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Source: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

One of the big financial news stories of the past month has been the inverted yield curve, which means that the interest rate on long-term government debt is lower than that on short-term debt. During expansions, interest on short-term government debt is lower than long-term. In other words, things are upside down. Inverted yield curves are rare events and often predict a recession within two years, although a couple of recessions have happened without the curve inverting.

John Tamny recently chastised market pundits for claiming that the Fed’s monetary policy is too tight and caused the inverted yield curve. The writers and talking heads who make that claim are followers of a school of macroeconomics known as monetarism. Milton Friedman was a famous monetarist. Monetarists believe that monetary policy drives everything. They have no objective measure of “tight” or “loose” monetary policy. Policy is too tight if the economy is slowing and too loose if inflation gets out of control.

Continue at Townhall Finance

Baptists and bootleggers explains lofty stock market

Jason Zweig, who writes the Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal, posted recently about “Disturbing New Facts about American Capitalism.” He wrote:

“Modern capitalism is built on the idea that as companies get big, they become fat and happy, opening themselves up to lean and hungry competitors who can underprice and overtake them. That cycle of creative destruction may be changing in ways that help explain the seemingly unstoppable rise of the stock market."

Zweig cites new research by academics that claims the US is moving to a “a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they grow.” The evidence consists of higher concentrations of market share among just a handful of companies. For example, the top four grocery chains hold 89% of the market. The top four real-estate service companies command 78%. In intro to economics those are called oligopolies.

The idol of randomness wants to steal your wealth

If you’re reading this post, I assume you have built some wealth and are wondering how to keep it and possibly make it grow. You should know that many people claim you have no right to that wealth because you didn’t earn it. You got it by luck, like a lottery winner.

Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist at the Oxford Club, wrote a great post recently on the topic, “Is Business and investment success due to skill...or luck?” The post issued from a debate he had with a New York Times columnist, Robert Frank, author of the book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.

Frank wrote in his book that “If you have been so economically successful that your income and net worth put you in the top 1% or 2% in the country, the deciding factor was not talent, education, hard work, risk-taking, persistence, resilience or all of the above...It was luck, plain and simple.” Frank is clever to assault only the top 2% of wealthy. They have no friends and attacking them will excite envy in the rest. 

Stop dancing to the Fed's fiddle

For the first time in almost a decade the market shrugged off a significant move by the Fed when it increased its rate by 0.25%. Of course, the market had anticipated the increase for a year and so priced it in earlier. And euphoria over the president elect trumped Fed policy. This is a good time to reassess the logic of dancing to the Fed’s fiddle.

Mainstream economists used to dance to the tune of Keynes and fiscal policy until the disaster of stagflation in the 1970s. Fiscal policy, they cried, suffered from too many lags to be effective, as if the lags were the only reason it couldn’t be effective. There were no problems with lags during the 1930s under FDR and it still wasn’t effective.

Fickle as teenage groupies, mainstream economists switched their adoration to the Fed. The Fed could save us all when Uncle Sam failed. Adulation for the Fed climaxed with the financial media’s crowning of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as the “Maestro” who could orchestrate the economy as he wished with a wave of his wand.

Then housing landed on the economy and caused the Great Recession (GR). Ben Bernanke waved his wand but the economy wouldn’t perform. It couldn’t get out from under the house. Eight years later, confidence in the Fed has evaporated and mainstream groupies are bailing out on the Fed and returning to their first love, fiscal policy.

Trump proposes welfare for Mexican immigrants

Last week the Dow index hit records highs largely on the assumption that a Trump presidency will mean massive new spending on infrastructure to shock the economy back to life like a paramedic putting the paddles on a patient whose heart has quit. That’s sad because it reveals how Keynesian and medieval the economic thinking of too many investors has become.

Bush allocated $800 billion to jolt the economy after the Great Recession. Can anyone tell me what we got for it? Of course, the medieval economists counter with “The economy would have been worse without it.” But they don’t know that. They have no data on what might have been, and for a field that is supposed to be data driven they make a lot of decisions based solely on their imagination.

Yes, they have the new-Keynesian models that “prove” the spending helped, but what do you expect from math models constructed with the assumption that state spending drives the economy?

How over confidence destroys earnings

“The curious task of economics,"  wrote Nobel Prize winner in economics Friedrich Hayek "is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

In other words, good economists are humble and that shows how few good economists live in the US.

