Monthly Archives: July 2015

three weird things that happened this week

July 10, 2015 By in China, Current Market Thoughts, emerging markets, EU financial crisis, Greece, Hong Kong, Macau, Recent Market Action, Stock Connect Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

1.  Greece  After months of vitriolic negotiations and after calling a referendum in which it successfully campaigned to have Greece vote against accepting a financial bailout from the EU/IMF, the Greek government appears today to have accepted that bailout.

2.  Chinese stocks  After plunging for a month, Chinese stocks have risen by 10% over the past two trading days.  The world is breathing a sigh of relief.  I’m not sure what’s weirder–that this happened or that foreigners believed for a short while that in a country where doing anti-social stuff can get you either a long prison term or beheading, rather than the cover of Forbes, China would be unable to achieve this outcome.  Actually, the foreign belief is way weirder.

3.  Microsoft/Nokia  Less than fifteen months after acquiring the cellphones business of Nokia, MSFT has discovered that what it bought for over $7 billion (led by mastermind Steve Ballmer) is essentially worthless and is writing off virtually the entire purchase price.  The stock went up on the news.

Which is weirder:  that the MSFT board that rubber-stamped this disaster is still intact?  …or that people are still buying Clippers season tickets?   I suppose you could argue that Nokia was the price for getting rid of Ballmer, which would imply that the behavior of Clippers fans is weirder.

negotiating: Casio, China and Greece

July 9, 2015 By in economic problems in emerging countries, economics, EU financial crisis, Greece Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

requesting an investment banking client meeting

Years ago, so long ago in fact that Tokyo was by a wide measure the largest stock market in the world, I received a call from a broker asking whether I wanted to meet with the top management of electronics maker Casio in my office in Manhattan the next day.

I knew the company a bit.  I’d visited it in Japan.  It wasn’t a particularly well-run firm.  And it was an exporter, a weak yen beneficiary, at a time when the yen was soaring and only domestic-oriented companies went up.  So I had little interest.

But I said yes anyway.

The broker was in a bind.  He was supposed to be showing Casio the power of his firm’s client list in New York and some manager had cancelled at the last minute, creating a potential loss of face for both the broker and Casio.  I had only a small pool of money under management and my acceptance would obligate the broker to provide me a return service that my commission volume alone couldn’t buy.

Apparently, the CEO of Casio felt under the same sort of obligation.  The meeting was interesting and informative, although it gave me no reason to want to buy the stock.

negotiations with China

The main topic was the company’s negotiations at that time to increase manufacturing capacity in China.

Casio met with Chinese government officials over several sessions and came to a preliminary agreement.  When the two sides met again, ostensibly to cross the ts and dot the is, the Chinese side reopened the negotiations, demanding substantial new concessions.   What Casio expected to be the end point turned out to be the new starting point for further haggling.  It went along because it figured the costs of starting again elsewhere from scratch were too high.

This happened several more times.

Then a contract signing was scheduled.  At that meeting, the Chinese side accused Casio of complicity in the rape of Nanking and demanded still more concessions as a form of reparation.  Casio did so, even though the last contract changes removed all chance of profit from the new plant.

With some distance, the CEO’s main conclusion from this experience was that the long-term relationship of mutual respect and trust that he hoped to find in China was simply not there.  He’d already decided to cut his losses and do no more expansion in China.

Greece today

I was already quite familiar with this negotiating style, which might be described as death (of the other guy) by a thousand cuts.  I’d seen a former boss to the same thing to Lehman.  In that case, however, Lehman eventually picked up and left in disgust.

In its negotiations with the rest of the EU, Greece has been following the same playbook Casio described to me decades ago, down to the accusation of wartime atrocities.  The main casualty in this approach is the loss of trust between the parties, once the Casio-side party realizes the other has no interest in a solution that brings mutual benefit.

It seems clear to me that we’ve passed that point in the Greece-EU discussions.  We’ll find out over the weekend whether this precludes any agreement from being reached.

 

 

 

the impact of daily price fluctuation limits on Chinese stock trading

July 8, 2015 By in China, emerging markets, Margin, margin trading Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

As I’ve said in prior posts, I have no desire to buy shares on mainland China’s stock exchanges.  Hong Kong is fine enough for me.

This has led me to not pay enough attention to what may be a key feature of trading there–daily price fluctuation limits of +/ – 10% per day.  What this means in the current context is that a given stock can trade down until it has fallen by the maximum 10%.  Unless/until there are buyers at the -10% level or better, there is no more trade in the stock that day.

While this was common practice in stock markets around the world several decades ago, and is the norm in commodities trading, it is no longer the case in most stock markets.

The reason is that it prevents markets from clearing quickly in times of stress.  It tends instead to increase investor fears and to deepen stock market losses, as well as lengthen the selloff period.  I first saw this very clearly in the cases of Mexico, Spain and Thailand during the market downturn of October 1987.  All three countries had daily fluctuation limits.  After a number of days of limit-down-no-trade, Mexican authorities loosened the bands and the market began to clear.  Spain and Thailand didn’t.  Both markets suffered severe selloffs that lasted for months.

