We’re back! We relished upstate New York and Canandaigua Lake.
If you’ve never been to Letchworth and Watkins Glen parks, put them on your list. See photo here from the former, the Upper Falls there. Alert reader Deb Pawlowski of Kei Advisors, a local resident, said in pragmatic investor-relations fashion, “Beautiful area, isn’t it?”
Boy, indeed.
Letchworth State Park – Tim Quast
And it was month-end. Companies were demolishing earnings expectations, a thousand of them reporting last week, sixteen hundred more this week. Most big ones pile-driving views and guidance saw shares fall.
But how can that be? Aren’t markets a reflection of expectations?
Tim. Come on. You buy the rumor, sell the news.
If that’s how you’re describing the market to your executive team and board…um, you’re doing IR like a caveman. Rubrics and platitudes ought not populate our market commentary in this profession.
Use data. Everybody else does (except certain medical-science organizations, but let’s just step lightly past that one for now).
Last week across the components of the S&P 500, Active Investment was up 0.0%. Unchanged. Passive Investment – indexes, Exchange Traded Funds, quants, the money following a road map – fell 7%. The use of derivatives, which should be UP during month-end when indexes use futures and options (quarterly options and monthly futures expired Jul 30) to true up tracking instead fell 2%.
No biggie? Au contraire. A combined 9% drop in those behaviors is colossal. In fact, Passive money saw the steepest drop Jul 30 since Aug 3, 2020.
I’ll come back to what that means in a moment.
Finishing out the Four Big Behaviors behind price and volume, the only thing up last week besides short volume, which rose to 45% Friday from a 20-day average of 44% of S&P 500 volume, was Fast Trading. Machines with an investment horizon of a day or less. Up 4%.
Think about all the economic data dominating business news. The Purchasing Managers Index came in at 55 versus expectations of 56. Jobless claims unexpectedly jumped above 400,000. Inflation came in hotter than expected at a seasonally adjusted 5.4%, annualized. Egads!
As Ronald Dacey in the Netflix series Startup would say, “You feel me?”
I’m just saying data abounds and so do reactions to it. Yet we talk about the stock market like it’s got no measurable demographics or trends driving it.
Well, of course it does! Why is there not a single report Monday – except mine on Benzinga’s “Market Structure Monday” segment on the Premarket Prep Show – driven by data?
By the way, on Monday Aug 2, Passive Investment surged more than 14%. New month, new money into models. The reason the market didn’t goose into the rafters was because it filled the giant Friday Passive hole I just described.
Broad Market Sentiment at Aug 2 is 5.4 on our 10-point market-structure scale of waxing and waning demand. That’s exactly what it’s averaged for more than ten years. The market is not a daily barometer of reactions to data. But it IS a reflection of what money is observably doing.
And what it’s observably doing to the tune of about 90% of all market volume is not picking stocks. The money follows models. The money speculates. The money transfers risk. Because time is risk. The riskiest of all market propositions is buying and holding, because it leaves all the price-setting to stuff that’s much more capricious.
The least risky thing to do in the stock market is trade stuff for fractions of seconds, because your money is almost never exposed to downside risk. This is how Virtu famously disclosed in its S-1 that it made money in 1289 of 1290 days. Stock pickers just want to be right 51% of the time.
What’s the lesson? Everything is measurable and trends manifest precisely the way money behaves. It’s darned well time that boards and executive teams – and investors – understand the market as it is today.
Oh, and why is the Jul 30 drop in Passive money, the biggest in a year, a big deal? Because the market corrected in September 2020. The so-called FAANG stocks (FB, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG/L) fell 35% in three days.
There is Cause. Then a delay. Then the Effect. There is DEMAND and SUPPLY. If DEMAND declines and SUPPLY rises, stocks fall. In fact, those conditions uniformly produce falling prices in any market.
We measure it. Sentiment is demand. Short Volume is supply.
So. The stock market is at 5.4. Right at the average. But if the supply/demand trends don’t improve, the market is going to correct. Can’t say when. But the data will give us a causal indication.
If you want to know, use our analytics. We’ll show you everything!
