Sailing takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be just a dream and the wind to carry me.
Christopher Cross said it (youngsters look it up). In this pandemic we said, “That boy might have it figured out.”
TQ and KQ sailing
So, with two negative Covid tests in hand, we’re currently near 17 degrees North, 62 degrees West readying our 70-foot catamaran for a float with friends. Chef, bar, crew, trade winds blowing our hair around, azure waters, sunrise, sunset. We’ll catch you after, Feb 8.
And in between, let’s have a look at the market. The big buzz is GME, Reddit now dominating chatter with WallStreetBets (y’all can look that up too), the stock streaking, a push-pull among longs and shorts, and Andrew Left from Citron cannonballing into the discourse and an pool empty.
It may be a sideshow. GME is up because Fast Trading, the parties changing bids and offers – shill bids, I call it – and buying retail volume surged from 38% of GME trading to over 57%.
At the same time, Short Volume, daily trading that’s borrowed, plunged from 47% to 34%. The funny thing is it happened AFTER the news, not before it.
The Reddit WSB crew has the sort of solidarity I wish we’d direct at being free. Nobody says to them the words “allow,” or “mandate,” and I love that.
But.
In a free stock market, your actions as traders are known before you make them.
That is, plow millions of limit orders into the market from retail brokerage accounts, and the firms like Citadel Securities buying them know before they hit the market. They will feed the fire, blowing on the conflagration until it runs out of fuel.
And BBBY is up 50% in two weeks. But it’s not the same, looking at market structure (the behavior of money behind price and volume in context of rules). Quantitative money plowing into BBBY to begin the year ignited the surge.
Could the actions of machines be misunderstood by humans? Of course. Already the pattern powering GME has reverted to the mean. In BBBY, Short Volume is up already on surging Fast Trading, the same machines we just talked about.
All but impossible is beating trading machines. They know more, move faster.
However, they are, paradoxically, unaware of market structure beyond fractions of seconds into the future.
Humans have the advantage of knowing what’s days out. And on Fri Jan 29, the largest futures contract in the market comes due. It’s designed to erase tracking errors. This is a much bigger deal than GME and BBBY but not as much fun.
Tracking errors are the trouble for Passive investors, not whether they’re “beating the benchmark,” the goal for Active stock-pickers.
A tracking error occurs when the performance of a fund veers from its benchmark. The aim is generally less than 2%. Yet S&P 500 components are 2.5% volatile daily, the difference between highest and lowest average daily prices. For those counting, daily average exceeds monthly target).
It’s why Passives try to get the reference price at market-close. But the market would destabilize if all the money wanting that last price jammed into so fleeting a time. It would be like all the fans in Raymond James Stadium pre-pandemic – capacity 65,618 – trying to exit at the same time.
Congrats, Tom Brady. We old folks relish your indomitable way.
Like Brady’s achievements, everybody leaving RJ Stadium at once is impossible in the real world.
So funds use accounting entries in the form of baskets of futures and options. ModernIR sees the effects. The standard deviation between stocks and ETFs in 2019 was about 31%. The difference reflects the BASKET used by the ETF versus ALL the stocks. To track that ETF, investors need the same mix.
Well, it’s not possible for everyone in the market to have the same quantity of shares of the components. So investors pay banks for options and futures to compensate for those tracking errors. The more errors, the higher the demand for true-up derivatives.
In 2020, the average weekly spread rose to 71%, effectively doubling. In the last eight weeks since the election it’s up to 126%.
The paradoxical consequence is that increasing volatility in benchmark-tracking is creating the illusion of higher demand for stocks, because options and futures are implied DEMAND.
And so we’re
sailing away. You guys hold the fort. Keep your heads down. We’ll catch you after the last Antigua sunset.