 

Press reports on China have alluded to the daily price fluctuation rule there.  But the authors haven’t a clue as to its significance; they provide no useful information about how it is impacting trading.  They do indicate that many small caps aren’t trading, but that would likely be the case whether price limits were in effect or not.  (Typically, one of the early signs of market recovery is that small caps go down.  The positive signal is that buyers–at any price–have reemerged.)

The 10% rule may be having negative effects on Chinese stock markets. The way to tell would be to examine the most liquid stocks and see if they are closing on the lows, with the last trades significantly before the market close.  Given the behavior of the overall indices and the overall trading volumes, I don’t think this is the case to a crucial degree.  But at this point I’m not curious enough to check.

Even so, it seems to me that Beijing could shorten the period of margin-selling downward pressure on the market if it were to modify or eliminate its old-fashioned daily limit rules.

(a little) more on the Chinese margin crisis

July 8, 2015 By in China, Hong Kong, Margin, margin trading, Stock Connect, stock market Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Chinese stocks closed lower by about 5% overnight, as the margin selling spiral continues downward.

My thoughts:

–this very strongly suggests that some margin accounts that have enough equity in them a day ago are under water now.  So Shanghai and Shenzhen will likely open tonight to more selling.

–to be clear, I don’t know exactly how Chinese margin works.  And, because I have no intention of buying A shares, I have no desire to find out.  A logical step for authorities to stop forced selling would be to loosen margin collateral requirements.  It may be, however, that the government has decided that the best course is to wring speculation out of the market as quickly as possible.  In other words, despite its rhetoric, it’s content to see the selling play itself out fully.

–margin players tend to be their own worst enemies.  Taking both their margin and cash accounts into consideration, they tend to have a mishmash of high quality stocks and speculative junk.  Their margin accounts tend to be heavily weighted toward trash.  The junk is what’s most vulnerable to price declines, since it has little, if any, intrinsic merit.  The logical response to a margin call is to sell the trash and keep the quality names.  Margin players, in my experience, invariably do the opposite.  They sell their winners and keep their losers, exposing themselves to continuing margin calls and prolonging the overall market agony beyond what it should be.

–I’m still guessing that the current selling will exhaust itself within two weeks.

the Chinese stock market now

July 7, 2015 By in China, Hong Kong, margin trading, Stock Connect Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

declining stocks

Until about a month ago, Chinese stocks were soaring.  Over the prior year the main indices in both Shanghai and Shenzhen were up by about 150%.

Since then, however, both markets have been in a continuous tailspin, dropping a quarter of their value.

Beijing has just announced emergency stock market stabilization measures aimed at halting the fall, on the idea that swooning stocks will hurt capital formation (duh!) and clip a percentage point or more from economic growth–at a time when China doesn’t have that many points to spare.

What’s going on?

As part of its plan to gradually modernize its equity markets and ultimately open them to the outside world, China introduced margin trading (as well as stock index futures and short-selling) domestically in 2010.  China is now going through what all emerging markets eventually do–its first full-blown margin trading crisis.

margin trading

There are lots of ins and outs to margin trading, but it’s basically using the stocks you own as collateral for loans to buy more shares.  It can be very seductive when stocks are going up.  And it’s immensely profitable for brokers.  So it’s not surprising that margin loans are easily available to lots of customers.  Also, in many emerging markets, China included, it’s relatively easy to circumvent restrictions on margin lending by arranging bank loans collateralized by stocks that may not technically be margin borrowing, but effectively are the same thing.

The key aspect of margin trading is that the value of the securities in the account must exceed the margin loan total by a certain safety amount.  If prices fall to the extent that the safety amount shrinks, or is wiped out, the broker has the right to sell enough securities from the account to restore it.  He may call the client and give him the opportunity to add more money to the account   …or he may just sell.

However, this selling itself depresses prices further–eroding the value of the remaining securities in the account as well as any safety amount that may be built up.

Also, margin traders around the world tend to be both the ultimate dumb money and the ultimate herd animals.  They all but the same speculative stocks and they (almost) all leverage themselves to the eyeballs. Even if customer A is initially in fine shape, the selling in the accounts of customers B,C and D will pressure the margin balance of A as well as their own.

The first selling, then, tends to create an accelerating cascade of more selling that’s extremely hard to stop.

This is what China is experiencing now.  This is also why the government has stepped in with a massive market support operation to try to staunch the flow.

effect on the rest of the world?   …especially you and me

The Stock Connect linking mechanism between Shanghai and Hong Kong–aimed a diverting funds away from soaring mainland stocks–is now exporting the mainland weakness in much milder form to the Hang Seng.

Beijing has a ton of money and its stock markets are, realistically speaking, still not very open to the outside world.  As the current anticorruption campaign shows, the CCP has lots of ways to punish people who do stuff it doesn’t want.  So I imagine that the government will stop the downward stock market momentum.  The big questions are:

–how long will it take, and

–how large an unwanted portfolio of stocks (which will act as an overhang on the market) will Beijing have to purchase in order to achieve the stabilization it wants.

My answers are:

–I don’t know, but probably not more than a couple of weeks, and

–I don’t care, because I think the way to play a potential rebound from oversold levels is through the Hong Kong stocks now being sold by mainlanders.