I rest my case, and it only took 15 years.
On Dec 29, 2009, we wrote in this very blog we’d then been clattering off the keyboard since 2006: “Now, why would you care about Iron Condors, IROs and execs? Because once again something besides fundamentals affected market prices.”
Has the market ever offered more proof than now of the absence of fundamentals? SPY, the S&P 500 Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), is up 27.3% since Mar 23 after falling 34.1% from a Feb 19 peak. It’s still 19% down but, boy. That’s like a Patriots Super Bowl comeback. And what happened?
Nothing.
I’ll explain.
Note: We’re going to discuss what’s happened to the market in the age of the virus at 2p ET today, and it’s free and open to anyone. Join us for an hour: https://www.niri.org/events/understanding-wild-markets-age-of-virus
What I mean by nothing is that the virus is still here, the economy is still shut down. Quarterly earnings began with the big banks yesterday and they were bad and Financials fell. The banks are the frontlines of the Viral Response (double entendre intended).
Many say the market’s expectations are improving. But we have NO IDEA what sort of destruction lies beyond the smoky wisps floating up from quarterly reporting. Future expectations are aspirational. Financial outcomes are rational facts.
And do they even matter?
Consider the Federal Reserve. Or as people are calling it on Twitter, the Freasury (Fed merged with Treasury). The Fed is all-in, signaling that it’ll create plenty of money to replace shrunken consumption (why is that good if your money buys less?). It’s even buying bond-backed ETFs, which are equities (we’re Japan now).
The market’s reaction to Fed intervention cannot be said to reflect business fundamentals but rather the probability of asset-price inflation – or perhaps the analogous equivalent of enough poker chips for all the players including the losers to stay in the game.
It’s a reason for a 27% rally in equities. But it’s confusing to Main Street, as it should be. We’ll have 20 million unemployed people (it’s coming) and capital destruction in the trillions of dollars when we sort out the mess in our consumption-driven society.
Yet the market doesn’t seem to depend on anything. That’s what I mean by nothing. The market does its thing, rises and falls, shifts money from Real Estate to Tech and back, without respect to the virus or fundamentals. As investors flail to describe the unexpected.
Stocks dependent on consumption like Consumer Discretionary, Energy, Materials, led sector gainers the last month. These include energy companies like Chevron, Exxon and Valero that sell gasoline to commuters. Chipotle, Starbuck’s, Royal Caribbean, selling stuff to people with discretionary income. Dow, Dupont and Sherwin-Williams selling paint, chemicals, paper.
They’ve soared, after getting demolished. And nothing has changed. Sure, Amazon, Zoom, Netflix, the chip companies powering systems behind all our stay-at-home video-use are up, and should be.
But the central tendency is that the market plunged down and bucked up, without data to support either move. That’s what I’ve been talking about so long. The market is not a barometer for rational thought.
It IS a barometer for behaviors, one of which is rational. And we’ll explain what this image means when you tune to the webcast. (Click here for larger version.)
Think of the risk in a market motivated by nothing. In Dec 2019 when we described the market as surly furious, the steep decline had no basis. During it, pundits tried to explain the swoon as expectation of a recession. Stocks roared to epic gains after Christmas 2018.
Nothing motivated either move. That was a stark illustration of market structure form trumping capital-formation function.
Now stocks have zoomed back up 27% off lows, and everything is still wrong, and the wrongness doesn’t yet have defined parameters.
I don’t know which instance is most stark. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Come ask questions today at 2p ET at our webcast on market structure during the age of the virus. I would love nothing more!
