One of the biggest challenges in investing is timing a rotation from a style that is currently in favor into a style that is currently out of favor. This was the challenge in 1999 and is so again today. In April 1999, the NY Times had an article titled “Mutual Fund Report; What’s Killing the Value Managers?”; history doesn’t repeat itself but it surely does seem to rhyme.
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Value and Rebalancing
The temptation is strong. The strategy you have used for years has underperformed. Why take the risk? Move back to the benchmark. Like a remake of a classic film, we have seen most of this before. In early 2009, pressure was on value stock managers to change their stripes. We recall a conversation from April 2009 with a foundation client invested in our Large Cap Value strategy. We had recently rolled to a new portfolio, and one of the selections was Wyndham Hotels. They were quite agitated – after the financial crisis it was unlikely that people would be going back to hotels for years. How could we? I took the quant’s way out of the question – “the model made me do it.” Wyndham was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 over the next 12 months.
The current reckoning certainly rhymes with the financial crisis. We must confess that even our conviction was challenged this time, and I promise you, ours runs deeper than most. Last week it was time to roll our value portfolio forward. Put the names back into the hat, take a fresh look, buy what is cheapest based on the models and caveats we employ. To add to the insult, it was also time to rebalance our multi-asset portfolios. What this meant was we had to buy a portfolio of decimated value names, in some cases buy more of them. Alaska Air? Kohl’s? Valero? MGM? Who is going to fly, go to a department store, get gas or gamble? Sure, these stocks have never really been cheaper, but come on. This is wake up in the middle of the night with these ticker symbols swirling in your head stuff. And you want us to buy more!
Continue readingCorrelation Is Not Causation
Drummed into applied math students everywhere. It even has its own website, with this gem on how margarine consumption is correlated with divorce rates in Maine.
Should be true enough in markets as well. But in reality, at least in pockets, it isn’t always true. Stocks have always in part been driven by relative valuations. Stat-arb was a big thing some twenty years ago when computing power was starting to be applied to stocks. Pairs trading based on common risk factors makes some sense, Ford and GM operate in the same business after all, it makes sense they should be broadly be impacted by the same broad industry and economy trends. When computing power jumped later, factor investing came to dominate. Grouping stocks based on different attributes has some merit. At their heart, the old quants had valuation firmly in the mix of parameters. Many of the newer factors and machine learning quants have thrown out what ultimately matters. Price – or rather ‘value’. Low vol investing doesn’t care whether a stock is priced for perfection or not. Quality takes no account of what that pricing implies going forward, just that its metrics are stable. Momentum will push junk yields far below default rates and not even notice. As long as the quants see the property they like, regardless of valuation, away they go. They operate as if they are just observers, quietly taking a look from afar and being able to interact without impact. The Hawthorne effect is the phenomena where the behavior of subjects is altered due to the awareness of being observed. The quants in places are not observing any longer, and their impact is self-fulfilling, for a time anyways. There is plenty to be gained from applying stats and metrics to markets, but it is surely important to not take it too far.
You can see this today (September 9, 2019). ‘Value’ stocks are up a lot, not particularly based on the merits of the underlying businesses, but because other types of stocks are down. When stocks are held for their correlation properties, strange things happen. Like the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a distant thunderstorm. It’s easier to make a case that at least today, retail stock Gap is up big because Boris Johnson chose to shut down parliament. Not often thought of as a butterfly, but bear with the logic here. Boris shut parliament…which catalyzed votes to stave off ‘no deal’ Brexit…which caused Gilts to fall…which drove global bonds to fall…which pushes growth stocks, utility stocks and REITS down…which makes value stocks jump. Seem strange? It should. But the stock market acts this way more and more. Factor investing and ETF baskets that segment stocks into groups are big drivers of prices, particularly when smaller names get larger weights in factors. We need to get back to a more fundamentally driven world.
1995 Redux
History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, or so the saying goes. In retrospect, we see many similarities between 2018 and 1994.
Can News Flow Create Value?
Searching Google for “Retail Apocalypse” returns 8.8 million results (in .45 seconds!). For the better part of a decade the sector has been beaten up in the press. The headlines are not unfounded. Former staples of American consumerism such as Toys-R-Us, Radio Shack, and Payless ShoeSource are no longer, while many others struggle to find stable ground. The negative hype surrounding the Retail Apocalypse has created a fog around the whole sector and retail stocks have not been a popular pick amongst active money managers in recent memory.
Behind the retail apocalypse headlines are companies who have adapted to new market conditions, have strong balance sheets, and forward-thinking management. Looking into the fog, we see a shunned sector, overly beaten down valuations, and good potential to seek out value. Our Mount Lucas Focused Large Cap Value currently holds 4 retail names amongst its 36 total holdings. Some may view this as a high concentration of an unpopular sector for a focused strategy which holds no more than 40 stocks. However, our quantitative stock picking algorithms have no such opinions, they are programmed to seek value.
Below are the 4 retail names currently being held in the strategy, each picked for the portfolio on Sept. 22, 2017. Presented are price charts with selection date indicated and resulting price move, as well as headlines from the time preceding selection. Even positive news is tinged with negatively worded headlines. We believe this illustrates the headline fear and peer pressures that all human stock pickers face, as well as the benefit of a non-biased quantitative approach to value investing.
Stress Testing CTA Portfolios – Impact of Volatility Adjusting Positions
In light of recent market performance, and the corresponding effect on changes in volatility on CTA returns we thought it important to give our views on the topic. Late last year, we were asked by a prospective client to see how one of our trend following models performed over several different stress environments. We highlight one particular stress that was given- a 20% stock market drop over 3 months, with 40% of move in month 1, 35% in month 2, and the last 25% of the move in month 3. A relatively straightforward exercise, but to really understand the nuances of different CTAs relative to our approach, you must look past just the change in level, but consider the potential price paths and volatility over that stress period. The difference boils down to whether one is viewing CTAs as a standalone investment, or as a piece of a larger portfolio, and the role of volatility targeting in position sizing.
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Red and Orange Signals
Fed Chair, Janet Yellen said yesterday that economists were not good at stock valuation, but that she saw no red or even orange signals. Here’s one … The S&P 500 Relative Strength Index, a measure of “overboughtedness” is the highest it’s been in 20 some years – by a lot.
Source: Bloomberg
Stocks vs Corporate Profits
If nothing else, points out the contrast between the tech bubble and today’s market.
With Friends Like These…
There is a saying in our business,”the trend is your friend.” Given the recent downturn in trend following returns, I am reminded of another saying, “with friends like these, who needs enemies.” I was in a meeting recently with a consultant who asked a question we have heard many times over the years. How do you keep clients invested in managed futures in times like these? We know the history, the diversification benefits, the crisis protection, the long volatility profile…but, each time there is an extended period of challenging performance clients look to throw in the towel – because their equity investments are ripping up and managed futures is down. A good question, and the answer, I think, lies in the statement – it is a matter of faith.
Investors in the equity market have faith. They trust, and have been conditioned, that the market goes up over time, corrections are temporary. Participating in the capital formation of companies provides a risk premium to the investor and is an investment in the economic growth of a country.
Managed futures on the other hand is viewed as a trading strategy, it goes long and short, it is typically quantitative based. The perception is…I can’t have faith in a model, it can break. But this perception is misplaced, trend following measures a real economic risk premium in the market, just like equities (see older posts diving deeper on this topic, Portfolio Symmetry, Commodities are not Stocks, Benchmarking Alternative Beta). Investors in this market are rewarded by taking the price risk companies seek to shed. Faith should be in the durability of this premium, just like there is in the equity risk premium. Faith is gained by understanding this risk premium, when it works (periods of volatility and instability), and when it doesn’t (periods of low volatility and stability). Similar to equities, faith should be garnered from the underlying economics of the markets.
The Speed of Change – Buying Puts and Calls
Value investing can be counter-intuitive at times. Acting against our own intuitions is not an easy thing to do; it’s uncomfortable. We form our thoughts and reasons based on what we see and experience in the present, and extrapolating our present situation into what the future holds is something we all do. Predicting the trajectory of long-term trends that have already begun is not rocket science, but investing requires you to be right about the trend, as well as the timing of that trend.
Bill Gates wrote the following a while ago
‘we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.’
It comes to mind as I think about some of the stocks we hold, some of the stocks that are doing really well and the difference between a great company and a great investment. There is a lesson in the drivers of value investing and how it interacts with momentum, and more broadly on real visceral fears that are out there, manifesting themselves in the politics of both the left and the right. One way to think of value vs growth investing is as extrapolations of the current set of worries out to the future. Everyone remembers the Blockbuster video example, killed off by Netflix, and see that story writ large across big chunks of the rest of the economy and stock market. Disrupted businesses are everywhere – just this week Hertz announced a bad set of numbers, sequential declines in revenues and a bigger than expected loss. The stock got hit hard. On the other side? The new ride sharing services, Uber and Lyft, raising money at high valuations as people extrapolate to a future of self-driving on demand cars, and no place for old school Hertz. Amazon making it tough for big box retail is another example. Tech, robots and AI are coming for jobs and business as we know it.
Many instances of these seem perfectly valid, and it’s easy to paint the picture. The likes of Amazon, Netflix and Tesla are amazing businesses that have changed the world and achieved incredible things. The issue we have is that they seem priced for ever greater levels of growth into perpetuity, and don’t seem to take into account what we think is one of the key reasons value investing works – the people running the businesses are scared as well, and where they can, they fight back. Some will be unable to. But not all. Take General Motors and Tesla. General Motors trades around a 5 PE and pays a dividend north of 4%, and the last couple of years has about $9bn in income. The numbers are a bit different for Ford, but the picture about the same. That income is an enormous amount of firepower. The people running these businesses are not stupid, and I’ll bet are more worried about electric vehicles and driverless cars than you or I. The market focuses on Tesla and the incredible way it’s broken into the car market, its Gigafactory, and its solar roof product. They are extrapolating a future whereby Tesla hits the big time with its $35k Model 3 and kills off Ford and GM – at these prices that’s what is implied. Relating it to option buying, by buying Tesla investors are effectively buying calls on this amazing future – things need to get to this new world quicker, and it needs to be more amazing than it seems now. They may be right, but boy are those calls expensive here. With GM and Ford, we see value investing as akin to buying puts on the speed and scale of this societal change, and think that the extrapolation has gone too far – and doesn’t take into account the firepower of the businesses. If the transformation doesn’t happen, takes longer, or investors decide to pull financing from the Tesla project (and they sure will need a lot of funding to build out the scale the stock price is banking on) maybe things looks different and old Detroit transforms itself. That $9bn pays for a huge amount of R&D to fight back – indeed when you look at it, the first few firms to get an electric vehicle to market at a mass market price point have already done so. They Chevy Volt, the electric Ford Focus, the Nissan Leaf. GM is hiring 1000 engineers in Silicon Valley to expand Cruise Automation, the self-driving car unit it spent some $600m on last year. Ford is doing similar, investing $1bn in a self-driving car firm in Pittsburgh. GM is into the battery game as well, opening battery factory in Shanghai. One can make the same case with Walmart and Amazon – Walmart has some $20bn in operating income, and an e-commerce business growing at 30% a year. At its root, Walmart isn’t too far from being an Amazon warehouse with a door and a checkout – it has a brand name, incredible logistics and supply chains – and won’t go down without a fight.
All of this isn’t to say that Tesla and Amazon aren’t incredible companies pushing the world forward – they certainly are. What they also do though, is to bring others up with them, galvanizing competitors into action. Capitalism in all its glory. We think the markets are extrapolating the future too far in both directions – the new kings Tesla and Amazon and their ilk to the high side and older world names to the low side. Back to the Bill Gates quote, investors are focused on the first part, over estimating the next two years at the expense of how things will look in ten years. The people in Detroit and Bentonville are focused on the second part, and not being lulled into inaction. Buying old Detroit at valuations like this is hard, it goes against the story of change. What you are doing by buying is really selling a put on the speed and scale of the change. We’ve seen a movie like this before at the turn of the century. New world growth expectations were out of hand and the growth premium over that five year period was enormous. The following five years were reversed, as value investing outperformed strongly. The chart below has some details on it. That’s how value investing works, in cycles, and it works because it’s uncomfortable.
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