August 7, 2019

Yet Arrived

Bula!

That’s Fijian for “greetings!” You say it “boo-lah.” Fiji is among the friendliest places on the planet. Karen and I are just back from the South Pacific, as this compilation illustrates.  Do you know it’s traditional in Fiji to invite anyone passing by to breakfast?

Maybe that’s the answer to the world’s woes.

And maybe we should have stayed out to sea!  Our first day back the market tumbled.

We left you July 18 with our concern that the market had become a runaway train. In a private client note Jul 19 as options expired we said, “Right now, the data say the market will next tick up. If it’s a weak top – check page 3 of your Market Structure Reports – we could have trouble. At this moment, I don’t think that’s set to occur. Yet.

Well, “yet” arrived.

Is it possible to know when yet is coming?

Yes. At least the way one knows a storm front is forming. It’s not mystical knowledge. It’s math. Weather forecasters track patterns because, as it turns out, weather is mathematical.  It follows rules that can be modeled.

We put a man on the moon 50 years ago because escaping gravity and traveling four days at predictable velocity will get you there. It’s math – which smart people computed on devices less powerful than your smart phone.

Even human behavior, which isn’t mathematical, can often be predicted (somebody needs to develop a model for mass-shooting nutcases). For instance, in the stock market rational people predictably buy weakness and sell strength.

What kind of money sells weakness and buys strength? We’ll come to that.

Conventional wisdom says stocks imploded because a) people wanted the Federal Reserve to cut rates Jul 31 more than it did, b) President Trump tweeted about Chinese tariffs, c) and the Chinese retaliated by letting the yuan slide.

Relative currency values matter. We’ve written often about it. The pandemonium routing equities Aug 24, 2015 followed a yuan devaluation too. Stocks inversely correlate with the dollar because currencies have no inherent value today.

So if the supply of dollars rises, the value of the dollar falls, and the prices of assets denominated in dollars that serve as stores of value, such as stocks, rise. Value investor Ron Baron said he puts depreciating assets, dollars, into appreciating assets, stocks.

With dollars increasing, the relative value of other currencies like the euro and the yen rises, so prices of goods denominated in them fall – which governments and central banks interpret as “a recession,” leading to interest-rate cuts, negative bond yields, banks buying stuff to create money, and other weirdness.

Makes you wonder if these central planners actually understand economics.

I digress. That’s not the root reason why stocks rolled over. Headlines, Fed actions and currencies don’t buy or sell stocks. People and machines do.

The majority of the money in the market pegs a benchmark now – machine-like behavior. Market Structure Sentiment, our index for short-term market-direction, has been above 5.0 for an extended period without mean-reversion.

That matters because money tracking a measure must rebalance – mean-revert. If it goes an unusual stretch without doing so, risk of a sudden mean-reversion rises.

We saw the same condition before stock-corrections in Jan 2016, June 2016 around Brexit, ahead of the US election in late Oct 2016, in Jan 2018, and in Sep 2018. Each featured an extended positive Sentiment run with a weak top, as now.

The week ended Aug 2 also had another mathematical doozy: Exchange Traded Fund flows as measured not by purchases or sales of ETFs but market-making by brokers plunged 20%.  In some mega capitalization stocks it was the largest decline in ETF flows since early Dec 2018.

Passive money buys strength, until it stops. When it stops, weakness often follows. And if it has not rebalanced, it sells weakness because weakness means deteriorating returns.

The last day of trading every month is the most important one for money tracking benchmarks. That was July 31. Stocks deteriorated in the afternoon. Pundits blamed Jay Powell’s comments. What if it was long overdue rebalancing on the last trading day?

That selling coupled with a big overall decline in ETF flows converged with a currency depreciation Monday, and whoosh! What yet we feared arrived.

And yet. It’s not fundamental. Why does that matter? Monetary policy, portfolio positioning, and economic predictions may be predicated on a false premise that rational people had unmet expectations.

I think that’s a big deal.

So. Since yet has arrived, is yet over?  Data say no. It’s a model with predictiveness that may be a step ahead or behind. But a swoon like this should produce a mean-reversion. That’s not – yet – happened.

With that, I say Bula! And if you’re in the neighborhood, drop by for breakfast on us.

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