Tag Archives: corrections

dealing with market volatility

March 6, 2020 By in correction vs. bear market, Current Market Thoughts, major changes in market direction, market bottoms, market tops, stock market, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Beginning rant:  finance academics equate volatility with risk.  This has some intuitive plausibility.  Volatility is also easy to measure and you don’t have to know much about actual financial markets.  Using volatility as the principal measure of risk leads to odd conclusions, however.

For example: Portfolio A is either +/- 1% each week but is up by 8% each year; Portfolio B almost never changes and is up by 3% every twelve months.

Portfolio A will double in nine years; Portfolio B takes 24 years to double–by which time Portfolio A will be almost 4x the value of B.

People untrained in academic finance would opt for A.  Academics argue (with straight faces) that the results of A should be discounted because that portfolio fluctuates in value so much more than B.  Some of them might say that A is worse than B because of greater volatility, even though that would be cold comfort to an investor aiming to send a child to college or to retire (the two principal reasons for long-term savings).

more interesting stuff

–on the most basic level, if I’m saving to buy a car this year or for a vacation, that money should be in a bank account or money market fund, not in the stock market.  Same thing with next year’s tuition money

–the stock market is the intersection of the objective financial characteristics of publicly-traded companies with the hopes and fears of investors.  Most often, prices change because of human emotion rather than altered profit prospects.   What’s happening in markets now is unusual in two ways:  an external event, COVID-19, is causing unexpected and hard-to-predict declines in profit prospects for many publicly-traded companies; and the bizarrely incompetent response of the administration to the public health threat–little action + suppression of information (btw, vintage Trump, as we witnessed in Atlantic City)–is raising deep fears about the guy driving the bus we’re all on

–most professionals I’ve known try to avoid trading during down markets, realizing that what’s emotionally satisfying today will likely appear to be incredibly stupid in a few months.  For almost everyone, sticking with the plan is the right thing to do

–personally, I’ve found down markets to be excellent times for upgrading a portfolio.  That’s because clunkers that have badly lagged during an up phase tend to outperform when the market’s going down–this is a variation on “you can’t fall off the floor.”  Strong previous performers, on the other hand, tend to do relatively poorly (see my next point).  So it makes sense to switch.  Note:  this is much harder to do in practice than it seems.

–when all else fails, i.e., after the market has been going down for a while, even professionals revert to the charts–something no one wants to admit to.  Two things I look for:

support and resistance:  meaning prices at which lots of people have previously bought and sold.  Disney (DIS), for example, went sideways for a number of years at around $110 before spiking on news of its new streaming service.  Arguably people who sold DIS over that time would be willing to buy it back at around that level.  Strong previous performers have farther to fall to reach these levels

selling climax:  meaning a point where investors succumb to fear and dump out stocks without regard to price just to stop losing money.  Sometimes the same kind of thing happens when speculators on margin are unable to meet margin calls and are sold out.  In either case, the sign is a sharp drop on high volume.  I see a little bit of that going on today

 

more on Monday

 

all clear?

October 31, 2018 By in Strategy, Technical Analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

My worst flaw as an investor–at least, the worst that I’m aware of–is that I’m too bullish.  So I have to be careful at a time like this when the stock market has been on a downtrend, to ensure that I don’t call a tactical bottom too early.

I should also point out that mutual funds have most likely been out of the market for the past few days, so the wicked intraday spikes we’ve been seeing in recent trading are more likely the work of algorithms than humans.  So the end of the mutual fund fiscal year is in itself no reason for these swings to stop.

Still, it looks to me as if the lows the market established early in 2018 are holding.  Also, many tech stocks, having lost a third of their value, are beginning to move up on what seems to me to be the flimsiest of positive news–a so-so earnings report or an upgrade by a brokerage house analyst.

So my guess is that the worst is over and that stocks will go sideways to up from here.

 

Several things to note:

–intraday swings have been unusually large, based on past instances of correction.  This may just be what machine-driven markets look like

–a change in market leadership often occurs after a correction.  I’m not sure what that would be in this case.  I’m still thinking that IT will lead, noting, though, that chip manufacturing businesses appear to be entering one of their periodic phases of oversupply (driven by the fact that capacity is added in huge chunks, and usually by everyone at the same time)

–the long-term economic negatives recently created by Washington–large-scale deficit spending; emphasis on reviving older, inefficient industries; policy directed at breaking down global supply chains–haven’t gone away.  The considerable social/cultural damage being done by the administration hasn’t, either.  At some point, these factors will begin to retard stock market progress, although they may be issues for 2019.

