“Live everyday as if it were your last because someday you’re going to be right.” – Muhammed Ali There appears to be trouble ahead – the Brexit Vote, the US Presidential election, and the tensions arising therein, have created a dangerously entrenched set of opposing sides. It is happening across the globe, with potentially de-stabilising effects on markets. There are a number of flash-points which bear close attention.
“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.” Jean Giraudoux We have seen a series of big rises and scary falls in the last year. Since the April 2015 highs, the market has gone nowhere, but very fast. As the market continues its most recent ascent, participants are getting increasingly nervous. As the chart below shows, Fund Managers have been hoarding cash, and according to Bank of America’s regular client survey, so-called “smart money” have been net sellers for 17 consecutive weeks 
“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones” -Donald Rumsfeld 12/2/2002. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”- Mark Twain
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. – Yogi Berra There has been increasing talk recently about the advent of “Helicopter Money” (HM). Even mainstream academics and economists are now starting to advocate it’s use to arrest the continued slump in demand, most recently noted here. But what is it, what does it do and does it work? …
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned” -Richard Feynman, Physicist. The markets currently present somewhat of a paradox – since the low point in February, the MSCI World Index has risen 13% (as has the S&P 500), becoming on one metric the most overbought since 2009, whilst at the same time seeing NYSE Short Interestreaching the same levels as 2008 (see charts below). This is a Schrödinger market – both bullish and bearish at the same time.
“Capitalism requires a structure and value system that people believe in and can depend upon.” – John C. Bogle It is commonly supposed that the Dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chiucxlub asteroid that landed in Mexico around 65 million years ago, but it is possible that the die had already been cast- they had been declining in numbers and diversity over several million years, and the Asteroid may well have been akin to the knock-out punch that floored an already wobbly boxer. So may it be with Hedge Funds- there have been a number of high profile “blow-ups’ recently, which has caused even the mainstream media to wonder aloud why Investors still use them.
[Up-date: This morning,(18/4) Pepsi announced results: by the magic of Accounting, it managed to convert an $0.64 EPS number into a non-GAAP EPS of $0.89 on a non-GAAP basis. Voila, a $0.25 improvement, with only a little effort required !! ] “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince…
There is nothing permanent except change – Heraclitus In the early 1990’s Fama and French demonstrated that Company Size and Price-to-Book (Value) explained the majority of investment returns, in what was dubbed the Three Factor model. This was the addition of two factors to the market risk (Beta), that the CAPM stated was the cause of stock returns. These have since expanded to 5 (operating profitability and investment policy), and more recently to 6, as investors have judged Momentum to be a “factor”. It is the last of these that has had the most influence on market behaviour over the past few years, in both directions.…
The markets are starting to exhibit signs of economic stress: from oil to stocks across the globe, investors appear to be in full “risk off” mode. One portfolio manager described the situation thus: “Credit default swaps continued to soar last week, particularly among European banks. Given that risks surrounding China and the energy sector are widely discussed, European banks continue to have my vote for “most likely crisis from left field…in the fixed income market, we wouldn’t touch low-grade credit at present [nor would we – only in our case it would be full stop]. Once credit spreads widen sharply, the default cycle tends to kick in several quarters later. The present situation is much like what we observed in early 2008, when we argued that it was impossible for financial companies to simply “come clean” about bad debts, because then as now, the bulk of the defaults were still to come.”
