September 28, 2016

Three Acts

Spain rocks.

We’re back from pedaling the Pyrenees and cruising the rollers of the Costa Brava on bikes, where the people, the food, the wine, the scenes, the art, the land and the sea were embracing and enriching.

To wit, we traversed 200 miles, thousands of feet of climbing and even walked some 40 miles around Barcelona and Girona and I still gained weight. But I wouldn’t trade a bite of Jamon Iberico or sip of rich red Priorat (I’ll let you look those up!).

After a night home we’re now in Chicago where I’ll speak today to the Investor Relations council for MAPI, the manufacturers’ association, on market structure, and tomorrow we’re in Austin for the NIRI Southwest Regional Conference where we sponsor and I’ll aim to rivet attendees with how IR should navigate modern markets.

Speaking of which, a perspective as September concludes this week that’s shaped by two weeks away and abroad might best work as journal entries:

Journal Entry #1:  CBOE to buy Bats Global Inc.

Years ago I sat in front of Joe Ratterman’s desk in the unassuming Lenexa, KS, BATS offices and talked about things ranging from market structure to Joe’s fondness for aircraft.  Joe is now chairman and should be able to afford a bigger plane.

But the thing to understand here is how the combination is a statement on markets. Derivatives and equities are interwoven with other asset classes. It’s what the money is doing. The market is a Rubik’s Cube where moving one square impacts others and strategies for traders and investors alike manifest in complex combinations (you clients see this all the time in our Patterns view in your Market Structure Reports).

The IR job is about building relationships with long-term money, sure. The challenge is to understand the process and method through which money moves into and out of shares. Without knowledge of the process and method, comprehension wanes – and it’s incumbent on IR to know the market. Investors and traders are not mere buyers or sellers now. Profit and protection often lie in a third dimension: Derivatives.

Journal Entry #2: The Tick Size Study. 

We reflected back to 2014 last week and revisited our comments from December that year. The exchanges at the behest of the SEC are at last embarking next month on a study of bigger spreads for buying and selling small-cap stocks to boost trading activity.

It’s a fundamentally correct idea except for one problem. And you’d think, by the way, that the Federal Reserve could grasp this pedestrian concept. Where spreads are narrow, products and services commoditize and activity moves to the path of least resistance. You understand? Low interest rates shift focus from long-term capital investment to short-term arbitrage.  Low market spreads do the same to stocks.

But the problem is the National Market System. It’s an oxymoron. Something cannot simultaneously be a market – organic commercial interaction – and a system – a process or method.  There’s either a market, or a process and method. The SEC wants to tweak the process and method to revitalize organic commercial interaction. Well, if organic commercial interaction is better, why not just eliminate the system?  The Tick Size Study is a good idea trapped within a process and method that will likely desiccate it of benefit.

Journal Entry #3:  The Market.

It too is matriculating in a process and method.  We had the Great Recession, as those who take credit for halting say.  The process and method for constraining it (for now) could be called the Great Intervention.  The third step is the Great Risk Asset Revaluation, currently underway.

In August 2014 the Fed’s balance sheet stopped expanding as the Great Intervention that followed the Great Recession halted.  In latter 2014 the stock market stopped rising. So long as the Fed’s balance sheet increased, the supply of money via credit did too, and that money chased a decreasing supply of product – stocks (because public companies are buying back more shares than they issue, collectively).  There are today fewer public companies than in 2008.  Stocks are trading roughly where they did in December 2014.

Something to ponder:  Generally when growth stocks experience slowing revenues (see Twitter for instance) or earnings, shares fall. The stock market has been in a year-long recession for both. Never in modern history has the economy not also been in recession when that occurred, nor has the market failed to retreat. That it hasn’t is testament to the inertia – a tendency to remain in a uniform state of motion – created by Intervention.

It’ll stop. And stop it must.  We’ll never have a “normal” market until then, so see it cheerfully and not with fear (inertia can last a long time too). Catch you in October.

Share this article:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

More posts

dreamstime m 102328582
February 12, 2025

Why do sellsiders cover beta? Quast, you’re like a Kendrick Lamar rap: inscrutable. Let me speak English. NVDA, the most widely held stock and a...

SPGlobal 2024 Capital Flows
February 5, 2025

“Really? That’s all the time you spent?” I said,”Yessir. It doesn’t take long to pull weeds.” I think I was twelve.  The mailman had suggested...

dreamstime m 135367887
January 29, 2025

DeepSeek would be a great name for a rock band. As would Rapeseed, an alternative offered by the helpful Whole Foods staff when I asked...

dreamstime m 6354515
January 22, 2025

A headline at Bloomberg from Jan 13, 2025, reads: I was a Wall Street Analyst. They are Irrelevant. The article by opinion columnist Shuli Ren...

dreamstime m 350316889
January 15, 2025
Public companies with traded shares need to stop selling horses and wagons to a stock market buying cars....
Public companies with traded shares need to stop selling horses and wagons to a stock market buying cars.
dreamstime m 116868429
January 8, 2025

We were in Nashville and Keith Urban wished us a happy new year. If you like country music, that’s a good start to 2025. More...