A Gift From The Oldies

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

I bumped into a friendly bloke at my local gym last week. Jim is his name.

Jim tells me he just started because, and I quote, "my doctor says I"m going to die unless I do something".

Now, I assure you it doesn"t take a doctor to figure this out.

One glance in Jim"s direction and you can tell that underneath all that weight there"s a big struggling heart in there... just ready to explode. He was surprisingly frank and tells me it"s so bad that he can only do little bits of exercise because if he pushes it too hard, there is a very serious risk that his ticker just says, "You know what... f*ck it," and gives up.

Jim"s 52, which is really a ripe old age and about normal life expectancy — if we lived in the 1700"s. But we don"t.

I feel for Jim, told him so, and naturally we all hope that he can bring himself back from the brink. But the fact is many people aren"t like Jim. As mentioned in a previous article on pensions, they"re living longer and stronger.

Years ago it seemed that when you hit 65 you’d retire, receive a gold watch, and proceed to spend your pension money on a rocking chair and pot plants. Ten years later you’d be in a box and, since pot plants are cheap, the cost of keeping you alive wasn’t prohibitive.

 

Not anymore. Today things are different. My wife belongs to a running club and there are a bunch of octogenarians there who put us both to shame. Nope, today you retire and spend your pension on kickboxing classes and second wives, with no plan of dying anytime soon.

Now, this second group (our kickboxing oldies) pose a grave problem.

You see, unlike Jim, these folks, who’ve spent their life exercising, go on and on and on.

70 is spring chicken young for them, and many make it well into their 80"s and 90"s when inevitably they need nappies, nursing care, accommodation, and mushy food to eat. And then finally machines on wheels need to be wheeled in and they end up with tubes in their noses. Don"t laugh. We"re all going to get there, unless we"re fortunate enough to just drop dead quick and fast. The point is this all costs a boatload of money.

Now, I"m aware that this topic isn"t rosy Friday red or shampoo advert fresh and clean, but there are some serious implications that I think you"ll thank me for so hear me out.

Demographics and Pensions

Demographics is an elephant in the room we shouldn"t ignore. It"s stomped around, defecated in the corner, and is now proceeding to knock over all the furniture. Ignore it at your peril. Rather, there are a number of ways to invest.

Let"s explore a few...

Old people (Mabel and Bob) pay for their retirements with pensions, and those pensions are held in pooled accounts at the DTC and managed by folks with pointy shoes and Tom Ford suits.

And because old Mabel and Bob are closer to the box than younger folks, the pointy shoed gents are extremely risk averse (as they should be), and this is where it gets exciting because you know what?

They"re presently engaged in the worst possible leveraged speculation you can think of.

Nope, it"s not Bitcoin.

First, to understand the insanity we have to take a step back and examine how these pointy shoed gents think.

They like fixed income because it"s far less volatile and ostensibly less risky than equities.

They hate small caps and frankly can"t invest in them due to their size, and they have a disdain for commodity markets. That volatility thing again...

In fact, volatility is like a barometer in their world by which everything else is measured.

The problem is with central banks shatbit crazy interest rate policies none of them have been able to make any money in a yield starved world and so they"re, wait for it, selling volatility.

Either through tailor made products from the investment banks or by buying any number of the low volatility ETPs out there.

Volatility isn"t even an asset.

In fact, the VIX is an index of volatility on 1 month to expiry ATM puts and calls on stocks in the S&P 500.

But now the geniuses on Wall Street have figured that they can actually package this animal, which as you can see, is a derivative of a derivative, and treat it like a bond. Fun, heh?

In all fairness, hats off to the asset managers who"ve had the balls to do this. They believed in the central banks" liquidity machine, and they backed their belief and for that they deserve to be paid. I sure wouldn"t have been able to do it.

Now, I"m not some miserable jealous git here to tell you that armageddon is coming and I"ve the answers.

God knows there"s enough of that nonsense in the financial publishing blogosphere for you to get your fill elsewhere. What we do know, however, is that this entire game: the selling of vol, the passive indexing — all of it is predicated on one thing. The central banks keeping rates low and pumping liquidity into the market. It"s why BTFD has become a meme.

The problem that I have with it, other than the distortions made, is that when so many are on one side of the boat like right now and that boat has many moving pieces, then I begin to wonder.

I"m reminded that markets change at the margin, where the slightest hiccup can act like a spark to light the fire of volatility, and these poor suckers who"ve managed to earn steady incomes selling puts find out what "unlimited risk" actually looks like as they"re forced to cover in a market that"s gapping the other way.

I"ve thought about this a lot and, in fact, we recently published how we are going "long vol" for members. And no, it"s not buying puts on VIX because that is, in my humble opinion... how do I say this politely, like begging to be stabbed in the eyes. repeatedly.

In any event that"s just one angle to this market. Here"s another.

Redemptions

I would be remiss in mentioning that as retirees retire, these pension funds will be drawn down.

It"s what Mabel and Bob do to pay for their mushy food, viagra, and bingo nights.

Now, I"m sure you"re all sharp enough to figure out what can happen to the assets these guys have been buying when they have to go from flat out full throttle, to stall, to reverse.

How big is this problem?

Well, for some context global institutional pension fund assets in 22 major markets stood at US$36.4 trillion at year end 2016, amounting to 62% of global GDP.

That is a staggeringly large amount of money.

Pension funds are big cumbersome dumb money. And they"re all allocated in equally dumb indexes, passive strategies, and bonds. So what happens when pensioners draw down on their funds?

You tell me...

Talking of staggeringly large amounts of money, the passive bubble grows bigger as I write this because this beast is fuelled not just by our pointy shoed friends but by Joe Sixpack himself.

Bloomberg just ran a piece:

BlackRock and Vanguard Are Less Than a Decade Away From Managing $20 Trillion

Two towers of power are dominating the future of investing.

Dominating indeed. Here"s how come the pointy shoed crowd can afford Tom Ford suits.

The article goes on to say:

Investors from individuals to large institutions such as pension and hedge funds have flocked to this duo, won over in part by their low-cost funds and breadth of offerings. The proliferation of exchange-traded funds is also supercharging these firms and will likely continue to do so.

Sometimes when everyone is zigging and you zag, you just get run over. But think about it...

We don"t need to go the other way. All we need to do is look where others are no longer.

These behemoths don"t do battle in the little unloved sectors or with stocks that don"t make it into an index. They can"t because they"re too big.

This means that there are a lot of orphans out there and here"s the good news. If it"s not in an index, passives aren"t buying it. And if passives aren"t buying it, it"s only active money that"s even looking at it.

Which brings me to the double helping of good news.

Here"s your competition in active with the accompanying passive.

Right now, it"s a mosh pit food fight to grab and create the next index or ETF so that more capital can be attracted, earning more fees, buying more suits.

This is all well and good.

Markets do what markets do, and I"m not here to grumble about it. I"m here to make money. And indeed if I was in the passive business, I"d be enjoying the steady stream of fees and hoping like hell the market keeps going up.

QE more? Yes, please.

But I"m not.

I"m a humble squirrel searching for nuts in the forest. And gosh, with all this moshing going on it"s wonderful how few other squirrels there are about. The same Bloomberg article makes a good point on this.

While bigger may be better for the fund giants, passive funds may be blurring the inherent value of securities, implied in a company’s earnings or cash flow.

Nah. You think?

Stocks in the index funds no longer trade on fundamentals but rather on asset flows, which sucks the oxygen out of the small guys who don"t make it into the indexes where brain dead passive money is playing.

It means we can gladly play in a sandpit with all the toys and there are very few we have to share them with.

The Cracks Have Already Appeared

Nothing lasts forever, and as I argued when discussing the impact of the incoming strong men on the global economy, there are 3 critical points worth thinking about:

1. Political cohesion and stability can no longer be relied upon as politics becomes inward looking with everything from trade deals to central bank swap lines being renegotiated or cancelled altogether.


