Shocking.
No other word for it.
Yesterday as VIX volatility futures settled on an odd Tuesday, Barclays suspended two of the market’s biggest Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs), VXX and OIL.
Let me explain what it means and why it’s a colossal market-structure deal.
VXX is the iPath Series B S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN. OIL is the iPath Pure Beta Crude Oil ETN (OIL). iPath is a prominent Barclays brand. Barclays created the iShares line that Blackrock bought. It’s an industry pioneer.
Illustration 76839447 © Ekaterina Muzyka | Dreamstime.com
These are marketplace standards, like LIBOR used to be. This isn’t some back-alley structured product pitched from a boiler room in Bulgaria (no offense to the Bulgarians).
Let’s understand how they work. ETNs are similar to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in that both trade like stocks. But ETNs are unsecured, structured debt.
The aim of these particular notes is to pay the return via trading reflected in crude oil, and volatility in the S&P 500 stock index.
OIL uses quantitative data to select baskets of West Texas Intermediate oil futures that the model projects will best reflect the “spot” market for oil – its immediate price. But nobody owning OIL owns anything. The ETN is just a proxy, a derivative.
VXX is the standard-bearer for trading short-term stock-volatility. It’s not an investment vehicle per se but a way to profit from or guard against the instability of stock-prices. It’s recalibrated daily to reflect the CBOE Volatility Index, the VIX.
In a nutshell, a security intended to give exposure to volatility was undone by volatility.
I loved this phrase about it from ETF.com: “Volatility ETPs have a history of erasing vast sums of investor capital over holdings periods as short as a few days.”
ETP is an acronym encompassing both ETFs and ETNs as Exchange Traded Products.
It’s not that Barclays shut them down. They continue trading for now. The bank said in a statement that it “does not currently have sufficient issuance capacity to support further sales from inventory and any further issuances of the ETNs.”
ETF industry icon Dave Nadig said, “The ‘Issuance Capacity’ thing is a bit of a get out of jail free card, so we can interpret that as ‘we no longer feel comfortable managing the implied risk of this product.’”
Barclays said it intends to resume supporting the funds at some future point. But we’ll see. Credit Suisse ETNs that failed in Mar 2020 amid Pandemic volatility were stopped temporarily too but suspensions became permanent.
The lesson is clear. The market is too unpredictable to support single-day bets, which these instruments are principally designed for.
I’ve long written about the risks in ETPs. They’re all derivatives and all subject to suddenly becoming worthless, though the risk is relatively small.
And it’s incorrect to suppose it can happen only to ETNs. All tracking instruments are at risk of failure if the underlying measure, whatever it is, moves too unpredictably.
You might say, “This is why we focus on the long-term. You can’t predict the short-term.”
Bosh. Any market incapable of delivering reliable prices is a dysfunctional one. It’s like saying, “I don’t know what to bid on that Childe Hassam painting but I’m sure over the long-term it’ll become clear.”
Bluntly, that’s asinine. Price is determined by buyers and sellers meeting at the nexus of supply and demand. If you can’t sort out what any of that is, your market is a mess.
It remains bewildering to me why this is acceptable to investors and public companies.
It’s how I feel about empty store shelves in the USA. No excuses. It reflects disastrous decisions by leaders owing a civic duty to make ones that are in our best interests.
Same principle applies. We have a market that’s supposed to be overseen in a way that best serves investors and public companies. Instead it’s cacophony, confusion, bellicosity, mayhem.
At least we at ModernIR can see it, measure it, explain it, know it. We’ve been telling clients that it’s bizarre beyond the pale for S&P 500 stocks to have more than 3% intraday volatility for 50 straight days. Never happened before.
Well, now we know the cost.
Oh, and the clincher? VIX options expired yesterday. Save for four times since 2008, they always expire on WEDNESDAY. Did one day undo Barclays? Yes.
That’s why market structure matters. Your board and c-suite better know something about it.