Investors should be humble, too, and researchers have provided the proof. Two professors at the University of Maastrict published a paper at the beginning of this year on the question of “How Does Investor Confidence Lead to Trading?” The problem is not that initial successes spur investors to greater confidence.

Hence, we find evidence that our measure of investor confidence refers to a certain type of individual, as it is stable over time...Moreover, there is no evidence that any of the small fluctuations in investor confidence are driven by past returns, that is, that high returns lead investors to learn to be overconfident...That is, confident investors generally have lower returns (because of their higher turnover, see Section 5.1), but variation in those lower returns does not change their confidence.

In other words, the overly confident investor is always confident whether winning or losing. And men don’t have a monopoly on excessive confidence:

What’s an investor to do when the market won’t cooperate?

What is an investor who follows the Austrian school of economics supposed to do with a market that has traded in a narrow range for almost two years and refuses to bend to the reality of falling profits and a slow economy? After all, we may already be in a recession, as Peter Schiff thinks, but the market is clueless.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the fetish with randomness that afflicts mainstream economics and finance. One result of that fetish is the dogma that no one should try to time the market; just pick good stocks and stay with them. The high priests ridicule those of us who make any effort at looking into the future.

Socialists stuck on luck

In May of this year The Atlantic offered another hymn to the goddess of luck. Not only is worshiping the goddess a good thing according to the author, but agnostics are stingy and selfish:

Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and public-spirited...

A recent study by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright found that the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders are “extremely active politically” and are much more likely than the rest of the American public to resist taxation, regulation, and government spending. Given that the wealthiest Americans believe their prosperity is due, above all else, to their own talent and hard work, is this any wonder? Surely it’s a short hop from overlooking luck’s role in success to feeling entitled to keep the lion’s share of your income—and to being reluctant to sustain the public investments that let you succeed in the first place.

Traditionally, religion explained what we couldn’t understand. Today, it’s randomness. Choosing randomness, or luck, is a description, not an explanation of a phenomenon, and an admission of ignorance. There are quite a few books promoting the goddess of luck. Keynes blamed recession on the “animal spirits” of businessmen, an allusion to randomness and not pagan beliefs. Nassim Taleb’s books on black swans was my first introduction to her. Then I read Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street: A Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing. Recently, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow came out.

The rich are getting richer - Baptists and bootleggers

Hillary and Bernie dusted off and hoisted aloft the old medieval standard “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer” during their primary contest. Republicans tended to respond with, “So?” During the Olympics, Hill promised to make the rich pay their fair share in her TV ads. Hill and Bernie imply that the rich have become wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, another medieval economics principle.

Attacking the wealthy always inflames envy, draws a crowd and extorts campaign contributions. That’s why politicians use it so often, as Helmut Schoeck noted in his masterpiece, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.

The truth is that Bernie and Hill are half right: inequality is growing. They're just wrong about the reasons. However, free marketeers do a lot of damage to the cause by ignoring the issue or denying that anything is wrong. Worse, some even defend growing inequality. 

How long can low rates last?

The charging of interest on loans is one of the most hated and worst understood concepts in human history. Aristotle claimed that money cannot beget money because it is dead, so charging interest on loans is immoral. Moses’ law forbid Israelis to charge interest on loans to the poor, but the Church interpreted that prohibition according to Aristotle’s economics and made charging interest on loans one of the worst sins that Christians can commit. Aristotle’s writings had almost equal weight with the Bible in many matters until Copernicus and Galileo trashed his astronomy.

But kings, nobility and popes needed to borrow money occasionally in order to keep up their conspicuous consumption, so Jews were allowed to commit the sin of usury. That gave Christians an excuse to persecute them regularly.

The church didn’t reform its economics until the 17th century when theologians from the University of Salamanca abandoned Aristotle for common sense. A letter from John Calvin to a friend on the topic may have helped. Calvin wrote that interest on loans was no different from charging rent on land, which everyone could understand.

Recently, an investing newsletter increased the confusion over interest rates for its readers. It claimed that interest rates have fallen naturally from roughly 50% in 5000 BC. “Fast-forward a bit and we see the Greeks expanded the credit system. In 600 B.C., they paid rates of around 16% in a quickly modernizing monetary system. By 100 B.C., though, a typical loan came with a rate of just 8%. And then things got interesting...”

