You know it’s after Groundhog Day? We passed Feb 2 and I don’t recall hearing the name Punxsutawney Phil (no shadow, so that means a reputed early spring).
Reminds one of the stock market. Things change so fast there’s no time for tradition.
We have important topics to cover, including the implications of the SEC’s recent decision to approve closing-auction trading at the CBOE, which doesn’t list stocks (save BATS). Circumstances keep pushing the calendar back.
We said last week that the Coronavirus wasn’t driving stocks. It was market structure – measurable, behavioral change behind prices.
The Coronavirus is mushrooming still, and news services are full of dire warnings of global economic consequence. Some said the plunge last Friday, the Dow Industrials diving 600 points, reflected shrinking economic expectations for 2020.
Now the market is essentially back to level in two days. The Nasdaq closed yesterday at a new record. Did expectations of Coronavirus-driven economic sclerosis reverse course over the weekend?
It’s apparent in the Iowa caucuses that accurate outcomes matter. The Impeachment odyssey, slipping last night into the curtains of the State of the Union address, is at root about interpretations of truth, the reliability of information, no matter the result.
We seem to live in an age where what can be known with certainty has diminished. Nowhere is it manifesting more starkly than in stocks. Most of what we’re told drives them is unsupported by data.
A business news anchor could reasonably say, “Stocks surged today on a 10% jump in Fast Trading and a 5% decline in short volume, reflecting the pursuit of short-term arbitrage around sudden stock-volatility that created a broad array of cheap buying opportunity in derivatives.”
That would be a data-backed answer. Instead we hear, “Coronavirus fears eased.”
Inaccurate explanations are dangerous because they foster incorrect expectations.
The truth is, behavioral volatility exploded to 30% Feb 3, the most since Aug 2019. To understand behavioral volatility, picture a crowd leaving a stadium that stampedes.
Notice what Sentiment showed Feb 3. Sentiment is the capacity of the market to absorb higher and lower prices. It trades most times between 4.0-6.0, with tops over 7.0 The volatile daily read dropped below 4.0 Feb 3.
Cycles have shortened. Volatility in decline/recovery cycles is unstable.
Here’s the kicker. It was Exchange Traded Funds stampeding into stocks. Not people putting money to work in ETFs. No, market makers for ETFs bought options in a wild orgy Monday, then caterwauled into the underlying stocks and ETFs yesterday, igniting a searing arc of market-recovery as prices for both options and ETFs ignited like fuel and raced through stocks.
That’s how TSLA screamed like a Ford GT40 (Carroll Shelby might say stocks were faster than Ferraris yesterday). Same with a cross-section of stocks up hundreds of basis points (UNH up 7%, AMP up 6%, VMW up 4%, CAT up 4%, on it goes).
These are not rational moves. They are potentially bankrupting events for the parties selling volatility. That’s not to say the stock market’s gains are invalid. We have the best economy in the world.
But.
Everyone – investors, investor-relations professionals, board directors, public-company executives – deserves basic accuracy around what’s driving stocks. We expect it everywhere else (save politics!).
We’ll have to search out the truth ourselves, and it’s in the data (and we’ve got that data).
