We’ve written of risks in stocks from proliferating Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).
We’ve talked long about liquidity risks, here last October with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan.
So what, right?
The market has functioned well in this Coronavirus Pandemonium, argue regulators and reporters (WSJ subscription required).
What’s the definition of functioning? Volume? You longtime users of Market Structure Analytics rely on them so as not to confuse busy – volume – with productive – liquidity (and to know when story drives price, and doesn’t, and much more).
Refinitiv Lipper says some $20 billion left US equities the week ended Mar 6. Sounds big but it’s 1% of volume.
Add up shorting (borrowed stock) at 45.2% of daily S&P 500 trading the past week, and Fast Trading (machines hyper-trading intraday and ending flat), 53.3% of volume, and it’s 98.5% of market volume but not liquidity.
There’s your 99% (the difference is a rounding error).
This is why you should care about market structure, if you haven’t yet.
Volatility Monday triggered a marketwide stock circuit-breaker halting trading when stocks drop 7%. First time since the rule was implemented in 2013.
Volatility halts also stopped futures trading Monday. Both events derailed reads of VIX volatility, which depend on futures contracts and put/call pricing for freely trading S&P 500 components.
Maybe the VIX was over 100 Monday. We don’t know, as components stopped trading.
What’s more, volatility halts for stocks and ETFs cascaded to more than a thousand Monday and Tuesday, including pauses in large caps like OXY, stopped eight times. I think we surpassed the record-setting currency-driven (as is this) frenzy of Aug 24, 2015.
Many directional ETFs in energy, commodities, market vectors, bonds, leveraged instruments, were halted too. Volatility halts are coal-mine canaries.
And we’re led to believe investors are panicking over the Coronavirus, and getting out, because markets are working. Anybody but ModernIR writing about volatility halts, paucity of liquidity? Do tell.
Market Structure Analytics exist, public companies and investors, to know what headlines don’t say.
It’s egregious disservice to tell everyone “the market is working great!” when volatility halts explode, most volume is transient trading, and nobody can get in or out.
Canaries falling in waves.
Active Investment declined in the S&P 500 from early Feb until Mar 6 and Mar 9, then ticked up 3% on selling – less than the 5.4% daily intraday volatility (spread between highest and lowest average prices) in components of the S&P 500.
Responding, the market suffered one of its greatest collapses.
People don’t care about insurance – a canary in the coal mine – until it’s needed. And then it’s too late.
Investors and public companies, if you’re lulled by quiescence like last autumn, you’ll be shocked by its departure regardless of the Coronavirus. You shouldn’t be.
ETFs are a principal cause for both market volatility and vanishing liquidity. Investors can sit on stocks – meaning they don’t circulate – and trade ETFs. When the market lurched, ETF market-makers withdrew, as we’d reasoned from data.
Then investors wanted to sell.
Without the ETFs driving some 67% of trading volume normally, nobody was there to calculate prices. Markets spun crazily like a fighter jet hit by a missile.
And regulators tell us the market is working fine. What about these dying canaries everywhere?
Here is liquidity simply. Trade-size is down to 132 shares in the S&P 500. If you’re an investor trying to sell 100,000 shares, you fill 1% of it and the price gyrates away from you as Fast Traders jump ahead.
Now your pre-trade analytics are wrong. You can pull your trade. Or try to blitzkrieg it in a thousand 100-share trades “at the market,” the best bid.
Wham!
The market implodes a thousand points. Try to buy 10,000 shares and the market skyrockets, rising a thousand points.
Investor-relations people for Energy companies, how do your executives feel about this market?
Technology IR people, what if you’re next? Tech is the biggest sector. Shorting rose 12% last week in the FAANGs (FB, AAPL, AMZN, GOOG/GOOGL, NFLX) and Active money was selling. FAANGs lead the market up and down. They topped Feb 14, bottomed Mar 3. And now?
(We have the answer. Ask us.)
Investors, is a market that can’t accommodate 1% of the audience into and out of the exits without shuddering the whole stadium and threatening its foundations okay?
Sentiment by our measures is the lowest we’ve ever recorded. Yesterday it was still falling but a day or two from bottom. Uncharted territory, yes. But ModernIR is continuously mapping behaviors, trends, spreads, more. We have that data, right here.
What if markets zoom? Or don’t?
What’s it worth, public companies and investors, to know what the headlines don’t tell you? What’s the price of a canary? Ask us. You’ll be surprised.
