In crises I think of Winston Churchill who said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Let’s start now with lessons from a health crisis that became a market crisis and proceeded to an economic crisis.
This last leg is yet murky but with hotels at 15% occupancy and the great American service industry at a standstill in an economy 70% dependent on consumption, it’s big.
First, the stock market. Intraday volatility in the S&P 500 averaged 10% the past week – a daily market correction between mean high and low prices by component.
Volatility is unstable prices, and big money needs stability to move. If the market exists for public companies and investors, it has served them poorly. Short-term machines have dominated. Investors were unable to get in or out without convulsing the whole construct of a $30 trillion edifice now smashed a third smaller.
Energy companies should be the first ones knocking at the SEC because the sector was 22% volatile the past week amid losing vast value. Sure, oil prices fell. Should it be the worst month ever for oil? The sector was battered more than in the maw of 2008.
Market structure is the hubris of equities. We’ve said it for years. We warned that Exchange Traded Funds, derivatives, had pervaded it, spreading the viral threat of severe inflation and deflation if stocks and ETFs move in unison.
There’s another basic problem. I’ll give you an analogy. The local grocery store down the street in Steamboat was denuded of wares as though some biblical horde of incisor-infested critters had chewed through it. I guess in a sense it was.
If there’s no lettuce, you can’t buy it. The price of lettuce doesn’t carom though. Demand ceases until supply arrives.
And it did. We later found lettuce, carrots, onions, eggs in abundance, but no limes (drat! A vital gin-and-tonic component).
We bought what they had.
In the stock market as with groceries there is no limitless supply of XOM or AAPL or whatever. But rules permit machines to behave as though lettuce and carrots always exist on the shelves when they don’t (a majority of volume was shorting and Fast Trading the past week – phantom products).
It’s why prices bucked and seized like a blender hucked into a bathtub. Investors would reach a hand for the proverbial lettuce and it would vanish and lettuce prices would scream smoking off like bottle rockets on July 4.
We don’t do that with groceries. Why in stocks? Energy companies, are you happy that machines can manufacture a crisis in your prices (that rhymes) and destroy the bulk of your value in days?
Look at Utilities. Producing energy to heat and cool American homes is vulnerable to tornadoes. Not viruses. Why did a preponderance of Utilities lose half their market capitalization in days – and then get 20% back yesterday?
These are questions every public company, every investor, should ask.
(Here’s what happened: Utilities were overweight – we warned of it! – in “low volatility” investments. Those blew up, taking Utilities with them.)
And they jumped on options bets. Volatility as an asset class lapses today around VIX expirations, and resets. Tomorrow index options expire, Friday is the first quad-witch of 2020. Derivatives have demolished swaths of equity capital like a runaway Transformer in one of those boom-boom superhero movies trampling through a trailer park.
It should be evident to the last market-structure skeptic – whoever you are – that market structure overwhelms reason, fundamentals, financials. If you’re in stocks, you need to get your head around it (we have, removing that burden for you).
If you want to be prepared and informed, ask us. We have a product that will fit your budget and put you in with the – socially distanced – cool kids who make market structure part of the investor-relations and investing processes.
Speaking of social distancing, there are 71 million American millennials (meaningful numbers living paycheck-to-paycheck). Viral mortality rate for them globally: 0%. There are two million hoary heads over 90. Covid-19 mortality is 19% (and most over 80 have chronic medical conditions).
I’m a data guy. How about keeping oldsters out of bars and youngsters out of nursing homes? I don’t mean to be insensitive and I know the concern is healthcare facilities. But destroying the finances of millennials over sequestering the vulnerable is troubling.
Last, central banks once were lenders of LAST resort taking good collateral at high cost. I would be pulling out all stops too, were I leading. I’m casting no aspersions. But governments are funded by people, not the other way around, and cannot carry the freight by idling productive output. That’s cognitively dissonant, intellectually incongruous.
This may be the last time we get away with it. Let’s stop that before it ends us. Find a new plan.
And investors and IR people, understand market structure. This is a beginning. It’ll again roar in our faces with slavering fangs.
