This Cinco de Mayo we’re grateful for tequila.
Especially if you’re a Tech investor. Why are companies crushing earnings and revenue being pulverized by an imperious market?
It’s easiest to say expectations for the future have diminished and so market capitalization will too. That doesn’t reflect how the market works.
In fact, there’s inherent contradiction between that orthodox view of equities and the way money now behaves. Morningstar shows that more than a third of all institutional assets are in large-cap blend Passive funds. Total domestic ETF assets have increased by $1.5 trillion in the past year, says the Investment Company Institute.
Well, what’s that money do? We all understand the idea of following the money. That is, if you want to understand what’s driving behavior, track where the money goes.
For instance, prices of things consumers buy for both daily and discretionary reasons have risen. Personal income is up 21%. That’s following the money. The more there is, the more stuff costs.
Until everything resets. 
See the image here. The Tech sector dwarfs other parts of the S&P 500 at 28%. Data we track show Passive and Active Investment – combined indexes and ETFs and stock-picking flows – were up about 5% in the sector last week as stocks fell 5%.
That means investors were selling Tech.
No mystery there, you might think. But stocks can fall on the absence of buying as much as the presence of selling. And Tech has come down further since, though the pattern of selling by investment behaviors is receding.
Here’s the point. The stock market’s value nears $50 trillion. Tech is about $15 trillion. And it’s even more when you consider that the largest companies – Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft – are spread over three sectors, not one, the big green box on the left of the image.
If 5% of that money leaves during month-end window-dressing it’s destabilizing not just to a handful of stocks but to the sector, the whole market. The big green box is about $24 trillion. All of that can oscillate if money shifts to say, Financials (up 2% last week) or Energy (up 5%).
I’ll give you another observation from the data. This one requires understanding something. ETFs – Exchange Trade Funds – are not fiduciaries. They don’t manage your money. If you buy Blackrock ETFs, you don’t have an account at Blackrock.
And Blackrock can do what you can’t. Blackrock can dump its Tech stocks all at once via the “redemption basket” – the garbage to take out – while simultaneously asking for only appreciating stocks in the “creation basket,” the grocery cart from brokers.
So Blackrock could shed its falling Tech stocks for ETF shares and then trade the ETF shares for Financials, Homebuilders, Energy stocks, Real Estate stocks. It thus avoids the falling stocks and rides the rising ones.
But that’s a very short-term trade. There’s not enough stock in those sectors and industries to remotely account for the 52% in the giant swaths of the market populated by Big Tech.
So either the whole market tips over. Or suddenly Tech will look good again. There’s no way to meet the demands of large-cap Passive target-date funds with heavy weightings in equities without Tech.
We told clients this in the Friday Market Desk note out Apr 23:
You recall when those two Bear Stearns mortgage-backed securities funds went under in 2007? We all went, “Huh. Wonder what happened there.” Then we followed the Dave Barry Car Mechanic Manual: When your car starts knocking, turn up the radio.
We didn’t understand that those funds and Bear Stearns and Lehman and the whole housing industry were roped together and pulling each other off El Capitan. I’m not saying we’re roped here. But it’s possible.
We’re all roped to Tech. Tied to its weight.
I also trotted out an old theology term from my college days studying that discipline: Laodicea. I said the market was neither cold nor hot, and it was the kind that could spew us out. You can look it up in the last book of the bible, Revelation, chapter 3.
I think there’s too much commitment to equities by large-cap diversified Passive target-date (that’s a mouthful) funds for us to fall from El Capitan. Yet. There will be a day when the flows stop, and Blackrock can’t trade anything for Tech shares.
That’s when, as the head of campus security back in my collegiate days in tornado country would say, “You go grab little brother Willie off the porch.”