2. Global coordinated central bank action. The era of global coordinated monetary policy which we’ve been experiencing since the GFC, especially with the three largest players (ECB, FED and BOJ), will be looked back upon with nostalgia by the current clutch of central bankers who muddy the halls of power. Policy will increasingly be driven with greater sensitivity to nationalist rather than international concerns, which brings me to…


3. Liquidity in the financial system which has stemmed from easing monetary policy is already contracting. In a world where derivatives traverse borders, connecting financial systems like never before, a liquidity crisis presents enormous tail risk in a leveraged world.

Invest accordingly, and thank you for reading.

- Chris

“If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.” — Ed Seykota

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Human Traders Are Trouncing The Machines

The contemporary low volatility trading environment has been kind to actively managed equity funds - particularly if they piled into large-cap momentum stocks like Facebook and Amazon, which have been responsible for the bulk of this year’s rally.

But while active managers have enjoyed three quarters of strong returns, quant funds – purportedly the future of asset management, according to many an “expert” on Wall Street – are falling further and further behind. As Bloomberg reports, during the first nine months of 2017, the average equity fund was up 9.7 percent while quant funds rose only 0.6 percent, according to data from Hedge Fund Research.

The striking reversal has validated the views of the handful of quant-fund skeptics on Wall Street, many of whom were previously branded as “luddites” for questioning the inherent superiority of algorithm-driven investment strategies. Quant funds, as we are learning, don’t function well in a low volatility environment because there are fewer opportunities to exploit small disparities in price.

The environment that lifts stock pickers - steady markets that enable their long-term trades - is not so friendly to quants. They do best in periods of volatility and dispersion, when their algorithms can find small price disparities to exploit. But the U.S. stock market has been unusually tranquil since last year’s presidential race. At an average level of 11.6 since Election Day, the CBOE Volatility Index has hovered about 40 percent below its lifetime average.

“To a certain extent they are lowly correlated," Tim Ng, chief investment officer of Clearbrook Global Advisors, said of the two strategies. “The factors that drive positive returns in each are different, so what helps one doesn’t necessarily help another.” His firm invests in hedge funds.

Despite their recent underperformance, quant funds have continued to receive the bulk of hedge fund inflows. Last year, total hedge fund assets AUM dropped for the first time in years as investors pulled money from actively managed funds and reallocated to both passive and quantitative strategies.

Still, both quant funds and traditional discretionary managers have on average continued to underperform the S&P 500.

Equity funds betting on technology have posted some of the biggest gains in the first three quarters. Light Street Capital Management’s Halogen fund, which focuses on technology, media and telecommunications stocks, soared 44 percent, said a person familiar with the matter. The flagship fund at Philippe Laffont’s tech-focused Coatue Management jumped almost 24 percent, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg News.

Computer-driven funds struggled to keep pace in the period. BlueTrend, the main fund at Leda Braga’s Systematica Investments, dropped almost 7 percent, another person said. The Diversified fund at $6.6 billion Aspect Capital fell 4.7 percent, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg News. Winton Group’s Futures fund is about flat on the year, according to a person with knowledge of the returns.

While the hedge fund industry’s overall performance is improving, it still lags behind the S&P 500 Index, which was up 14.2 percent with reinvested dividends this year through September. Funds across all strategies on average returned 4.3 percent on an asset-weighted basis in the period, compared with 0.7 percent in the first nine months of last year, according to Hedge Fund Research.

As we noted above, funds focusing on tech stocks have posted some of this year"s biggest gains:

Equity funds betting on technology have posted some of the biggest gains in the first three quarters. Light Street Capital Management’s Halogen fund, which focuses on technology, media and telecommunications stocks, soared 44 percent, said a person familiar with the matter. The flagship fund at Philippe Laffont’s tech-focused Coatue Management jumped almost 24 percent, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg News.

And to be sure, not all quant funds have had a bad year. Bloomberg managed to find one that’s up 53%.

Not all quants have had a bad year. The QIM Tactical Aggressive Fund gained 53 percent in the first nine months, according to a letter seen by Bloomberg. Nor have all traditional stock pickers done well. Crispin Odey, who is known for his bearish bets, saw his European equity fund sink 14 percent this year through Sept. 15 in its U.S. dollar share class.

* * *

After Eagle’s View Asset Management, a $500 million fund-of-funds that invests with 30 managers, half of them quants, recorded its worst monthly performance ever in June, the fund’s manager Neal Berger penned a letter to clients explaining why quant strategies have broken down over the past year.

It comes down to two factors, he said:

1.Increased competition: more investors are using algorithms to fight over the same inefficiencies in the market.

“Now every bank has a factor model,” said Benjamin Dunn, president of the portfolio consulting practice at Alpha Theory LLC, which works with managers overseeing about $200 billion.

“You’ve had a democratization of a lot of data and analytics that were once the domain of very systematic quant investors. Everything is getting arbitraged away.”

2. Low volatility: quantitative funds are most successful in an environment where there is large disagreements in the market over the prices of assets. Today there is little disagreement, and the best way to earn outsized returns is placed highly leveraged bets that the market will remain calm. That"s working for some investors, but is far too risky for others.

In fact, the persistently low level of volatility has brought out an increasing number of hedge funds strategies oriented toward regularly selling volatility. Although we believe that this is "picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer", shockingly, these Funds have been some of the best performing strategies over the past years.

Although our guess is as good as anyone"s, we believe the shockingly low levels of volatility has to do with an increase in computer driven, quantitative trading coupled with banks selling options to offer "yield enhancement" structured products to investors who are starving for this yield.

This feedback loop, the increase in assets run by hedge funds, and, the rise of quants, has created unusual patterns, dislocations, and low levels of volatility.

While those simply following the broader market indices wouldn"t realize anything is amiss, it is our belief that these factors have created a challenging mix for trading oriented strategies. It won"t last forever, but, it could last longer than we can.

Additionally, he explains, systematic strategies require an endless supply of victims to thrive, and the growth of quant and passive funds has caused dumb money to behave unpredictably or disappear altogether.

With all the geniuses in quant, high-powered computers, and enormous data, where are the "suckers" who are providing the juice for all of these absolute return quantitative strategies?

Simply put, the "edge providers" have moved aggressively into passive index funds and broader market ETFs.

As such, we have a condition amongst the traditional quantitative strategies whereby we have robots trading against robots. Without a steady source of "edge providers", these "edge demanders" are just trading money back and forth with each other.

We believe increased quantitative trading coupled with passive indexation by retail, and, low levels of realized and implied volatility may be creating a feedback loop that has caused unusual price movements in a variety of securities that have challenged trading oriented strategies.

Of course, all of this could change shortly as market strategists like Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett warn that a sharp selloff could be in store for the fourth quarter. Investors have upped their bullish bets through S&P 500 calls, buying more S&P 500 delta over the past two weeks than at any point since 2007.

In summarizing the contemporary market, Hartnett explains that the "best reason to be bearish in Q4 is there is no reason to be bearish.”

Complacent active managers ought to keep this in mind.

Howard Marks Sounds The Alarm On ETFs And Passive Investing, Again

Back in March 2015, Howard Marks was among the first to sound the alarm on the encroaching danger posed by both ETFs in particular, and passive investing in general, when he memorably asked (rhetorically, for now), "what would happen, for example, if a large number of holders decided to sell a high yield bond ETF all at once?" and answered his own question:

"in theory, the ETF can always be sold. Buyers may be scarce, but there should be some price at which one will materialize. Of course, the price that buyer will pay might represent a discount from the NAV of the underlying bonds. In that case, a bank should be willing to buy the creation units at that discount from NAV and short the underlying bonds at the prices used to calculate the NAV, earning an arbitrage profit and causing the gap to close. But then we’re back to wondering about whether there will be a buyer for the bonds the bank wants to short, and at what price. Thus we can’t get away from depending on the liquidity of the underlying high yield bonds. The ETF can’t be more liquid than the underlying, and we know the underlying can become highly illiquid."