What is a “correction,” exactly? Is one going on now?

February 27, 2011 By in corrections, counter-trend movements, Current Market Thoughts, Discounting, Fixing mistakes, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

corrections

A correction is the signature countertrend movement of a bull market.

It’s normally short–lasting two or three weeks.  It’s also shallow, although psychologically  it may not seem like it at the time.  Typically, the decline will be more than 3% but fall considerably short of 10%.

trigger vs. cause

I think it’s important to distinguish between the trigger for a correction and its cause.

The cause, which is always valuation, is usually easier to see.

Stock markets are ultimately driven by the economic performance of the companies whose stocks are publicly traded.  Bull markets occur during periods when corporate profits are not only expanding now but are also expected by investors to continue to do so for an extended period.  During times like this, investors can easily  become overenthusiastic and bid stock prices up to levels that are too high too soon, given consensus expectations for profit growth.  In fact, they tend to do so repeatedly.

Actual earnings expansion may eventually show–and it often does, in bull markets–that the consensus is too conservative.  But the market rarely stands still for an extended periods of time.  It either goes up, or it goes down (don’t ask me why, that’s just the way it is).  So if the justification for the price you’re paying in February for a stock will only come through an earnings report that will be made in October or in the following January, your stock probably isn’t going to sit there and wait.  If there’s no way it can go up for now, you can be very sure it’s going to start to go down.

Put a slightly different way, if the consensus thinks that S&P 500 earnings will be at best $100 for 2011 and that investors will be paying 14x for those profits, the consensus target for the S&P–until the market begins to factor in 2012 earnings–is 1400.  At 1350, this implies only about 3% upside for the market for, say, the next six months.  That isn’t enough financial incentive to choose stocks over some other, less risky investment, in my opinion.

It isn’t that the market thinks bad things will happen in the economy.  It’s a question of the odds of making a satisfactory return.  Sooner or later, this fact dawns on investors.  They slow down their buying to a trickle.

This is the position we were in a week ago.

What must–and always does–happen in this situation is that the market has to decline enough to restore favorable odds.   Last year the magic number for “favorable” seemed to me to be more than 10% but less than 15%.  My guess is that this year the number is lower,because investors are more confident, maybe 10% or so.

The trigger for a correction can be anything.  Many times it comes out of the blue. You should also note that the trigger doesn’t necessarily have to make any sense.   In 2010, for example, INTC reported the first of a series of stunningly good profit results early in the year.  The consensus concluded (incorrectly, as it turns out) that this was the high point for tech earnings in the current business cycle.  So the entire market, which had been a bit frothy, sold off.

This year the trigger is unrest in the Middle East.  My guess is that if equity markets had been 10% lower, stocks would have shrugged off events in Libya.

where are we now?

Proceeding in logical order, the first question to answer is whether we are still in a bull market or whether what we are seeing now is not a correction, but evidence of a reversal of the markets from bull to bear.

True, market tops are notoriously difficult to recognize–more so for always-bullish growth stock investors like me.  But we’ve just begun to see economic recovery take hold in developed markets.  Corporate profits seem to me to be very likely to continue to expand.  Valuations aren’t crazy high.  Interest rate hikes are a long way away.  Therefore, I interpret what we’re in now as a correction.  (Also, as it turns out, I’ve been writing that one is due for some time.)

Applying the rules of thumb I outlined above, stocks in the S&P 500 should be weak for another 5-10 trading days and bottom somewhere around 1250.

On the other hand,  there seems to have been a mini-panic in New York trading around midday last Thursday that may have taken a lot of the negative sentiment out of the market.  From intraday high the previous Friday to intraday low on Thursday, the S&P fell around 4%, which would just barely qualify for the depth of a decline.

I think trading in the next few days will be interesting to watch.  Last week’s decline really wasn’t deep enough or long enough to qualify as a correction, no matter what happened on Thursday.  So there should be more weakness to come, unless underlying sentiment is super-bullish.

what to do in a correction

As I’ve mentioned a number of times in other posts, stocks that have gone up a lot usually suffer the worst in a correction.  “Clunker” stocks (and everyone holds one or two), on the other hand, don’t decline much because they’ve never gone up.  The most useful thing to do when the market is declining is not to hide under the bed, but to upgrade your holdings.  Sell the clunkers at relatively attractive prices and buy healthier stocks at a discount.  You should make gains from doing this.  At the very least, you’ll have gotten rid of securities that would have continued to subtract from performance.

I found myself doing this on Thursday.  That’s pretty early in a correction to be acting.  I’ll be interested to see how this works out.