Category Archives: Trading

to raise cash or not

June 13, 2013 By in Absolute vs. relative performance, Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, market timing, Recent Market Action, Trading Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

raising cash

I find myself raising 10%-15% cash in the taxable joint brokerage account my wife and I use to pay for much of our living expenses.  No change in our fully invested stance in our IRAs or 401ks, just the taxable account.

Thirty years of professional training and experience tell me this is always a mistake.  But I’m doing it anyway.

why pros don’t do this

The easy answer is that pros typically can’t.  Their contracts with pension funds routinely require that the managers they hire remain fully invested.  The idea is that the pension fund and its consultants control the asset allocation (thereby justifying paying themselves the big bucks) and parcel out various pieces of the overall portfolio to specialists.  If managers stray from the asset classes where they’re experts they risk mucking up the overall asset allocation strategy.

Although mutual fund charters usually offer much more leeway, the manager will be pilloried if he raises a large amount of cash and the market goes up.

More importantly:

–to make a significant difference in performance, you have to raise a ton of cash–30%-40% of the portfolio at least.  This turns the portfolio into a Las Vegas-like all-or-nothing bet.

–I’ve never met an equity professional who’s any good at timing the market.  People tend to either understand either market bottoms very well–when to invest aggressively–or market tops–when to become defensive–but not both.  So they either raise cash much too early, or they get that timing right and never put the money back to work.  In either case, the cash-raising exercise tends to backfire.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t any successful market timers.  I just don’t know, or know of, any.  And I’ve seen lots of managers punch big holes in the bottom of their performance boats by trying their hand.

–the desire to raise cash invariably comes at times of stress and high emotion.  Emotional decisions in investing are almost always bad ones.

what pros do (or should do) instead

Make the portfolio less aggressive, so it will perform better in a downturn.  Eliminate speculative, smaller-cap, or highly economically sensitive names.

Look harder for new names.  If everything in the industries you feel most comfortable in looks too expensive, broaden your scope to include other sectors.

Go on vacation.

If you absolutely have to sell something (for your own emotional well-being), do it in small enough size that it won’t do much damage.

why I’m ignoring my own advice

Several reasons:

–low interest rates have forced me into a very high equity allocation

–in this account, I’m more interested in having money on hand to pay bills than in beating the S&P.  So I’m willing to accept underperformance.

–history says that stocks go sideways to up during periods when the Fed is removing emergency money stimulus from the economy.  I think this should hold true again.  On the other hand, while stocks appear reasonably priced to me, the size of the interest rate raise now underway is about double the normal size.  So there is an uncharted waters aspect to this Fed move.

Also, the tone of the market seems to me to be increasingly set by short-term traders who don’t have the skill or temperament needed to analyze economic fundamentals.  Their behavior is harder to predict with confidence–just look at what’s going on in Japan.

the Bloomberg snooping scandal

May 20, 2013 By in Current Market Thoughts, Information for investors, Trading Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

About a week ago the New York Post, of all places, broke a story that reporters for Bloomberg News could (and did) access information about customers’ use of their Bloomberg data terminals–and were using the insights they gleaned to try to generate stories.   In the instance the NYP cited, a Bloomberg reporter was asking Goldman about whether a certain executive was still on the payroll.  It sounds to me that in the course of an unproductive conversation the reporter said he knew something was amiss because the person in question hadn’t been using his Bloomberg terminal for an unusually long time.

Once the story broke, J P Morgan revealed that it had been pressured for information on the fate of the disgraced “London whale” trader by Bloomberg reporters who said the same thing–that they could see changes in his usage of Bloomberg data.

Bloomberg says reporters’ access to customer data has since been turned off.

good news/bad news

The good news, for Bloomberg users, is that the reporters in question made no effort to disguise the fact that they had been analyzing their target’s Bloomberg usage.  This has brought to light fine print in Bloomberg contracts that apparently allow such behavior.  The contracts will doubtless be changed.

Also, the ineptitude of the Bloomberg reporters suggests to me that the practice of mining customer information was not kept quiet for long.  They went directly to the companies; their main tactic seems to have been to beat them over the head with the privileged information they had–ensuring instant publicity.   So the problem has likely been nipped in the bud.

relevance?

Whether and when the London whale lost his job isn’t really a market-moving story.  It would be inconceivable that a trader could rack up monumental losses, hide them while trying to recoup through further trades, and still keep his position once discovered.  And the workout of the mess he made would follow easily predictable steps.  So this was not investment news.

No, this was a general news story.

That’s the interesting part of the tale.  If we figure there are 300,000 Bloomberg terminals in use, at, say, an annual fee of $25,000 each, that would mean they generate $7.5 billion in yearly revenue for Bloomberg LP.

Why in the world would you put that revenue stream at risk by undermining customer confidence in your discretion?   …especially by going after stories that have no direct relevance in helping investment industry customers do their jobs?

My guess is that someone high up in Bloomberg LP has decided that it’s a good idea to try to develop a new source of profits by building a general news capability using the investment researchers already in the company as a base.   I’d also guess that this is a relatively recent development, one that coincides with the fading of Bloomberg Radio as a source of investment information.