Not to make a too fine a point of it, Marks underscored just how profound the role of liquidity can be at a time when everyone needs it, and none is available:

In September 2008, AIG experienced serious liquidity issues (despite its $1 trillion balance sheet) when it couldn’t post $20-25 billion of liquid collateral related to credit default swap contracts written by one of its subsidiaries. The U.S. government stepped in as a result, lending support that eventually reached $182.3 billion, massively diluting AIG shareholders in the process. When you can’t meet a margin call because you have insufficient liquidity, that’s profound.

In the ensuing two years, while the ETF market has only gotten more "liquid" (at least in a time when liquidity wasn"t actually needed), the underlying bond market has seen bid/ask spreads widen as liquidity in single-name securities has shrunk. This has not been a purely credit-linked concern, as increasingly more ETF-linked "events" have emerged in other asset classes, including the most liquid one: equities.

Fast forward to today, when the Oaktree co-chairman, in his latest memo titled "There They Go Again... Again" has not only shared his broader thoughts on markets and the current investing environment, as follows...

• The uncertainties are unusual in terms of number, scale and insolubility in areas including secular economic growth; the impact of central banks; interest rates and inflation; political dysfunction; geopolitical trouble spots; and the long-term impact of technology.


• In the vast majority of asset classes, prospective returns are just about the lowest they’ve ever been.


• Asset prices are high across the board.  Almost nothing can be bought below its intrinsic value, and there are few bargains.In general the best we can do is look for things that are less over-priced than others.


• Pro-risk behavior is commonplace, as the majority of investors embrace increased risk as the route to the returns they want or need.

... which however he doesn"t go so far as describing it as a "bubble", but - among others - discusses his latest views on what many believe is the biggest risk to market structure and overall risk stability: ETFs and Passive Investing.

And here, once again, Marks sounds the alarm on not only on ETFs, but the exponentially growing passive investor sector, which is soaking up hundreds of billions in capital from active managers, in the process creating perhaps what may be the biggest bubble ever, one which - ironically - takes place with no fundamental analysis whatsoever. The key quotes:

Given the generally lagging performance of active managers over the last dozen or so years, as well as the creation of ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, which make transacting simpler, the shift from active to passive investing has accelerated.  Today it’s a powerful movement that has expanded to cover 37% of equity fund assets.  In the last ten years, $1.4 trillion has flowed into index mutual funds and ETFs (and $1.2 trillion out of actively managed mutual funds).

* * *

As a product of the last several years, ETFs’ promise of liquidity has yet to be tested in a major bear market, particularly in less-liquid fields like high yield bonds.

* * *

... as ETFs attract capital, they have to buy large amounts of these stocks, further fueling their rise.  Thus, in the current up-cycle, over-weighted, liquid, large-cap stocks have benefitted from forced buying on the part of passive vehicles, which don’t have the option to refrain from buying a stock just because its overpriced... Is Apple a safe stock or a stock that has performed well of late?  Is anyone thinking about the difference?

* * *

... what should we think about the willingness of investors to turn over their capital to a process in which neither individual holdings nor portfolio construction is the subject of thoughtful analysis and decision-making, and in which buying takes place regardless of price?

* * *

Like the tech stocks in 2000, this seeming perpetual motion machine is unlikely to work forever.  If funds ever flow out of equities and thus ETFs, what has been disproportionately bought will have to be disproportionately sold.  It’s not clear where index funds and ETFs will find buyers for their over-weighted, highly appreciated holdings if they have to sell in a crunch. 

* * *

Finally, the systemic risks to the stock market have to be considered.  Bregman calls “the index universe a big, crowded momentum trade.”  A handful of stocks – the FAANGs and a few more – are responsible for a rising percentage of the S&P’s gains, meaning the stock market’s health may be overstated.

* * *

More in the full excerpt below (source):

Passive Investing/ETFs

Fifty years ago, shortly after arriving at the University of Chicago for graduate school, I was taught that thanks to market efficiency, (a) assets are priced to provide fair risk-adjusted returns and (b) no one can consistently find the exceptions.  In other words, “you can’t beat the market.”  Our professors even advanced the idea of buying a little bit of each stock as a can’t-fail, low-cost way to outperform the stock-pickers.

John Bogle put that suggestion into practice.  Having founded Vanguard a year earlier, he launched the First Index Investment Trust in 1975, the first index fund to reach commercial scale.  As a vehicle designed to emulate the S&P 500, it was later renamed the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

The concept of indexation, or passive investing, grew gradually over the next four decades, until it accounted for 20% of equity mutual fund assets in 2014.  Given the generally lagging performance of active managers over the last dozen or so years, as well as the creation of ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, which make transacting simpler, the shift from active to passive investing has accelerated.  Today it’s a powerful movement that has expanded to cover 37% of equity fund assets.  In the last ten years, $1.4 trillion has flowed into index mutual funds and ETFs (and $1.2 trillion out of actively managed mutual funds).

Like all investment fashions, passive investing is being warmly embraced for its positives:

• Passive portfolios have outperformed active investing over the last decade or so.


• With passive investing you’re guaranteed not to underperform the index.


• Finally, the much lower fees and expenses on passive vehicles are certain to constitute a permanent advantage relative to active management.

Does that mean passive investing, index funds and ETFs are a no-lose proposition?  Certainly not:

• While passive investors protect against the risk of underperforming, they also surrender the possibility of outperforming.


• The recent underperformance on the part of active investors may well prove to be cyclical rather than permanent.


• As a product of the last several years, ETFs’ promise of liquidity has yet to be tested in a major bear market, particularly in less-liquid fields like high yield bonds.

Here are a few more things worth thinking about:

Remember, the wisdom of passive investing stems from the belief that the efforts of active investors cause assets to be fairly priced – that’s why there are no bargains to find.  But what happens when the majority of equity investment comes to be managed passively?  Then prices will be freer to diverge from “fair,” and bargains (and over-pricings) should become more commonplace.  This won’t assure success for active managers, but certainly it will satisfy a necessary condition for their efforts to be effective.

One of my clients, the chief investment officer of a pension fund, told me the treasurer had proposed dumping all active managers and putting the whole fund into index funds and ETFs.  My response was simple: ask him how much of the fund he’s comfortable having in assets no one is analyzing.

As Steven Bregman of Horizon Kinetics puts it, “basket-based mechanistic investing” is blindly moving trillions of dollars.  ETFs don’t have fundamental analysts, and because they don’t question valuations, they don’t contribute to price discovery.  Not only is the number of active managers’ analysts likely to decline if more money is shifted to passive investing, but people should also wonder about who’s setting the rules that govern passive funds’ portfolio construction.

The low fees and expenses that make passive investments attractive mean their organizers have to emphasize scale.  To earn higher fees than index funds and achieve profitable scale, ETF sponsors have been turning to “smarter,” not-exactly-passive vehicles.  Thus ETFs have been organized to meet (or create) demand for funds in specialized areas such as various stock categories (value or growth), stock characteristics (low volatility or high quality), types of companies, or geographies.  There are passive ETFs for people who want growth, value, high quality, low volatility and momentum.  Going to the extreme, investors now can choose from funds that invest passively in companies that have gender-diverse senior management, practice “biblically responsible investing,” or focus on medical marijuana, solutions to obesity, serving millennials, and whiskey and spirits.

But what does “passive” mean when a vehicle’s focus is so narrowly defined?  Each deviation from the broad indices introduces definitional issues and non-passive, discretionary decisions.  Passive funds that emphasize stocks reflecting specific factors are called “smart-beta funds,” but who can say the people setting their selection rules are any smarter than the active managers who are so disrespected these days?  Bregman calls this “semantic investing,” meaning stocks are chosen on the basis of labels, not quantitative analysis.  There are no absolute standards for which stocks represent many of the characteristics listed above.

Importantly, organizers wanting their “smart” products to reach commercial scale are likely to rely heavily on the largest-capitalization, most-liquid stocks.  For example, having Apple in your ETF allows it to get really big.  Thus Apple is included today in ETFs emphasizing tech, growth, value, momentum, large-caps, high quality, low volatility, dividends, and leverage.

Here’s what Barron’s had to say earlier this month:

With cap-weighted indexes, index buyers have no discretion but to load up on stocks that are already overweight (and often pricey) and neglect those already underweight.  That’s the opposite of buy low, sell high.