The Damage that NIRP does

Bloomberg carried a story a few weeks ago on Denmark, which has been “blessed” with a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) longer than any other developed nation. The authors asserted that the horror stories about low interest rates with which economists have typically frightened us for decades haven’t come true in the Scandinavian country, so economics must be wrong.

Of course, the Bloomberg journalists have forgotten the primary caveat of economic reasoning – ceteris paribus, or all other things being equal. The horror of money printing, such as the disaster that nearly destroyed Germany in the early 1920s, caused hyperinflation and a plummeting exchange rate. Those haven’t afflicted Denmark, or any other major country, yet, because everything hasn’t remained ceteris or paribus.

When every nation reduces rates in concert, it has no impact on exchange rates. And it may not cause much inflation. The idea that it must cause price inflation or economics is wrong comes from a blockheaded view of the quantity theory of money. Again, ceteris paribus applies. Printing money (or technically credit expansion via low interest rates) will cause price inflation if nothing else in the economy changes. But money printing doesn’t work mechanically. Japan should know. The Bank of Japan has desperately tried to create inflation through money printing for the past 30 years.

Sector rotation confirms ABCT

Mark Skousen in his excellent economics text, The Structure of Production, shows that professions on the front line such as accountants and investing experts, follow the Austrian business-cycle theory (ABCT) often without know it. Schwab confirmed that in March of this year with a chart titled “The Business Cycle: How Does Each Sector Perform.”

The chart divides the business cycle into four segments – early expansion, maturing expansion, late expansion and recession – and shows which sectors perform the best in each segment of the cycle. I do something similar in Financial Bull Riding but use segments of the cycle described by Lord Overton in the mid-1800s.

How not to predict the stock market

Investing expert Bert Dohmen said that “Looking at earnings, dividends and P/E ratios in order to predict future stock prices are all a waste of time” in a recent Forecasts & Strategies email issued by the economist Mark Skousen. The email continued:

Dohmen explained, “If a P/E were meaningful for predicting future price performance, why is a stock like Facebook selling at a lofty P/E of around 90, and Amazon with a P/E of 300, both still highly recommended and rising, while other stocks, like Apple, with a low P/E of around 10, [are] declining and down 35%?”

He added, “Analysts tell us that ‘earnings’ are the most important thing affecting stock prices. Really?! Well, corporate earnings in 2015-2016 have had the largest decline since the crisis in 2009, but the DJI and the S&P 500 are within about 1% of making new record highs.”

Then Dohmen asked the all-important question, “So what is the major determinant of stock market trends?”

Of course, the answer is “future earnings.” Stock prices are always based on the forward-looking views of investors. That’s why high-priced stocks such as Facebook are selling for 90 times earnings. It also explains why Amazon is selling for 300 times earnings and Tesla is selling for $230 a share even though it has no earnings! Investors are upbeat about their future. Meanwhile, Apple is selling for only 10 times earnings because it’s not viewed as a growth stock anymore.

Fundamentalist investing scores big gains

Last week I wrote about fundamentalism and I want to carry on with that theme this week. I’m late to the party. Research Affiliates launched their fundamental indexes over ten years ago, but I only recently read The Fundamental Index: A Better Way to Invest by Robert Arnott, Jason Hsu and John West.

The authors promote index investing because of the evidence of the failure of most active managers to match the percentage returns of indexes such as the S&P 500. For most part time investors, indexes are the best choice. Even Warren Buffet enlisted an index fund to sustain his wife’s wealth after he moves on.

Golf, economics and fundamentalist investing

Scottish people will always have trouble getting into heaven because they have tempted humanity with two infamous inventions: golf and economics. They’re trying to make up for it with their whiskey, and doing a pretty good job, but the final judgment is up to someone else.

Golf offers a few lessons that would help economists as investors if they would pay attention. The chief lesson is get back to the fundamentals. Fundamentalism has become a curse word lately, but in Christianity it originally meant one who held to the doctrines of the virgin birth, deity, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is, the fundamentals of the faith. Fundamentalists were distinguishing their concept of Christianity from the modernists who denied all of the fundamentals but for some strange reason, or out of pure dishonesty, continued to call themselves Christians. Twenty years ago a few journalists intent on advertising their ignorance began misusing the word and today a fundamentalist is the vilest murderer on the planet.

