Your stock may collateralize long and short Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) simultaneously.
Isn’t that cognitive dissonance – holding opposing views? Jekyll and Hyde? It’s akin to supposing that here in Denver you can drive I-25 north toward Fort Collins and arrive south in Castle Rock. Try as long as you like and it’ll never work.
I found an instance of this condition by accident. OXY, an energy company, is just through a contested battle with CVX to buy APC, a firm with big energy operations in the Permian Basin of TX (where the odor of oil and gas is the smell of money).
OXY is in 219 ETFs, a big number. AAPL is in 271 but it’s got 20 times the market-capitalization. OXY and its short volume have moved inversely – price down, shorting up. The patterns say ETFs are behind it.
So I checked.
Lo and behold, OXY is in a swath of funds like GUSH and DRIP that try to be two or three times better or worse than an index. These are leveraged funds.
How can a fund that wants to return, say, three times more than an S&P energy index use the same stock as one wanting to be three times worse than the index?
“Tim, maybe one fund sees OXY as a bullish stock, the other as bearish.”
Except these funds are passive vehicles, which means they don’t pick stocks. They track a model, and in this case, the same model. If the stock doesn’t behave like the ETF, why does the fund hold it?
I should note before answering that GUSH and DRIP and similar ETFs are one-day investments. They’re in a way designed to promote ownership of volatility. They want you to buy and sell both every day.
You can see why. This image above shows OXY the last three months with GUSH and DRIP.
Consider what that means for you investor-relations professionals counting on shares to serve as a rational barometer, or you long investors doing your homework to find undervalued stocks.
Speaking of understanding, I’ll interject that if you’re not yet registered for the NIRI Annual Conference, do it now! It’s a big show and a good one, and we’ve got awesome market structure discussions for you.
Back to the story, these leveraged instruments are no sideshow. In a market with 3,500 public companies and close to 9,000 securities, tallying all stock classes, closed-end funds and ETFs, some routinely are among the top 50 most actively traded. SQQQ and TVIX, leveraged instruments, were in the top dozen at the Nasdaq yesterday.
For those juiced energy funds, OXY is just collateral. That is, it’s liquid ($600 million of stock trading daily) and currently 50% less volatile than the broad market. A volatility fund wants the opposite of what it’s selling (volatility) because it’s not investing in OXY. It’s leveraging OXY to buy or sell or short other things that feed volatility.
And it can short OXY as a hedge to boot.
All ETFs are derivatives, not just ones using derivatives to achieve their objectives. They are all predicated on an underlying asset yet aren’t the underlying asset.
It’s vital to understand what the money is doing because otherwise conclusions might be falsely premised. Maybe the Board at OXY concludes management is doing a poor job creating shareholder value when in reality it’s being merchandised by volatility traders.
Speaking of volatility, Market Structure Sentiment is about bottomed at the lowest level of 2019. It’s predictive so that still means stocks could swoon, but it also says risk will soon wane (briefly anyway). First though, volatility bets like the VIX and hundreds of billions of dollars of others expire today. Thursday will be reality for the first time since the 15th, before May expirations began.
Even with Sentiment bottoming, we keep the market at arm’s length because of its vast dependence on a delicate arbitrage balance. A Jekyll-Hyde line it rides.
