Curtains are window-dressing. Curtains loom. But not the way you think. I’ll explain.
Before that, here in New York it’s Indian Summer, and Karen snapped this midtown shot after we stopped in at The Smith before two busy days of client visits. Next up, Washington DC with the NIRI contingent at Congress and the SEC, as I wrote last week.
Back to curtains, the news cycle forces us to address it. Democrats hope developments are curtains for President Trump. The market fell today. One could say Democrat glee clashes with market euphoria. Impeachment talks snowballed and down went stocks.
Short-term traders can push the snowball where it may want to go, sure. But the DATA changed more than a week ago. Market Structure Sentiment™ topped between Sep 12-17. This is not mass psychology. Our Sentiment index measures whether the probability of prices to rise has peaked or bottomed.
The great bulk of stock orders – around 96% – feed through algorithms and smart order routers. When those systems using extremely high-speed techniques find diminishing probability that trades will fill at the rate, price, and cost desired, they stop buying.
We translate that condition into a sentiment measure on a ten-point scale. For single stocks it’s 10/10 Overbought. For the total stock market or key benchmarks within it (S&P 500, reflecting about 88% of market capitalization, Russell 1000 comprising 95% of market cap), 7.0 is Overbought, and topped. Readings below 4.0 are Oversold and bottomed, meaning machines can fill orders better than models show.
The stock market measured this way rather than by fundamentals, headlines, blah blah, was topped more than a week ago and thus unlikely to rise further.
On Monday, Sep 23, new options and futures on everything from individual stocks to currencies and US Treasurys and indexes began trading. We feared that disruptions in the overnight lending market coupled with big currency volatility would alter demand.
What’s more, as we’ve written, there was no momentum to value shift by INVESTORS in the first part of September. It’s happening now only because business journalists have written about it so relentlessly that people are beginning to believe it.
What manifested in the data was a massive short squeeze on Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) market-makers, caught out by a surge in Fast Trading of VALUE stocks (and corresponding rejection of growth stocks) propelled by one stock, AT&T, where Activist investor Elliott showed. Machines duped humans. Spreads gapped, a squeeze formed.
What’s that got to do with curtains? I’m getting to it. Stay with me.
Short-covering is a margin call. Margin calls drive up the cost of borrowing (it rippled through the overnight lending market, forcing the Federal Reserve to intervene), which meant the next time around, leverage would cost more.
That recalibration occurred yesterday, and behavioral change in ETFs exploded to near 30% – a black swan, three standard deviations from norms. You didn’t see it in price and volume. You can’t see it that way.
But with Sentiment topped, the market was destined to give us a swoon. What if there’d been no news on impeachment? Which thing would have been blamed instead?
Behavioral change in markets is CAUSING pundits to cast about for reasons and incorrectly assign motivation.
Window-dressing, when passive money adjusts assets to reflecting benchmarks, has got to get done the next few days. Volatility skews benchmark-tracking. Fear feeds through markets to investors. The cost of hedging continues rising.
And there’s a vital futures contract for truing up index-tracking that expires the last trading day of each month. That’s next Monday.
The needs of passive money, leviathan in stocks now, means the patterns of window-dressing stretch long either side of the last trading day. We’re seeing them already (and if you want to know what they say, use our analytics!).
What this means for both investors and public companies is that you must track the underlying data if you want to know what’s coming. It’s there. And we have it.
Headlines are being driven by data-changes behind stocks rather than the other way around (we warned you, clients, in a special private note Monday before stocks opened for trading that we feared just this outcome).
Curtains – window-dressing, the movement of money – are more important than the window, the headlines used to justify unexpected moves.
So every public company, every investor, should put MORE weight on the data than the headlines. We’ve got that data.