The large positions occupied by the top recent performers – with their swollen market caps – mean that as ETFs attract capital, they have to buy large amounts of these stocks, further fueling their rise.  Thus, in the current up-cycle, over-weighted, liquid, large-cap stocks have benefitted from forced buying on the part of passive vehicles, which don’t have the option to refrain from buying a stock just because its overpriced.

Like the tech stocks in 2000, this seeming perpetual motion machine is unlikely to work forever.  If funds ever flow out of equities and thus ETFs, what has been disproportionately bought will have to be disproportionately sold.  It’s not clear where index funds and ETFs will find buyers for their over-weighted, highly appreciated holdings if they have to sell in a crunch.  In this way, appreciation that was driven by passive buying is likely to eventually turn out to be rotational, not perpetual.

* * *

Finally, the systemic risks to the stock market have to be considered.  Bregman calls “the index universe a big, crowded momentum trade.”  A handful of stocks – the FAANGs and a few more – are responsible for a rising percentage of the S&P’s gains, meaning the stock market’s health may be overstated.

All the above factors raise questions about the likely effectiveness of passive vehicles – and especially smart-beta ETFs.

• Is Apple a safe stock or a stock that has performed well of late?  Is anyone thinking about the difference?


• Are investors who invest in a number of passive vehicles described in different ways likely to achieve the diversification, liquidity and safety they expect?


• And what should we think about the willingness of investors to turn over their capital to a process in which neither individual holdings nor portfolio construction is the subject of thoughtful analysis and decision-making, and in which buying takes place regardless of price?

Bob Rodriguez: "We Are Witnessing The Development Of A Perfect Storm"

Authored by Robert Huebscher via AdvisorPerspectives.com,

Robert L. Rodriguez was the former portfolio manager of the small/mid-cap absolute-value strategy (including FPA Capital Fund, Inc.) and the absolute-fixed-income strategy (including FPA New Income, Inc.) and a former managing partner at FPA, a Los Angeles-based asset manager. He retired at the end of 2016, following more than 33 years of service.

He won many awards during his tenure. He was the only fund manager in the United States to win the Morningstar Manager of the Year award for both an equity and a fixed income fund and is tied with one other portfolio manager as having won the most awards. In 1994 Bob won for both FPA Capital and FPA New Income, and in 2001 and 2008 for FPA New Income.

The opinions expressed reflect Mr. Rodriguez’ personal views only and not those of FPA.

I spoke with Bob on June 22.

In a recent quarterly market commentary Jeremy Grantham posited that reversion to the mean may not be working as it has in the past. What are your thoughts on mean reversion?

There will be a reversion to the mean. We are in a very difficult and challenging time for active managers, and in particular, value style managers. Many of these managers are fighting for their economic lives.

Given that I am no longer involved professionally in managing money, I believe the standards in the industry are being compromised; monetary policy has so totally distorted the capital markets. You are now into the eighth year of a period that is unprecedented in the likes of human history.

The closest policy period to what we have now would have been between 1942 and 1951, when the Fed and Treasury had an accord to keep interest rates low. Interest rates were artificially held lower to help finance the World War II effort. With the renewal of inflation after the war, a policy war developed between the Treasury and the Fed on the continuation of a low interest rate policy. The Treasury-Fed of 1951 brought this period to a close. But that is the only time we’ve had a period of nine years of manipulated, price-controlled interest rates.

This was a historical policy I discussed with my colleagues upon my return from sabbatical in 2011: what could unfold were controlled, manipulated and distorted pricing that could disrupt the normal functioning of the capital markets. The historical cycles that Jeremy would be referring to that entailed a reversion to the mean could be distorted, for a period of time, by this type of monetary policy action.

But I do not believe the economic laws of gravity have been permanently changed.

At a Grant’s Conference last year Steven Bregman asserted that indexation in general and ETFs in particular were factors in the under-performance of active managers and are potentially a bubble. Are you familiar with his work and what are your thoughts on ETFs? What is driving the flow of mutual fund assets to passive strategies and what can or should fund companies do in the face of this trend?

I go back to a speech I gave in 2009, Reflections and Outrage, and buried within that speech is a section that said that if active managers did not get their act together then the likelihood would be that passive strategies would continue to take market share. When you have a market that is distorted by zero interest rate policy, David Tepper said it very well many years ago, “Well, you’ve got to ride it.”

It’s a rocket ship that’s going up. If you are fully invested in the right areas, you have a shot at out-performing. However, if you are an active manager who has a valuation discipline, given the valuation excesses in the capital markets now and that have been developing for the past several years, then an elevated level of liquidity would be held, if you were allowed to do so. As such, you will likely underperform the market.

Active managers have not demonstrated a value-add to an appreciable extent over the last 20 years. When I look back at what happened prior to 2000, if an active growth stock manager could not see the most extraordinary distortion and elevated, speculative market in history, when will they? In the lead up to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, many value-style managers did not cover themselves in glory either. If you looked at what their major stock ownership concentrations were, they were very much in large banks and various types of financial institutions that were going to get crushed in the credit downturn. If they couldn’t acknowledge or identify the greatest credit excess in history, when will they?

I’m picking on both growth- and value-style managers for missing two of the great bubbles in history. This miss led to capital destruction. Now we have a clueless Fed, in my opinion, that has never known what a bubble is beforehand. It is accentuating one that has been developing as a result of its policy insanity of QE. Markets are going straight up predicated on it.

The public looks at these outcomes and says, “Why should I pay higher fees to managers who can’t outperform or can’t even identify a major speculative blow off. I might as well be fully invested. I might as well be in an ETF or index fund.”

Thus, since 2007, indexing or passive activities have risen from approximately 7% to 9% of total managed assets to almost 40%. As you shift assets from active managers to passive managers, they buy an index. The index is capital weighed, which means more and more money is going into fewer and fewer stocks.

We’ve seen this act before. If you didn’t own the nifty 50 stocks in the early 1970s, you underperformed and, thus, money continued to go into them. If you were a growth stock manager in 1998-1999 and you were not buying “net” stocks, you underperformed and were fired. More and more money went into fewer and fewer stocks. Today you have a similar case with the FANG stocks. More and more money is being deployed into a narrower and narrower area. In each case, this trend did not ended well.

When the markets finally do break, as they always have historically, ETFs and index funds will be destabilizing influences, because fear will enter the marketplace. A higher percentage of assets will be in indexed funds and ETFs. Investors will hit the “sell” button. All you have to ask is two words, “To whom?” To whom do I sell? Index funds and ETFs don’t carry any cash reserves. The active managers have been diminished in size, and most of them aren’t carrying high levels of liquidity for fear of business risk.

We are witnessing the development of a “perfect storm.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported that central banks from Switzerland to South Africa are investing their reserves in equities. How should investors respond to the participation in the price discovery system by players that can print money and may not be performance-driven?

The last thing I ever wanted to do as a professional was allocate capital to areas that government was buying. With governmental-driven decisions there are virtually no penalties for bad decision making. Look at the rank stupidity of Dodd-Frank, or Paulson, Bernanke, and Greenspan. They were clueless before each of the last crises. They helped drive a system off the tracks. What penalty have they paid? None! They get to keep their pensions.

But when you have central banks deploying capital and their cost of money is zero, they destroy the capital-asset pricing mechanism; they destroy comparability; the distortions continue.

As a dedicated contrarian, the last place I want to invest money is where governments are deploying the capital because they are so totally distorting the market.

How did the discipline of value investing as you practiced it at FPA, change over the course of your career, particularly since the financial crisis?

It’s an interesting question and I’ve asked myself that many times.

The markets moved more slowly prior to this century – the ebbs and flows, the decision-making and the conveyance of information. With the advance of electronics and the internet, the speed of dissemination of news accelerated. I don’t believe that judgments have improved; just the speed has accelerated and the time frames of patience have shortened.