Peter Lynch of Fidelity called it “diworsification” (a term I hate), when a company strayed from what it was successful at to enter an allied field.  Often, the diversification make the company worse, not better.  We may be seeing an instance of it here, particularly if worries about being spied on cause customers to start looking for alternatives to important Bloomberg services.

what is a “long-term hold”?

April 30, 2013 By in Getting financial advice, long-term hold, Portfolio management, Trading Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I was listening to radio news yesterday morning when a commentator from the Wall Street Journal  said that many brokerage house analysts are beginning to recommend both Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) as “long-term holds”.

What does this mean?

Well, it’s not a compliment.  It’s a way saying “sell” while not putting the word in print.

Why would an analyst be so indirect?    …because if his recommendation on a company’s stock  is “sell,” then the company in question is likely to deny him access to company information, refuse to return his phone calls, decline to appear at conferences he organizes (see my post)  …and do any other stuff it can think of to hurt his career.

Extremely petty, it’s true.  But it happens.  At least with the “hold” recommendation the analyst has a shot a plausible deniability.  He can say to the CEO or CFO that the company is so spectacular that its stock is temporarily overvalued.  All his recommendation is meant to convey is that investors should wait for a slightly lower entry point.

Of course, that’s not what “long-term hold” means.  It’s broker-speak that can be broken down into two parts:

–“long-term” means there’s absolutely nothing attractive about the stock in the short term–meaning the next year or so.  At best, the stock will be dead money.

–“hold” means the stock is not a “buy.”  Over the time frame specified, the stock will likely move in line with the market.

Therefore,

–“long-term hold” means the stock in question is dead money in the short term and, in addition as far forward as the mind can imagine there’s no reason to think the stock ever has a chance to outperform the market.

So, although the term sounds innocuous, in practical terms there’s no worse recommendation than this.

Of course, we can take the discussion one step farther and ask whether analysts’ recommendations have any predictive value.  My take:  analysts typically know a lot about the companies they cover and the industries they’re in.  Only a very few know much about how the stock market behaves.  A lot of times, their recommendations are lagging indicators.

commodities cycles

April 18, 2013 By in Capital-intensive firms, Current Market Thoughts, Gold, Industry Analysis, Mining, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

commodity rhythms

agricultural

The co-owner of one of the smaller investment companies I’ve worked for was a farmer.  He made me realize that there are no long cycles for most agricultural commodities.  If prices for a particular crop are high, farmers will plant more–usually a lot more–the following season.  That virtually guarantees that prices will either level out, or more likely fall.  The opposite happens–supply falls, and prices subsequently go up–if prices are currently low.

Considering that many crops have two or three growing seasons in a year, price adjustment comes swiftly.

metals

Metals mining, especially base metals mining, is just the opposite.  Mines tend to be gigantic projects, costing billions of dollars and designed to last 20 years or more.  Most of that money is spent up front:  for the mine itself, for all the drilling machines and other earth moving equipment, for the ore processing plants, for the roads or rails to tap into a country’s established transport infrastructure, and maybe even for new sources of electric power.

Because the optimal project size is “humongous,” mines tend to spew out very large amounts of output when they open.

Because–unless you’re very unlucky–the running costs are low relative to the initial investment, projects seldom shut down once they’re up and running.  They normally don’t even consider doing so unless the output price falls below out-of-pocket extraction costs.  And even then a mine may not shut down.  Miners always identify pockets of especially rich ore that they set aside for a rainy day.  So the first response to weak pricing it to turn to these high-grade areas in order to keep going–and spewing even more price-depressing output on the market.

In addition, some emerging countries run their mines to create employment and get foreign exchange.  Because whether they make money or not is a secondary concern, such mines almost never shut down.

The result of all this is a supply/demand dynamic somewhat like the farm one I sketched out above.  When times are good and metals prices are high, miners generally spend their cash developing new mines.  This creates periodic overcapacity when supply outstrips global industrial demand as all the new mines open at once.  But, unlike the case with soybeans or corn, excess capacity doesn’t disappear come winter.  Instead, it can stay for a decade.  What cures the oversupply is the eventual expansion of the world economy to the point where it can use all the raw materials being produced.

an example

I was a starting-out analyst when a supply-demand imbalance sent base metals prices skyrocketing in 1980.  I remember copper briefly hitting around $1.40 a pound and bringing previously loss-making capacity back onstream.  The price almost immediately fell back.  It took nine years for demand to expand to the point where it absorbed all available supply–and for the price to regain that 1980 high ground.

Another wave of new capacity pushed the price back down in the mid-1990s, where it stayed again until sharply climbing demand from China absorbed all the new output.  The price began to rise again in 2003.

For most metals, this pattern of feast and famine is common.  It’s not alone.  Chemicals and shipbuilding are the same way.  The common threads are:  commodity industry; long-lived assets with most of the capital in up front; capacity additions coming in large chunks.

Try to find a copper chart that goes back to the 1980s.  It isn’t that easy–suggesting to me that commodities traders aren’t as up on their history as they should be.

investment significance

I think that for base metals, and maybe for gold as well, we’re deep in the end-game transition from fat years to lean.  It has less to do with the state of demand in China than the state of supply among mining companies.  If I’m correct, time–and the accompanying gradual world economic expansion–is the only cure.