If money leaves, how is it stocks rise?
After all, most suppose the market is premised on buying leading to higher prices and selling producing lower ones. And humanity has also held through the ages that a thing seeming too good to be true probably is.
In that vein, Lipper US Fund Flows, a Thomson Reuters unit, tracked billions in outflows from US mutual and exchange-traded funds in equities throughout June including about $7 billion from US equities the week of June 29.
As the Brits fled the European Union so did money from stocks, which offered a stomach-curdling free-fall reminiscent of the Summit Plummet at Disney’s Blizzard Beach. Doom loomed.
Instantly, US equities boomeranged back, a weird financial-markets mulligan. Pundits cheered. Most of us prefer to be richer rather than poorer so heralding rising stocks is natural. But shouldn’t we want to understand why they’re up? Particularly if we’re getting contradictory data such as higher prices from less money?
Could it be short-covering? ModernIR tracks daily short volume, and it was 45.7% of all trading for the week ended June 13, 45.8% at June 27, and by last Friday had risen to 46.7%. Higher, not lower (yes, nearly half the volume is short).
How about fundamentals? A rosier future economic view can cheer current money. Ah, but from the Federal Reserve, to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to the International Monetary Fund, hoary heads of the dismal science see deepening malaise worsened by the Brexit, creaky European banks, possible copycat flight from the Eurozone – even a slowdown for the USA.
If things that should drive stocks up are down and yet stocks are up anyway, what might we predict ahead? There’s a saying that it’s better to keep one’s mouth closed and look like a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Forecasting the future is a fool’s errand.
But drawing sound conclusions never goes out of style. Economist Herb Stein, father of Ben, coined Stein’s Law: If something cannot last forever, it will stop.
Stocks by nature reflect things that can’t last. They go up and down. And the market is not really up. On Dec 29, 2014, the S&P 500 closed at 2090 and on July 5, 2016 finished at 2088. Stocks are now characterized by short-term ebbs and flows.
The pursuit of short-term price-changes is arbitrage, which isn’t additive investment behavior. Can a market characterized by declining money flows, weakening fundamentals and arbitrage, with no material gain in over eighteen months, gather steam? Anything is possible. But it’s not a sound conclusion.
Plus, stocks are a mirror for something larger. We call it the Great Risk Asset Revaluation. Starting in 2009, the Federal Reserve bought trillions’ worth of government and mortgage debt with dollars it created. Much of that money found its way via banks into risk assets – things with variable valuation – such as stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities like oil. Prices for these soared.
And then it all stopped. See Stein’s Law. At Sep 3, 1998, the Fed’s balance sheet was about $500 billion. At Sep 4, 2008, it was $900 billion. At Aug 21, 2014, it was $4.5 trillion. And at June 30, 2016, it was $4.5 trillion. The Fed’s balance sheet stopped expanding in latter 2014. Since then, the US stock market has not risen and the global economy has been thrown into turmoil.
It’s all about the money. Not how much is in the stock market but what the value of the US dollar is relative to other currencies. When the Fed ceases expanding its balance sheet, the dollar appreciates. It’s math. The bad news is that prices of risk assets will reset correspondingly lower. The good news is that it’s the way back to reality.
When? In the housing crisis, it was two years after home prices stopped rising that the bottom fell out of the mortgage-backed securities market. In August it’ll be two years since the Fed’s balance sheet stalled. Oil alone has repriced so far.
Whenever the Stock Reset comes (and much will be done to stop it), we’ll all survive it – and real opportunity will again abound. Besides, who wants a market that seems too good to be true?
