PhD’s and computers explain market volatility since 1980

Richard Bookstaber’s 2007 work, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, examines the huge increase in stock and bond market volatility since 1980. He notes that GDP volatility has shrunk while market volatility has increased. And if you graph the S&P 500, especially the year-to-year change, the massive increase in volatility is obvious.

Bookstaber, who has a PhD from MIT, writes that before the rise of computer trading, investment banks tended to hire college graduates who were also former athletes because managers thought they had the right temperament to handle the stresses of trading. Then computers came along and of course they need models to work with. Who had better models than PhD professors at universities? So the banks loaded up on PhD’s to create models for computer trading.

Bookstaber provides an insider’s account of the victories and tragedies of investment banking and arbitrage trading from the mid-1980s on because he labored in the trenches as a risk analyst, much of the time with Salomon Brothers. Two things stand out to Bookstaber: computer trading and innovation.

Investing tips from socialist Soros

Even though George Soros is a devout socialist, he knows something about investing. He writes about a typical cycle in the stock market in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism. He calls his theory “reflexivity,” but the general idea is that the stock market usually tracks profits closely until near the end of the cycle.

As the reader can see from the chart below, the variance in profits isn’t as great as that in stock prices. The two begin to diverge about halfway through the expansion. All that means is that the PE ratio begins to inflate because credit expansion by the Fed is pumping new dollars into the economy. 

If stock prices remained tethered to earnings, stock prices would level off. To prevent that, the media send in the clowns. In a rodeo, clowns distract the bulls to prevent them from stomping the cowboy into the arena dirt, but in the market the clowns distract the investor. The clowns pull from their shirt sleeves old tricks to make the fundamentals look better. They use performance measures that rely on creative accounting, alternative profit measures, pro forma statements, and complicated valuation techniques. The clowns break the connection to earnings so that prices continue their ascent unrestrained by fundamentals. If the market was an actual rodeo, the clowns would be lynched for letting the bulls pulverize the cowboys.

Brick and mortar retail is falling down

Brick and mortar retail is dying according to many reports. Here’s an example:

American retailers are closing stores at the fastest pace ever.

Roughly 10% of mall retail space - or 1 billion square feet - is on the verge of being closed, having rents slashed or transformed into something else. And in March, retailers cut 30,000 jobs, the same as in February.

It was the worst two-month span of job cuts for the sector since 2009 - during the depths of the Great Recession!

This year, as many as 8,640 total stores may close - which would outpace the 6,200 closed in 2008.

And as I've pointed out for years, it's because the companies failed to adapt. They were slow to recognize the changing tides and are now being destroyed by a single company... Amazon .”

Morgan Stanley says ride the raging bull

Morgan Stanley’s analysts suggest running with the bulls this week. They recently announced that they expect the S&P 500 to rise 15% in the next twelve months and possibly to reach 3,000, a gain of 27.4%. They wrote, 

Although optimism is a late cycle phenomenon, history tells us the best returns often come at the end."

Essentially, they are shouting “the end is near!” but “party while you can!” They credited President Trump for their optimism:

While acknowledging that the pro-business agenda of President Trump has awakened "animal spirits" in the economy, the Morgan Stanley strategists feel that Trump has simply "turbocharged" a global business recovery that already has been underway since the first quarter of 2016. They note that one of the worst economic contractions in 30 years, as measured by U.S. GDP, bottomed out a year ago. Since then, their favorite economic indicators have been accelerating, including those capturing business conditions, business outlook and global trade.

Creative destruction becoming less destructive

Investors should worry about productivity growth of the firms they invest in because it is one of the major determinants of profits and market share. Innovation should drive old technology firms out of business and improve productivity but that hasn’t been the case for half a century.

Productivity growth has been falling since about 1970 for many companies according to Andrew Haldane, Bank of England Chief Economist, in his speech “Productivity puzzles” at the London School of Economics last month in which he reported what’s happening to productivity in the UK and globally.

Haldane said the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. Some companies are highly innovative with rapidly growing productivity, but most lag far behind. There are broad differences in productivity growth between advanced economies and emerging market economies, between the US and other advanced economies, across industries and within industries. After providing the fruits of excellent research, however, Haldane offered an anticlimactic solution:

The Mayfield Commission aims to create an app which enables companies to measure their productivity and benchmark themselves against other companies operating in similar sectors and regions. By shining a light on companies’ relative performance, the aim is that this would serve as a catalyst for remedial action by company management.”

