DoubleLine’s famed Jeff Gundlach says we’ll take out March lows in stocks because the market is dysfunctional.
Karen and I have money at DoubleLine through managed accounts with advisors. Mr. Gundlach is a smart man. Maybe it’s splitting hairs if I say the stock market isn’t dysfunctional but reflecting its inherent structural risks.
We know as much as anyone including Mr. Gundlach about market mechanics. And I still learn new stuff daily. Matter of fact, I had an epiphany over the weekend. I compared market behaviors during the Great 2020 Market Correction.
Wow is that something to see. We might host a webcast and share it. If you’re interested, let us know.
Over the past decade, the effort to produce returns with lower risk has spread virally in the US stock market. Call it alpha if you like, getting more than you’re risking. Hedge funds say it’s risk-adjusted return.
The aim is to protect, or insure, everything against risk, as we everyday people do. We protect our homes, cars, lives, appliances, even our entertainment expenditures, against risk by paying someone to replace them (save for our lives, where beneficiaries win at our loss).
Stock traders try to offset the cost of insurance by profitably transacting in insured assets. That’s the holy grail. No flesh wounds, no farts in our general direction (for you Monty Python fans).
It works this way. Suppose your favorite stock trades for $20 and you’re a thousand shares long – you own 1,000 shares. For protection, you buy 20 puts, each for 50 shares. You’re now long and short a thousand shares.
If the stock rises, the value of your puts shrinks but you’re up. If the stock declines, your long position diminishes but your puts are worth more. Say the stock rises to $23. The value of your puts declines, making you effectively long 1,300 shares, short 700.
To generate alpha (I’m simplifying, leaving out how options may decrease in value near expiration, the insurance-renewal date, so to speak), you need to offset the cost of insurance. With a good model built on intraday volatility, you can trade the underlying stock for 20 days, buying high and selling low, going long or short, to mitigate costs.
Everybody wins. Your counterparty who sold you the puts makes money. You make money trading your favorite stock. You have no fear of risk. And because more money keeps coming into stocks via 401ks and so on, even the losers get lucky (thank you Tom Petty, rest in peace, for that one).
One big reason this strategy works is the rules. Regulation National Market System requires all stocks to trade at a single daily average price in effect. Calculating averages in a generally rising market is so easy even the losers can do it.
Now, what would jack this model all to hell?
A virus (frankly the virus is an excuse but time fails me for that thesis today).
Understand this: About 80% of all market volume was using this technique. Quants did it. Active hedge funds. Fast Traders. Exchange-Traded Funds (ETF) market-makers.
Big volatility doesn’t kill this strategy. It slaughters the parties selling insurance. Observers are missing this crucial point. Most active money didn’t sell this bear turn. We can see it. Again, a story for later via webcast if you’re interested.
What died in the great 2020 Coronavirus Correction was the insurance business.
Casualties litter the field. The biggest bond ETFs on the planet swung wildly in price. Big banks like Dutch giant ABN Amro took major hits. Twenty-six ETFs backed by derivatives failed. The list of ETFs ceasing the creation of new units keeps growing and it’s spilling into mainstream instruments. Going long or short ETFs is a fave hedge now.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange auctioned the assets of a major high-speed trader that sold insurance, Ronin Capital (around since 2006. If its balance sheet and leverage can be believed, it may have imputed a loss of $500 billion to markets.
Just one firm. How many others, vastly bigger, might be at risk?
Forget stock-losses. Think about how funds mitigate volatility. How they generate alpha. We’ve been saying for years that if the market tips over, what’s at risk is whatever has been extended through derivatives. ETFs are derivatives. That’s 60% of volume.
And now key market-makers for stocks, bonds, ETFs, derivatives, commodities, currencies, are tied up helping the Federal Reserve. Including Blackrock. They can’t be all things to all people at once.
The market isn’t dysfunctional. It’s just designed to function in ways that don’t work if insurance fails. And yes, I guess that that’s dysfunctional. That was my epiphany.
I’ll conclude with an observation. We shouldn’t shut down our economy. Sweden didn’t. This is their curve. Using a population multiplier, their curve is 27% better than ours – without shutting down the economy, schools, restaurants. We are the land of the free, the home of the brave. Not the land of those home, devoid of the brave. I think it’s time to put property rights, inalienable rights, above the government’s presumption of statist power.