I bet my entire business in the spring of 1998 when for the prior 11 or 12 years I ran my mutual fund, the FPA Capital Fund, on fumes, with 1% to 2% cash and sometimes even less than 1%. Had you held liquidity, with short-term bond yields in the high-single to double-digits, you would have underperformed the stock market by anywhere from 900 to 1,100 basis points. By 1998 the consultant’s mantra was to be “fully invested.”

I went out in the spring of 1998 arguing that the equity market was becoming excessively priced, and it continued to do so. I sought permission to move my liquidity limits from 7% to 10% which were the typical maximums, to upward of 30%. I had to fight every client on that. By the spring of 2000, without losing any money and avoiding the carnage, I took a little bit over a 50% reduction in my assets under management. I got fired. In 2007-2009, I did far more preparation and communication prior to that crisis and entered it with 45% cash.

In the first phase of a debacle like what went on in the financial crisis, it doesn’t matter whether you are a virgin or are the opposite. When they raid the entertainment house and you happen to be a person walking by, just out of the church right next door, you get caught with all of the people there.

In the aftermath the police discover, “Oh, you shouldn’t be here.” Well, it’s the same way in a crash; virtually everything gets hit. Then in the second and third stages, the real values start to unfold and you get a greater differentiation. That is what happened with my fund between 2007 and 2009 and subsequently.

A cash level of 45% was a real tough strategy for clients to handle. I had one client say, “Please stay fully invested for my account and just do your thing with the others.” I said, “No, the price you ask me to pay is too high. By being fully invested managing your money, I will contaminate my thinking, which will negatively affect my other clients. I’m sorry, that’s a price too high to pay.” I said, “Where do you want me to return the money?” He said, “Let me think about it.” The next day his response was, “Okay, you’ve got flexibility.” But I still took over a 50% hit in redemptions during that crisis.

Looking back at these two prior major cycles, it is far more difficult for a value manager to hold liquidity today in light of the policies that are being deployed. These are the worst fiscal and monetary policies in human history.

If I were still professionally managing money, despite my background of pain-and-suffering from being redeemed, my liquidity allocation would be north of 60% today.

So-called “smart-beta” products have become very popular, particularly those that incorporate a quantitatively-driven value strategy based on the Fama-French factor models. For investors that want a value-oriented portfolio, what concerns should they have with these strategies?

I have never seen a quantitative strategy succeed longer term. They are predicated on models. The models are predicated on history. When history changes, they have to develop a new factor model.

We witnessed this in the last cycle. There was an article in the WSJ quoting a quant manager who said on a Wednesday, we had experienced a 1-in-10,000 year event. On Thursday, we had a 1-in-10,000 year event. On Friday we had a 1-in-10,000 year event. A former colleague wrote an email that weekend that said, “I have a quick question to ask. On Monday, are we safe for the next 30,000 years?”

All of these strategies are meant to enhance or give an essence of how you are going to try and minimize risk and enhance return. When you are in an environment where the lead entity, the Federal Reserve, has its foot on the scale and is distorting the information coming out of the capital markets, where interest rates can go to zero, what is the proper hurdle rate for budgetary or capital allocation decisions? These actions distort the price comparison or discovery process in the capital asset-pricing model. This is highly disturbing.

By the way, I wrote a piece in 2008 before the Fed even knew they were going to balloon their balance sheet. It said they would have to increase the balance sheet by at least a trillion to a trillion and a half. They hadn’t got to that realization yet.

After 45 years of watching the Fed, the only Fed chairman that was worth spit was Paul Volcker. The last great central banker that we had in the last 110 years other than Volcker was J.P. Morgan. The difference is, when Morgan tried to contain the 1907 crisis, he wasn’t using zeros and ones of imaginary computer money; he was using his own capital. As long as you have anointed centralized bureaucratic decision makers like the Federal Reserve, that in many ways is similar to the concentrated decision making structure of the former Soviet Union, decisions will be late and generally wrong. The Fed is a large organization and like all large organizations, there are internal pressures where they try to come to a consensus, and so they do.

This is not how you make your greatest decisions.

If there is one piece of investment advice you would offer to a young professional embarking on a career now, what would that be?

I will give the same advice that I got when I was a very young professional back in 1973. I was two years into the field and a gentleman spoke before my investment class. After everybody had walked out, I walked up to Mr. Munger and I asked him, “Sir, if I could only do one thing that would make myself a better investment professional, what would you recommend?” He responded, “Read history, read history, read history.” I have done that over the years. Had you read about the banking crisis of 1907 and what preceded it in the 1890s, you would have recognized it in a form in 2007.

If there is one piece of management advice that you could offer to that same person, what would that the?

You must have two things – discipline and integrity. Compromise either and you will fail.

That’s true in all walks of life.

Yes, but it’s very easy to use the justification that this time is different.

The world has changed. I gave a speech in 2001 to some pension advisors. I said, “Look at you people out there.” I hadn’t shown them my chart yet but I said, “Look at what we have just gone through. We had the greatest, the highest level of computerization in the history of man, the most timely acquisition to information, the highest percentage of advanced degreed professionals and college graduates in the field, and we got an outcome no different than 1974, 1929, 1907. There is something more here going on.”

Then I held up two hand-written stick figures – I was not a good artist. They were cows and they were talking to one another. One cow said to the other, “Glad we’re not part of the herd.” The other cow said, “Yea.” The next exhibit was an aerial shot. It showed the two cows are in a ravine, so they can only see themselves. But all around them is the herd. I looked out and said, “People, whether you realize it or not, you are part of the herd. All you have to understand is one word, now let’s say it all together. Moo.” What a way to influence friends and make new clients.

How are you investing your personal assets?

I am at my lowest exposure to equities since 1971. They represent less than a fraction of one percent. Liquidity is north of 65%, all in Treasury-type securities, nothing beyond a three-year term. I do not trust what is going on fiscally or monetarily, and I’ll circle back on this in a moment. The balance is in rare fully paid-for physical assets.

Circling back, after I stepped down from daily money management at the end of 2009, I took a sabbatical. One of my goals was to meet a gentleman by the name of David Walker, the former comptroller general of the U.S. He wrote a book called Comeback America that I read in January of 2010. I sent my review to Dave. Two days later Dave called me and said, “My name is Dave Walker. Is this Bob Rodriguez? If so, I want to thank you for your review.” That’s how we came to know one another. I’d used his work for over 10 years. For the next three and a half years I was a sponsor of his program, Comeback America. He closed it down in 2013, a complete unmitigated failure.

Think about the budgetary battles of 2011; the only thing that was cut was defense. Two thirds of the expenditure cuts that were going to get controlled under the system would not occur until after 2016. Funny how that works. In the presidential debates, only one candidate used a word that I think has now left the English language, “sequester.” That was Bush and it was to eliminate sequestration to raise defense spending.

The 2016 election was one of the most important elections in the last 80 years. Back in 2009 I said if we do not get our economic house in order sometime between 2014 and 2018, we could see a crisis of equal or greater magnitude than the 2007-2009 crisis. I also argued that we would have a substandard recovery that would be no better than 2% real GDP growth for as far as the eye can see. Productivity and capital spending would be substandard. All of those have played out.

Here we are in 2017. I have seen absolutely nothing that would give me any degree of confidence that Washington will get its act together. We are into a period of expanding deficits. We are hitting a time where the entitlements are worsening in terms of their funding status. We are in a decade that is unprecedented from anything that we’ve seen before with monetary policy and fiscal policy.

Why on Earth should I allocate capital into a system where the scales are completely manipulated, price discovery is distorted, and the Fed doesn’t have a clue what’s going on? They’ve missed every economic forecast for the last nine years straight. Why would anybody pay any attention to what those people are doing?

I have confidence in one thing. The Fed will blow it.

My thoughts are very much analogous to those of Lacy Hunt. Where Lacy and I part company is what happens after the deformation hits. He would argue that we will be in a dis- or deflationary period for an extended period of time; therefore, you should own 30- and 20-year Treasury bonds.

