Jakob Dylan (he of Pulitzer lineage) claimed on the Red Letter Days album by the Wallflowers that there are three ways out of every box. Warning: Listen to the song at your own risk. It will get in your head and stay there.
Something else that should get in the heads of every investor, every executive and investor-relations professional for public companies, is that there are three ways to make money in the stock market (which implies three ways to lose it too).
Most of us default to the idea that the way you make money is buying stuff that’s worth more later. Thus, when companies report results that miss by a penny and the stock plunges, everybody concludes investors are selling because expectations for profits were misplaced so the stock is worth less.
Really? Does long-term money care if you’re off a penny? Most of the time when that happens, it’s one of the other two ways to make money at work.
Take Facebook (FB) the past two days.
“It’s this Cambridge Analytica thing. People are reconsidering what it means to share information via social media.”
Maybe it is. But that conclusion supposes investors want a Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, a mutilated nose that spites the face. Why would investors who’ve risked capital since New Year’s for a 4% return mangle it in two days with a 9% loss?
You can buy stocks that rise in value. You can short stocks that decline in value. And you can trade the spreads between things. Three ways to make money.
The biggest? We suppose buying things that rise dominates and the other two are sideshows. But currently, 45% of all market trading volume of about $300 billion daily is borrowed. Short. In January 2016, shorting hit 52% of trading volume, so selling things that decline in value became bigger than buying things that rise. That’s mostly Fast Trading betting on price-change over fractions of seconds but the principle applies.
Facebook Monday as the stock plunged was 52% short. Nearly $3 billion of trading volume was making money, not losing it. FB was 49% short on Friday the 16th before the news, and Overbought and overweight in Passive funds ahead of the Tech selloff.
The headline was a tripwire but the cause wasn’t investors that had bought appreciation.
But wait, there’s a third item. Patterns in FB showed dominating ETF market-making the past four days around quad-witching and quarterly index-rebalances. I say “market-making” loosely because it’s a euphemism for arbitrage – the third way to make money.
Buying the gaps between things is investing in volatility. Trading gaps is arbitrage, or profiting on price-differences (which is volatility). ETFs foster arbitrage because they are a substitute for something that’s the same: a set of underlying securities.
Profiting on price-differences in the same thing is the most reliable arbitrage scheme. ETF trading is now 50% of market volume, some from big brokers, some from Fast Traders, nearly all of it arbitrage.
FB was hit by ETF redemptions. Unlike any other investment vehicle, ETFs use an “in-kind exchange” model. Blackrock doesn’t manage your money in ETFs. It manages collateral from the broker who sold you ETF shares.
To create shares for an S&P 500 ETF like IVV, brokers gather a statistical sampling of S&P stocks worth the cost of a creation basket of 50,000 shares, which is about $12 million. That basket need be only a smattering of the S&P 500 or things substantially similar. It could be all FB shares if Blackrock permits it.
FB is widely held so its 4% rise means the collateral brokers provided is worth more than IVV shares exchanged in-kind. Blackrock could in theory make the “redemption basket” of assets that it will trade back for returned IVV shares all FB in order to eliminate the capital gains associated with FB.
So brokers short FB, buy puts on FB, buy a redemption basket of $12 million of IVV, and return it to Blackrock, receive FB shares, and sell them. And FB goes down 9%. The key is the motivation. It’s not investment but arbitrage profit opportunity. Who benefited? Blackrock by reducing taxes, and brokers profiting on the trade. Who was harmed? Core FB holders.
This is 50% of market volume. And it’s the pattern in FB (which is not a client but we track the Russell 1000 and are building sector reports).
The next time your stock moves, think of Jakob Dylan and ask yourself which of the three ways out of the equity box might be hitting you today. It’s probably not investors (and if you want to talk about it, we’ll be at NIRI Boston Thursday).