The four biggest mistakes in option trading

Years ago I had a friend attend a seminar on options in which he learned to buy out-of-the-money options on commodities and keep buying them until he hit the jackpot. Theoretically, the one big win would pay off all of the losses and add a hefty profit.

That strategy is pure gambling according to Jay Kaeppel, author of The Four Biggest Mistakes in Option Trading. The four are 1) relying solely on market timing to trade options, 2) buying only out-of-the-money options, 3) using strategies that are too complex and 4) casting too wide of a net.

Options and futures originated in the 17th century in the Dutch Republic to provide farmers a way to protect themselves against falling prices at harvest time and as a way for processors to protect their businesses against shortages caused by drought or disease. Options are still a good way to protect all kinds of assets, including shares of stocks. For example, a simple strategy for protecting one’s nest egg from a market collapse is simply to buy put options on an index of on the stock of specific companies. If the market declines, the option should increase in value enough to make up for the loss in the stock portfolio.

Now economists want to steal your wealth

Keeping your hard-earned wealth is hard. The state wants most of it in taxes. A couple of weeks ago I explained how socialists use randomness to steal your wealth. Now economists want to use a cashless society to take it. 

Many of the world’s top economists want to get rid of paper currency and force all of us to use electronic banking. One of the top mainstream economists, Kenneth Rogoff, has written a manifesto for them in his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash. Rogoff is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Many economists around the world have subscribed to his manifesto. Here are Rogoff’s main reasons for wanting a cashless society:

The real issues involve the ability to use monetary policy to (1) stabilize the economy, (2) issue credit in response to financial crises (act as lender of last resort), and (3) be able to inflate the price level in an emergency where it is necessary to engage in partial default (in real terms) on government debt. To achieve these ends effectively, it is extremely helpful for the government to control the unit of account and the currency to which most private contracts are indexed. 

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. 

Couch potato investing: better that betting on a horse race

In Financial Bull Riding I wrote that annual percentage returns is the wrong measure of investment performance. The better metric is absolute dollar return. Naive investors, and most financial journalists, assume the two will produce the same results, but they don't. 

Josh Peters, Director of Equity Income Strategy for Morningstar and the author of The Ultimate Dividend Playbook, calls chasing percentage returns a horse race: 

Almost all of Wall Street is geared around this idea of a horserace. That it’s all about trying to beat your benchmark, beat the S&P 500 — to do it every quarter regardless of whether that quarter is up or down. That’s not what most people are looking to do. That’s only how money managers evaluate each other, maybe. But that’s not necessarily what’s going to serve the actual financial requirements or financial needs of people who are out there. The biggest demand out there is for income and it’s not just because interest rates are low, it’s because baby-boomers are retiring and most of them don’t have those defined benefit pension plans to count on.

Why the Fed can't drive

One of Milton Friedman’s favorite analogies about monetary policy was driving a car. He compared money creation by the Fed to pushing on the gas pedal. On flat ground giving the engine more gas makes the car speed up, so giving the economy more gas should cause it to accelerate as well. But giving the engine more gas by pushing on the pedal may allow the car to slow down when climbing a hill if the engine doesn’t get enough gas to overcome the gravity involved in climbing the hill.

Friedman’s point: interest rates tell us nothing about whether Fed policy is too tight or too loose. Only the speed of economic growth can tell us that. Low interest rates may be too high if the economy is climbing a steep hill, like a recession. On the other hand, high rates may be too low if the economy is speeding up, as it does near the end of an expansion. The grandchildren of Friedman use that analogy to argue for nominal GDP targeting by the Fed instead of price targets. The problem with the Fed’s driving strategy is that it never knows if it is climbing or descending a hill or how fast the economy is growing at the time it makes its policy decisions because of long lag times from policy decision to its impact.

The case for a raging market in 2017

Trumpeting a new boss in the White House wasn’t the only cause of the recent spectacular rise in the stock market. Several economic indicators improved in the fourth quarter. Nicholas Vardy wrote,

Consumer confidence stands at its highest level since August 2001. The unemployment rate is at nine-year low. The U.S. economy is close to full employment. S&P 500 earnings are coming out of an earnings recession, and are expected to grow by double-digit percentages in 2017. 