I’m not so sure about that scenario. It occurred in Japan because it has a very cohesive society. That is not the case in the United States or in Europe. Our patience will be far shorter. At some point, in no more than one to two years, the Fed would likely panic and panic big time, and we will see QE on steroids. We will see monetary inflation. Lacy and I have a similar view. But the really big question is what the outcomes will be on the other side of this mess. Both of us could be very right, or very wrong, or partially in between.

I am managing my estate in a hedged fashion because what we are going through is without any precedent in human history. How can anybody have confidence that their particular view is the right view?

Quants Dominate The Market; Unexpectedly They Are Also Badly Underperforming It

Two days ago, JPM"s head quant made a striking observation: "Passive and Quantitative investors now account for ~60% of equity assets (vs. less than 30% a decade ago). We estimate that only ~10% of trading volumes originates from fundamental discretionary traders." In short, markets are now "a quant"s world", with carbon-based traders looking like a slow anachronism from a bygone era.

Bloomberg confirmed as much today, when looking at another divergence between quant funds and traditional, discretionary managers: "systematic strategies have barely budged from near-record participation in U.S. stocks. Meanwhile, fundamental equity long-short managers can’t afford to be anything but picky, considering the market’s narrow leadership. The result: the largest gap on record between humans’ and computers’ gross exposure to U.S. equities, data compiled by Credit Suisse Group AG show."

As the chart below shows, and confirms what JPM already revealed, "for now, systematic traders are the dominating force in markets."

What is just as curious,is that according to Credit Suisse "quants hit the highest gross exposure to equities on record around May 12. It’s since come down slightly, but still remains elevated."

So in light of near record exposure, and a market that continues to grind higher to all time highs, one would expect the average quant to be having a banner year. One would be wrong, because as the WSJ"s Greg Zuckerman reports "this year is shaping up to be a dismal one for so-called quant funds, typically some of Wall Street’s hottest investors." Some examples:

At Two Sigma Investments LLC, the $45 billion firm’s flagship Compass fund is down 2.5% this year through May 31, fund investors say. In 2016, the fund climbed 10.33% for the year and 15% in 2015.

AHL Dimension, a $5.2 billion fund that is the biggest managed by Man Group PLC’s Man AHL unit, is up just 2.2% this year, through June 9, after dropping 1.5% last year.

And Winton Group’s $10.5 billion Winton Futures Fund rose just 1.4% through June 7. It fell 3% last year and climbed less than 1% in 2015. The firm recently cut fees charged to its investors.

Overall, according to HFR, quant funds "which use sophisticated statistical models often developed by Ph.D.s rather than trade based on human research and intuition to find attractive trades" were up a modest 1.44% YTD drastically underperforming both the S&P"s 8.7% gain for the same period and the 5.7% return for the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund, which invests 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds, "highlighting how far quant hedge funds are lagging behind more traditional investments."

“You will see some very, very bad May numbers for a lot of firms,” said Andrew Fishman, president of Schonfeld Strategic Advisors LLC, which invests about $16 billion, including borrowed money, in various quantitative strategies. Which, in light of Bloomberg"s report, is paradoxical at best.

The returns, bad as they may be, have not stunted investor interest. As we have shown on numerous occasions, there has been a titanic shift in capital away from "expensive" active/discretionary strategies and into all forms of "cheaper" passive strats including quants.

Narrowing this down, HFR calculates that through the first quarter of this year, $4.6 billion of net new money was invested in quant funds, even as over $10 billion was withdrawn from non-quant funds. At the same time, more traditional investors are turning to sophisticated computer models to guide their trading, adding to the flow of money backing quant strategies.

Worst performing have been momentum funds, largely because many of the trends that worked over the past year, such as rising oil prices and a climb in the value of the U.S. dollar, have ended. Surprising strength for Treasurys and a lack of overall market volatility are among other reasons for the losses, investors say. It also explains the substantial, and often volatile, rotations that have been taking place below the otherwise calm surface of the market.

GSA Capital Partners LLP, a $7.8 billion firm that spun out of Deutsche Bank in 2005, saw its $3.8 billion Trend fund drop 7.6% through June 8, even as the fund received $1 billion of new cash this year, said a person familiar with the matter. The flagship fund run by Leda Braga’s Systematica Investments, the $5.5 billion BlueTrend Fund Ltd., is up less than 1% this year, through June 2. The fund, which takes riskier bets on market moves than many of its peers, fell nearly 11% last year.

And two funds run by Stockholm-based Lynx Asset Management, which manages $6 billion in its trend-following strategy, are down 7.4% and 4.8% through June 7, according to data sent to investors.

It is not uniformly bad performance: the occasional quant is outperforming, such as RenTec"s $14 billion Renaissance Institutional Equities LP fund, or RIEF, which is up over 10.5% this year, through May, while the $11 billion Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha Int. LP fund rose about 13.5% this year, according to HSBC data.

The firm has thousands of trading signals it relies on—from economic-data points to the value of global assets in real time—and employs computer science, statistics and more.

Trying to capture this performance, some funds are changing their methods to adjust to the new environment, "which some quants say has been especially challenging amid the market swings since the U.S. election in November." As one would expect, in a market without clear direction, momentum funds are pivoting to other strategies, or at least trying to.

Florin Court Capital, a London hedge fund backed by Swedish investment firm Brummer & Partners, has largely stopped trying to make money from momentum trades in developed markets, a relatively simple strategy still used by many trend-following firms and other quants. Instead, it has shifted to more complex or esoteric trades, such as taking advantage of small differences in various maturities of a single bond.

Florin’s founder Doug Greenig, a former chief risk officer at Man Group’s AHL unit, says trend-following funds trading developed markets had been “languishing” and managers needed to look for new sources of returns.

Traditionally that is code word for leverage. Lots of leverage, like the 25x applied by the Asgard Fixed Income Fund profiled recently. It also confirms what Bloomberg reported earlier today: "as volatility in the stock market stays low, returns among quantitative strategies have been compressed, likely compelling managers to increase their leverage to juice up returns."

This "juiced up" leverage is why JPM"s Kolanovic calculated earlier in the week that just a modest increase in the VIX, from 10 to 15, could be sufficient to inflict "catastropic losses" for vol selling quants:

May 17th and similar events bring substantial risk for short volatility strategies. Given the low starting point of the VIX, these strategies are at risk of catastrophic losses. For some strategies, this would happen if the VIX increases from ~10 to only ~20 (not far from the historical average level for VIX). While historically such an increase never happened, we think that this time may be different and sudden increases of that magnitude are possible. One scenario would be of e.g. VIX increasing from ~10 to ~15, followed by a collapse in liquidity given the market’s knowledge that certain structures need to cover short positions.

Finally, one question remains: if virtually everyone, from quants, to hedge funds to vanilla funds are all underperforming the market, who is outperforming it?

WTF Chart Of The Day: There Are Now More Indexes Than Stocks

For the first time ever, the number of market indexes now exceeds the number of U.S. stocks...

As Bloomberg reports, traditional ones such as the S&P 500 are collections of securities weighted by market value, and index funds mimic them as a low-cost way to deliver the market’s performance. Many new indexes are different: They include stocks based on custom criteria, such as having low volatility or high dividends. The recent explosion in indexes has been driven by demand as many new benchmarks essentially repackage active investment strategies into indexes, says Eric Balchunas, senior exchange-traded fund analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. They can then be tracked by so-called smart-beta ETFs, which fund companies are rolling out rapidly. Money managers are under pressure to cut costs, says Balchunas, as investors shift their money into funds with low fees. Smart-beta ETFs are generally more expensive than S&P 500 funds but cheaper than actively managed funds. It remains to be seen how well the new funds will perform.

As we wrote previously, for now, the debate about the impact of ETFs rages, and will do so inconclusively as long as trillions in central bank liquidity prop up broader risk assets and equity markets. It is only once central banks take start soaking up some $18 trillion in excess liquidity that the true impact of ETFs will be visible. Until then, we leave readers with thoughts from a recent note by JPM"s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, first reported here last October, and summarized below, on what the take over by ETFs really means:

• Markets become more brittle, risky: "The shift towards passive funds has the potential to concentrate investments to a few large products. This concentration potentially increases systemic risk making markets more susceptible to the flows of a few large passive products."