We should rescue the term from ignorant journalists. (Other words need rescuing as well, such as liberal and justice.)Those who practice the fundamentals of any discipline are fundamentalists and the fundamentals are important in most areas of life. In football the fundamentals are blocking and tackling. With investing, fundamental analysis is extremely important. In golf they’re grip and swing, according to the golf masterpiece, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book. Penick recommends revisiting the fundamentals when you’re golf scores suffer from inflation. Are there any fundamentals in economics that could rescue the field from the macro confusion that threatens it today? Yes. The fundamentals of economics are in micro.

Two schools of macroeconomics exist – Austrian and mainstream. But the mainstream world is split between paleo-Keynes, neo-Keynes, monetary and neoclassical. In spite of their common origins, they imitate their socialist counterparts in other fields by fracturing and fighting over insignificant details. All of them pretend that micro doesn’t exist and try to build their systems through correlations of aggregates, such as aggregate demand, aggregate supply, savings, investment, exports, money supply and GDP.

On the other hand, Austrian economics builds up its macro on the certain fundamentals of micro. There are no schools in micro. Micro is just micro because the principles of micro are the most certain in all of economics. No good economist disputes the laws of supply and demand, or diminishing marginal returns, though mainstream macro pretends they don’t exist.

The focus of Austrian economists on the fundamentals has enabled them to craft the best business-cycle model in the field. Mainstream economists are still stuck, after eighty years, with “crap happens!” They call it “shocks,” but it’s the same thing.

So if you find you investing landing in the rough, try getting back to the fundamentals: the market follows profits and profits follow the business cycle, the Austrian business-cycle.

Will we never see another Soros or Buffett?

The Global Guru wrote recently that investing has changed so much over the past two decades that we will never see investors like Buffett and Soros who could earn 30% returns for 30 years.

Nicholas Vardy wrote, “George Soros’ investment track record made him the equivalent of a .400 hitter in baseball.” But then his luck changed:

Soros quietly left the hedge fund scene in 2011, turning his fund into a family office. But his last few years in the game were hardly like his first. Indeed, 2010 was Soros’ worst year since 2002, with his flagship fund up a mere 2.63%. The following year was even worse, with his famed Quantum fund reportedly down 15%.

Another market head fake

In the world of real bull riding, as opposed to nominal bull riding, or investing, the cowboy (investor) must anticipate the spins and leaps of the bull. Riders often study video of bulls engaged in previous games of cowboy tossing. A wrong guess sends the cowboy flying then landing awkwardly absent a score and without money.

So what can we make of the January plunge and recent recovery of the bull market? I am betting that the bull’s real intention is to plunge into a bear and that the latest rise in stocks is a head fake to trick the cowboys to overcompensate in anticipation of a continued ascent. Instead, the bull will reverse direction and slingshot the cowboy (investor).

Some of us are mystified by the recent rise in stock prices, but as the great Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann wrote, moving the deeply anchored expectations of investors out of their comfort range for prices on the market requires extraordinary events. Some of us have seen indicators as early as two years ago, such as the hedge fund manager Mark Spritznagel, author of The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World.

Central bankers made bull riding necessary for survival

Bull riding has become a lucrative sport for those with the talent to ride, earning the top riders hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in spite of a few broken bones. Central bankers have made learning to ride the leaps and spins of the stock market a necessity since the early 1980’s. Why has the market been so volatile since 1980? Two factors have caused it:

1. End of Bretton Woods and rise of floating FX.

2. End of fiscal policy and rise of monetary policy.

The existing international system of floating rates doesn’t have a cool name like Bretton Woods, but it came about after the death of the former fixed rate system. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bankers’ bank, doesn’t like what its member banks are doing under the current system. While the media and politicians, especially Bernie Sanders, preach fire and brimstone damnation of Wall Street and condemn it for the Great Recession, the BIS body slams the world’s central bankers:

Rescuing turtles - How the ABCT can help trend followers part II

Last week I introduced readers to trend following strategies of Michael Covel. Those who follow trends are sometimes called "turtles." Covel and others admit that trend followers have sailed into troubled waters lately.

The Austrian business-cycle theory can help trend followers by taking some of the uncertainty out of trend directions. During bull markets, such as characterized the first six years after the recession, the trend was up about 90% of the time with small dips because 1) the Fed was printing new money like a counterfeiter and inflation rose; 2) profits rebounded as the economy naturally turned around ,and 3) growing risk tolerance drove PE ratios to the sky.

Covel recommends trading the long term trends in his books and the expansion phase of the business cycle is one of the longest, lasting on average about six years. An trend following investor familiar with the ABCT will not mistake dips for trends.