October 23, 2019

Suppy Chain Trouble

If you go to the store for a shirt and they don’t have your size, you wait for the supply chain to find it.  There isn’t one to buy. Ever thought about that for stocks?

I just looked up a client’s trade data. It says the bid size is 2, the ask, 3.  That means there are buyers for 200 shares and sellers of 300.  Yet the average trade-size the past 20 days for this stock, with about $27 million of daily volume, is 96 shares.  Not enough to make a minimum round-lot quote.

That means, by the way, that the average trade doesn’t even show up in the quote data. Alex Osipovich at the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday (subscription required) that the market is full of tiny trades. Indeed, nearly half are less than 100 shares (I raised a liquidity alarm with Marketwatch this past Monday).

Back to our sample stock, if it’s priced around $50, there are buyers for $10,000, sellers of $15,000. But it trades in 96-share increments so the buyer will fill less than half the order before the price changes. In fact, the average trade-size in dollars is $4,640.

The beginning economic principle is supply and demand. Prices should lie at their nexus. There’s an expectation in the stock market of endless supply – always a t-shirt on the rack.

Well, what if there’s not? What if shares for trades stop showing up at the bid and ask?  And what might cause that problem?

To the first question, it’s already happening. Regulations require brokers transacting in shares to post a minimum hundred-share bid to buy and offer to sell (or ask). Before Mr. Osipovich wrote on tiny trades, I’d sent data around internally from the SEC’s Midas system showing 48% of all trades were odd lots – less than 100 shares.

Do you see? Half the trades in the market can’t match the minimum. Trade-size has gone down, down, down as the market capitalization of stocks has gone up, up, up.  That’s a glaring supply-chain signal that prices of stocks are at risk during turbulence.

Let’s define “liquidity.”

I say it’s the amount of something you can buy before the price changes. Softbank is swallowing its previous $47 billion valuation on WeWork and taking the company over for $10 billion. That’s a single trade. One price. Bad, but stable.

The stock market is $30 trillion of capitalization and trades in 135-share increments across the S&P 500, or about $16,500 per trade.  Blackrock manages over $6.8 trillion of assets. Vanguard, $5.3 trillion. State Street. $2.5 trillion.

Relationship among those data?  Massive assets. Moving in miniscule snippets.

Getting to why trade-size keeps shriveling, the simple answer is prices are changing faster than ever.  Unstable prices are volatility.  That’s the definition.

I’ll tell you what I think is happening: Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are turning stocks from investments to collateral, which moves off-market. As a result, a growing percentage of stock-trades are aimed at setting different prices in stocks and ETFs. That combination is leading to a supply-chain shortage of stocks, and tiny stock-trades.

ETFs are substitutes dependent on stocks for prices. The ETF complex has mushroomed – dominated by the three investment managers I just mentioned (but everyone is in the ETF business now, it seems) – because shares are created in large blocks with stable prices. Like a WeWork deal.

A typical ETF creation unit is 50,000 shares.  Stocks or cash of the same value is exchanged in-kind. Off-market, one price.

The ETF shares are then shredded into the stock market amidst the mass pandemonium of Brownian Motion (random movement) afflicting the stocks of public companies, which across the whole market move nearly 3% from high to low every day, on average.

Because there are nearly 900 ETFs, reliant on the largest stocks for tracking, ever-rising amounts of stock-trading tie back to ETF spreads. That is, are stocks above or below ETF prices? Go long or short accordingly.

Through August 2019, ETF creations and redemptions in US stocks total $2.6 trillion.  From Jan 2017-Aug 2019, $10.1 trillion of ETF shares were created and redeemed.

ETFs are priced via an “arbitrage mechanism” derived from prices in underlying stocks. Machines are chopping trades into minute pieces because the smaller the trade, the lower the value at risk for the arbitragers trading ETFs versus stocks.

ETFs are the dominant investment vehicle now. Arbitrage is the dominant trading activity. What if we’re running out of ETF collateral – stocks?

It would explain much: shrinking trade-sizes because there is no supply to be had. Rising shorting as share-borrowing is needed to create supply. Price-instability because much of the trading is aimed at changing the prices of ETFs and underlying stocks.

Now, maybe it’s an aberration only. But we should consider whether the collateralization feature of ETFs is crippling the equity supply-chain. What if investors tried to leave both at the same time?

All public companies and investors should understand market liquidity – by stock, sector, industry, broad measure. We track and trend that data every. Data is the best defense in an uncertain time, because it’s preparation.

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