• Passive or index investing favours large caps as most equity indices are market cap weighted. "This could exacerbate the flow into large companies beyond to what is justified by fundamentals, creating potential misallocation of capital away from smaller companies. To the extent that these passive funds become even more dominant in the future, the risk of bubbles being formed in large companies, at the same time crowding out investments from smaller firms, would significantly increase."


• The proliferation of index funds increases the size of stock inclusion flows. In turn, market moves around index constituent changes become more pronounced overpenalizing companies leaving the index and causing excessive gains to companies entering the index.


• Crashes, when they happen, will be bigger and badder: "the shift towards passive funds tends to intensify following periods of strong market performance as active managers underperform in such periods of strong market performance. In turn, this shift exacerbates the market uptrend creating more protracted periods of low volatility and momentum. When markets eventually reverse, the correction becomes deeper and volatility rises as money flows away from passive funds back towards active managers who tend to outperform in periods of weak market performance."


• Markets become less efficient: "if passive investing becomes too big, potentially crowding out skilled active managers also, market efficiency would start declining. In turn, this would present opportunities for active managers to extract arbitrage profits."

Jack Bogle Warns Of Market "Chaos, Catastrophe" If Passive Investing Wins

In 2016 investors poured $480 billion into passive funds, a mix of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, while pulling more than $380 billion from active mutual funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Passive equity investments may become as much as 45 percent of the mutual fund industry within five years as investors move to low-cost funds, Bogle said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio in March. But just how much can the market take?

"If everybody indexed, the only word you could use is chaos, catastrophe," warned Jack Bogle, 88-year-old founder of Vanguard, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting on Saturday.

“There would be no trading,” Bogle told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer. “There would be no way to turn a stream of income into a pile of capital or a pile of capital into a stream of income... the markets would fail."

“We have too much trading in the market,” Bogle said. “The index really just neutralizes x-percent of the market… And it just, those stocks don’t get traded. So the other stocks would get traded, the market would go on as ever."

“So [the market] gets a little less efficient, but if it gets less efficient some managers can win by more. And some managers will lose by more. This is the equation. So, I’m not concerned about it. It’s going to take a long, long time [for indexing to get] anywhere near 50% [of the market], and things will change a lot in other ways by then."

“Markets are going to be efficient as long as there are managers, or investors, trying to find little holes in the system... price discovery, as they call it,” Bogle said.

Yahoo"s Myles Udland reports that currently, Bogle notes, about one-quarter of the U.S. stock market is currently indexed. In his view, indexing could account for 50% of the market “easily.” Asked by Serwer what level of indexing would concern him, Bogle said he expects indexing could exceed 75% of the market and not have it become dangerous.

Hedge Fund CIO: "Expect Enormous Losses In The Next Correction As There Is No Price Discovery In Index Investing"

In today"s excerpt from Eric Peters Weekend Note to clients, the CIO of One River Asset Management focuses on the one topic that is first and foremost on the minds of the active investing community: the unprecedented shift from active to passive management, and what it means for not only the industry, but for markets during the next "normal correction."

“Each day since the election $1bln has moved from active to passive management,” said VICE, standing in the shadow of America’s mountain of private wealth assets. When you buy the S&P 500, you pay the prevailing price for every one of those stocks.

“There is no such thing as price discovery in index investing.” And there will be no price discovery on the downside either. The stocks that have been blindly bought on the way up will be blindly sold.

“When these markets do finally have a correction there will be no bid for many of these stocks.” 

“The people who are indexing now are the same ones who were selling in 2009,” continued VICE, agitated. “I just spoke at a conference filled for wealth advisors from all the major players. They say the same thing - today’s buyers are not long-term investors.” They’re guys who put $1mm into index ETFs.

“When they lose 6%-7% and decide to sell, who will be on the other side of those trades?” And the stocks that will be savaged worst will be the ones that lagged the indexes on the way up. “It reminds me of 2000, when people piled into the QQQs.” 

“I don’t know when the next major crisis will hit, no one does,” admitted VICE. “But I do know that even in the next normal correction, the market’s losses will be amplified enormously by this move away from active management.”

$500bln has shifted to index investments, distorting the way equities are valued and the historical relationship between short sellers and buyers. This flow creates artificial demand for poor-quality securities that have few natural buyers. “And now even Warren Buffett is telling investors to shift to passive.”

And a bonus: the world as seen through the eyes of active managers.

 “Long-only investors have the longest memories,” he said, just back from a grueling march through countless offices. “They don’t believe bond yields will ever rise.” Secular stagnation has cast a long shadow. “The age of disruption has shifted their psyche too.”

Every day their assets decline, fees too. Their job future is more uncertain today than in 2008. So much for the return of animal spirits, the running of the bulls. “And these guys are not alone. For all the talk of bullishness, it’s hard for anyone to be euphoric when our industry is in such decline.”

We doubt, however, that as the active managed industry slides into the sunset that the rest of the world will shed too many tears.

The Robots Win: Blackrock Bets On Computers Over Human Stock Pickers, Fires Dozens

The writing had been on the wall - and countless online articles  - for a long time...

... and on Tuesday it finally hit the world"s largest asset manager, where in the war between passive-investing robots and active-investing humans, the humans lost. As the WSJ reports, at Blackrock, the era of the star "stock picker" is coming to an end, and he will be replaced by this...

As part of a massive overhaul that has been hinted at in recent months, and was unviled on Tuesday, BlackRock announced a reorganization of its actively managed equities business that will include job losses, pricing changes and a greater emphasis on computer models that inform investments.

BlackRock"s new strategy centers on a view that has been facilitated by the not so stealthy central bank takeover of capital markets in recent years, according to which it is difficult for human beings to beat the market with traditional bets on large U.S. stocks. As a result, at least seven stock portfolio managers are among several dozen employees who are expected to go as part of the revamp.

Instead of handing their funds to other humans for investing purposes, for the first time BlackRock’s Main Street customers will be able to buy lower-cost quantitative stock funds that rely on data and computer systems to make predictions, an investment option previously available only to large institutional investors. This option also virtually assures that the next market crash will be unlike anything ever seen. Some existing funds will merge, get new investment mandates or close.

For now the overhaul is only taking place at Blackrock, and represents the most dramatic attempt to rejuvenate a unit that has long lagged rivals in performance. Clients have pulled their money from the actively managed stock business in three of the past four years even as BlackRock’s total assets climbed to a record $5.1 trillion, according to the WSJ. BlackRock had $275.1 billion in active equity assets under management at the end of December, down from $317.3 billion three years earlier.

However, the world"s biggest money manager is only the beginning. Many other firms that specialize in handpicking stocks are also struggling with low returns and shifting investor tastes. Since the 2008 financial crisis, clients across the money management industry have moved hundreds of billions of dollars to lower-cost funds that track indexes instead of promising to beat the market.

BlackRock has it better than most of its competitors in that it is solidly diversified, and has benefited from investors’ embrace of passively managed investments. The amount overseen by the entire firm has been bolstered by its exchange-traded fund business, which now comprises about a quarter of all assets under management. It also sells investment and risk-management technology, giving it a broader mix of businesses than many of its rivals.

It also won"t be the first time BlackRock has tried to rediscover itself. As the WSJ reports:

The new effort to improve the performance of BlackRock’s stock-picking unit isn’t the first but goes further than past changes. In 2012 BlackRock replaced management teams of some of its largest stock funds and analyzed the investment process of each team.

Yet by the end of last year more than half of the assets in BlackRock’s traditional actively managed equity products underperformed their benchmarks or peers over one year, up from less than a quarter a year earlier. Over three years, 38% were underperforming, compared with 40% at the same time in 2015.

Who would have though that outperforming in centrally-planned markets that make no sense could be so difficult. Oh wait...

In any case, good luck to the man who is supposed to fix BlackRock"s legacy problems. The author of the company’s new strategy is former Canada Pension Plan Investment Board CEO Mark Wiseman, who was hired last year to turn around the stock-picking business.