And the money supply jumped:

The supply of US dollars accelerated during late 2016 with October's year-over-year percentage increase in the money supply hitting a 46-month high of 11.2 percent. The YOY growth rate fell slightly to 10.3 percent in November.

This comes after a long period of relatively sedate growth in the money supply through most of 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The recent surge in money supply growth suggests that the likelihood of an economic contraction in the near future has been reduced, with the next downturn being pushed out further into the future. 

Trump's strength is his weakness - businessman economics

President Trump is clearly a good businessman. His wealth proves it. And it was partly his success in business that encouraged many adults to vote for him. The logic seemed sound: if the problem with the US is the economy then surely a successful businessman can fix it. But the fact that he is a successful businessman is Mr. Trump’s weakness as well.

Mises used to say that businessmen are better at predicting the short run than are economists so economists should not try to compete with them in their area of comparative advantage. The job of the good economist is to force business people to look up once in a while and acknowledge the long run. They can spurn the long run and court the short run, but the long run always shows up and the longer she has been ignored the uglier she is. The field of economics was born out of that insight, Mises wrote:

In order to discover the immediate-the short-run-effects brought about by a change in a datum, there is as a rule no need to resort to a thorough investigation. The short-run effects are for the most part obvious and seldom escape the notice of a naive observer unfamiliar with searching investigations. What started economic studies was precisely the fact that some men of genius began to suspect that the remoter consequences of an event may differ from the immediate effects visible even to the most simple-minded layman. The main achievement of economics was the disclosure of such long-run effects hitherto unnoticed by the unaffected observer and neglected by the statesman. (Mises, Human Action, 649)

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.

Investors to get slapped by the invisible hand

The great American economist Benjamin Anderson wrote Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United State, 1914 – 1946. Most mainstream economists get the history of that period, especially the Great Depression, wrong. If you want to know what really happened and why, read Anderson's book. In a chapter on the stock market crash of 1929, Anderson related the following story:

One able Jewish investment banker said in the summer of 1928 that he did not understand what was going on. He said, “When I do no understand I do nothing.” He had withdrawn from the market. He had turned his holdings into cash, and he was waiting until he understood.

Goldman Sachs rains on Trump honeymoon

Traditionally, a new president enjoys a “honeymoon” period during his first few months in office but it seems that Goldman Sachs doesn’t like tradition. The investment bank tried to puncture the euphoria in the stock market over Donald Trump’s victory by issuing a sober forecast of what the US can expect from his regime next year. Their conclusion:

The prediction comes as part of the team’s annual not about the top ten market themes for 2017. Theme No. 1: Utter disappointment.

Actually, the theme was closer to “more of the same.” GS thinks stocks are pricey already and the economy won’t improve enough for profits to relieve some of the altitude in valuations. They are probably right and things might actually get worse if we get the long overdue recession.

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?

Investors are becoming aggressively passive

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran several articles on the tectonic shift in investing from actively managed funds to passive index funds. In “The Dying Business of Actively Picking Stocks,” the Journal reported that “Over the three years ended Aug. 31, investors added nearly $ 1.3 trillion to passive mutual funds and their brethren— passive exchange- traded funds— while draining more than a quarter trillion from active funds, according to Morningstar Inc.”

Even Warren Buffet jabbed a knife between the ribs of active fund managers by stashing his wife’s inheritance in an index fund. One active manager proclaimed passive investing to be worse than Marxism for the future of capitalism.

The standard charges against actively managed funds are that only a few outperform indexes like the S&P 500 and they charge higher fees, says the Wall Street Journal.

Caterpillar needed the Austrian business-cycle theory

Caterpillar is facing its fourth year of declining sales, the longest in its history. It expects total revenue this year to be 39% below its peak in 2012 and profits will be down 68%. Its stock is now 25% below its peak. Through the first six months of 2016, the company’s overall revenue was down 21% from the same period in last year.

CEO Doug Oberhelman is stepping down, but when he took the reins in 2010 the world, especially China, couldn’t get enough metals. Prices were soaring and everyone thought the good times would last. That’s the first mistake most investors and businessmen make – linear forecasting instead of thinking in terms of cycles. Oberhelman should have understood cycles after working for Caterpillar for 35 years. The capital goods sector is the most volatile in the business cycle. But he didn’t understand them. Caterpillar’s problems began when it invested heavily at the peak of a cycle according to an article in the Wall Street Journal:

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: