Right to the Source ….
The current trend in the managed futures world is … expand the portfolio, trade every little market in every suspect exchange around the world to get the maximum diversification. That’s fine I guess if your goal is to create a standalone investment with the best possible Sharpe ratio. But if your goal is to diversify a broader portfolio, adding many second-tier markets may be counter-productive. Let me explain.
Continue reading2022 has been an awful year for most all assets. Through the end of the 3rd quarter, the S&P 500 is down 23.9%, High Yield bonds down 14.4% and Investment Grade bonds down more at 21.2% (worse than HY due to the longer duration in IG). Over the past few decades, investors have been somewhat accustomed to seeing US Treasuries do well in tough times for equity and credit markets, this year though, 7-10 year US Treasuries are down 15.7%. It’s an ugly scene…not a lot of places to hide.
One bright spot – Managed Futures strategies. We wrote about these earlier in the year here. Our long-held view is that Managed Futures are fantastic portfolio elements. We like them more than most – and execute them in a purer form than most as well – but recognize them for what they are. A Portfolio Element. Most investors, us included, hold portfolios of stocks and credits. To our eye these are also Portfolio Elements. Stocks tend to do well in times of economic stability, growing earnings and rising multiples. Managed Futures tend to do well in periods of macro-economic uncertainty and instability. Combining these two elements makes a lot of sense to us.
Continue readingThe idea of investing quadrants has been around a long time. Divide the potential environment into 2 planes, basically growth and inflation. Determine the current intersecting box, invest in the things that have done well historically in that box. It’s a great shorthand method of putting order to chaos, most of the time. Thought experiment … Is the economy growing? Real GDP is negative, so no, nominal GDP is on fire, so yes. Weekly unemployment claims are low, so yes, but job openings are falling, so no. You get the point – picking the box is tough. We are in a really inflationary time, so buy gold, right? Wrong, regardless of what the cable ads say.
Check out this chart:
Same tune, different words. Every. Single. Time.
Some big pool of money (BPM) would like something for nothing. Large financial institutions (LFI) are happy to help. Heck, they even compete to help the most. As long as X never happens – and of course it never does – we can give you exactly what you want. In the 1980s, pension funds wanted to be long stocks but not the downside tail. Buying puts was too expensive. No problem says LFI! We will give you something called portfolio insurance. Instead of paying implied volatility, you can own an option-like structure at realized volatility. As long as the market does not gap down a lot – which of course it never does – there is plenty of liquidity to execute the hedge. October 1987 put an end to that little fantasy. Then there were those good old sub-prime loans. Some BPM would like some higher yielding debt. No problem says LFI! Each mortgage may be risky, but they are much better behaved when we look at a big basket of them and we’ll spread them out all over the country. As long as house prices never go down, which of course they don’t, and certainly not all over the country, these bonds are golden. We’ve even paid someone to give them a AAA rating! That ended…not well.
Continue readingWhen you woke up yesterday morning, this was the headline of the lead story on Bloomberg News:
The past week had been really tough, with bonds and stocks both crushed, regardless of locale. There were panic moves everywhere, but particularly in sterling. Third world type emergency action being considered to control the slide. If the Fed’s mission was to break something, well, mission accomplished. Negative skew everywhere. There was, almost, no place to hide.
Continue readingHere’s a question in everybody’s mind – Have we seen the top in commodity prices? We can see both sides of the argument.
The reaction to last week’s CPI print was pretty dramatic. We see a couple of related factors:
Watch rents. Lagging but steady inflation indicator, closely tied to wages.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague about the idea that portfolios over the last 40 years have been conditioned for falling interest rates. If that supertanker makes a turn, a lot of money will be on a collision course. He said in 1984 there was an equal and opposite issue … buying bonds for the prior 20 years had been a fool’s errand. The cycle climaxed in June 1984 with a hot GDP, a low inflation print and a collapse in bonds. Even though inflation was low, no one wanted to own them.
I was intrigued and pressed the conversation with our resident bond historian and partner, Paul DeRosa. His response below:
Continue readingThe chart below is fascinating to us, particularly in light of the fairly modest in magnitude, but quite speedy rise in UK yields. The chart shows the difference between futures prices for sterling 3 month LIBOR expiring in September 2022 and 3 years later, in September 2025. They price at 100 minus the interest rate, so a price of 99.5 equates to a 0.5% prevailing rate at expiry. Roughly speaking, individually the contracts can be interpreted as the markets best pricing for interest rates at those points in time, the spread between them gives a look at how the path is priced to get there.
A year ago, rates were priced to be at about zero in September 2022, and not much higher – maybe 1 hike – by September 2025. At a starting point of functionally zero rates – that’s a pretty poor prognosis for 5 years time. Earlier this year, the spread between contracts increased as the nearer maturity contract dropped a little in price – implying higher yields – while the longer maturity contract fell more in price. The spread widened to a high of 78bps in early summer. That’s the market roughly saying things are a bit better economically – over the next few years we will see about a hike per year.
Continue reading“You can eat or you can sleep”. The biggest change I have witnessed over the course of the past 3+ decades is the change in investor preference, particularly hedge fund investors, away from positive skew to negative skew… from sleeping to eating. I sleep well. The quote came from a discussion my partner had with another manager who runs a fund that is often aggressively short volatility. He, like all of Wall Street and beyond, have monetized this preference for negative skew – regular returns most of the time, with the occasional blowup. They are eating well.
The preference for negative skew flies in the face of conventional finance theory and behavioral economics. After all, why would people buy lottery tickets? Smarter people than me have worked these ideas over, and it’s a bit of a mess. Let’s just think about 3 possible drivers (I am not bashful about stealing others good ideas). Some of these thoughts are motivated by a great blog post that can be found here: https://www.macroresilience.com/2010/01/13/do-investors-prefer-negative-skewness/
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