The effort is the first test for Mr. Wiseman, viewed by some company observers as a potential successor to Chief Executive Laurence Fink.
Mr. Wiseman—who spent his first six months examining the strengths and weaknesses of the business with staff, consultants and clients—said the firm is trying to “play offense” as smaller rivals struggle.

“We’re in really rough seas, but BlackRock is an aircraft carrier,” Mr. Wiseman said. “Everyone else is in dinghies, and they’re bailing like hell.”

Someone should tell Mr. Wiseman that aircraft carriers are also the easiest to spot, and sink, by enemy forces.

Under Wiseman’s plan, BlackRock will change the investment mandates of some funds and focus on a slightly smaller lineup of equity products that includes nine quantitative funds that will be available to retail investors. In some cases those funds come at roughly half the cost of those they replace.

The firm will also run country and sector-focused stock products where executives believe they can outperform, funds that pursue specific outcomes such as social impacts and riskier go-anywhere or funds that make more concentrated bets. The changes weed out actively managed stock funds that closely follow indexes.

At the end of the day, however, it is all about lowering prices in a world in which simply investing in the SPY has been the best trade ever since the central banks took over in 2009. Blackrock"s planned price cuts involved in creating that lineup will result in a loss of $30 million in revenue annually, the firm said. The firm will take a $25 million charge in the first quarter to fund layoffs, staff relocations and research investments. San Francisco will become the firm’s hub for quantitative investing and some emerging-markets staff will move to Asia from London. Another change, Mr. Wiseman said, will be a better integration of research and data informing both traditional and quantitative stock picks.

What happens next? It"s unclear: "executives acknowledge potential risks from the staffing and fund changes. Too much manager turnover at funds can spook customers and trigger withdrawals. And changing fund mandates can lead clients who want what they initially signed on for to head for the exits."

But the biggest question mark is what will be the outcome of reallocating virtually all AUM to a bunch of robots who have never traded through a rate hike cycle, and have never had to participate in the process of central bank balance sheet normalization. Sadly for them, there is no instruction manual on how to trade that particular scenario. Another problem: what happens when Blackrock"s "smart beta" chasing robots start selling? Since the signal will likely be the same one that prompts all other robots at other funds to sell too, with all shorts obliterated, and with increasingly fewer humans left, who will be there to buy?

As for the humans who once made a killing in trading and are now obsolete thanks to a handful of 20-year-old math PhDs, there is always finance twitter to pass those long months (and years) of doing, well, nothing.

* * *

Sarcasm aside, the reason why BlackRock"s decision - which will soon be adopted by most of its peers - is bad news for both the financial industry and capital markets, is because as we discussed last October, and urge all readers to skim one more time, "The Shift To Passive Investing Increases Systemic Risk, Will Make Crashes Worse."

Index Investing Unmasked: 96% Of Stocks Are Garbage

Submitted by Daniel Drew via Dark-Bid.com,

Warren Buffett released his annual letter over the weekend, in which he praised Jack Bogle as his "hero" for promoting index investing. The irony is that investors would have been better off buying Berkshire shares. Over the last 10 years, Berkshire stock is up 139% while the S&P 500 is up 71%. The real question is why Buffett just doesn"t tout his own stock rather than promote index investing. He tries to explain himself:

"Charlie and I prefer to see Berkshire shares sell in a fairly narrow range around intrinsic value, neither wishing them to sell at an unwarranted high price - it"s no fun having owners who are disappointed with their purchases - nor one too low."

Buffett is doing something every skilled salesman does: managing expectations. Buffett"s own performance is compared against the S&P 500, and what better way to win that game than by putting a floor under the Berkshire price with the promise of share buybacks and then putting a ceiling on the stock by promoting index investing? The real secret is Buffett is talking his book by not talking it: Rather than tell investors to buy Berkshire at any price, he tells people to invest passively through an index, which leads to the very market inefficiencies that he profits from.

The great appeal of index investing is its low fees, but like buying a cheap pair of shoes that falls apart after 6 months, investors will find that index investing is the most expensive thing they ever did. Vanguard promotes its rock bottom expense ratios, but what is not published is market impact costs that are incurred when the fund rebalances. Since these rebalances are often announced ahead of time, they are extremely vulnerable to front running. Christophe Bernard, PhD Senior Scientist at Winton Capital Management, estimates that front running costs index investors 0.20% per year. That"s 4 times the official expense ratio of Vanguard"s S&P 500 ETF.

In his latest research, finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder discovered that 58% of stocks don"t even outperform a Treasury bill. This study was based on 26,000 stocks from 1926 to 2015. Just 4% of stocks accounted for all of the $31.8 trillion in gains during this period. That means 96% of stocks were complete garbage. Even worse, shares of unprofitable companies outperform their profitable counterparts, which is why you have a marketplace that is dominated by Twitters and Teslas.

Index investing means buying a box of garbage stocks sprinkled with a few hope and glamour stocks whose price gains are solely a result of underperforming fund managers grasping for quarterly bonuses and retail investors juicing up their portfolios in a doomed attempt to catch up on their retirement targets.

While mom and pop buy a Vanguard index with their $500,000 and get front run all day by proprietary traders, the capitalist televangelist Warren Buffett will continue to actively trade billions while preaching the miracle of buy and hold investing.

Indexing Lunacy

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Market dislocations occur when financial markets, operating under stressful conditions, experience large widespread asset mispricing.

Welcome to this week’s edition of “World Out Of Whack” where every Wednesday we take time out of our day to laugh, poke fun at and present to you absurdity in global financial markets in all its glorious insanity.

While we enjoy a good laugh, the truth is that the first step to protecting ourselves from losses is to protect ourselves from ignorance. Think of the “World Out Of Whack” as your double thick armour plated side impact protection system in a financial world littered with drunk drivers.

Selfishly we also know that the biggest (and often the fastest) returns come from asymmetric market moves. But, in order to identify these moves we must first identify where they live.

Occasionally we find opportunities where we can buy (or sell) assets for mere cents on the dollar – because, after all, we are capitalists.

In this week"s edition of the WOW we"re covering an update to indexing lunacy

In a previous edition of the WOW I wrote about a bubble in dumb money, and in it we looked at the massive drawdowns in capital from hedge funds in favour of "passive investing" via ETFs. Investors have a point. Why pay 2/20 when you can pay as little as 0.09% for an ETF which appears to do pretty much the same thing as a hedgie?

Two reasons that a 10-year old should be able to provide:

1. If you don"t know what you"re buying, then how the heck are you going to know when to sell?


2. Buying an ETF that is "low vol" creates a self fulfilling cycle. You"re buying it because of its volatility relative to other ETFs and asset classes. The more you buy it the lower the volatility measure - ergo the more you have to buy it. Genius, until the inevitable happens.

I summed my thoughts up with the following:

I fear we’re about to find out how smart “smart beta” really is. When the inevitable happens and Bob and Mabel, together with their millennial grandkids, Peach and Cloud, lose their shirts there’ll be no-one there to explain to them, “sorry, snowflake but did you realise that over half of the index you bought was sporting P/E and P/B ratios that have only existed a couple of times before?”

To help us along today in providing a granular view of how truly silly indexing really is I"m leaning on my buddy Harris Kupperman (Kuppy) who, after our discussions on the topic and some sifting through the entrails of ETFs, offered up the following:

So, this should be pretty easy to sort out.

Crawford & Co has two classes of stock, A and B. The A shares pay a dividend that is 2 cents a quarter higher than the B shares. There are differences in voting rights, but as there’s a control shareholder, those are irrelevant.

Therefore, a simple analysis says that the A shares ought to trade at a moderate premium to the B shares to account for the nearly 1% higher annual dividend yield. NOPE!! The B shares are in the Russell 2000 index and the B shares now trade at roughly a 35% premium to the A shares.

Now, I’m not here to pass judgement on the investment merits of Crawford and the A or B shares. I have done no analysis on the company and have no opinion on if it is a good investment or not. However, I know that the A shares are better than the B shares as you get a higher dividend and there is no logical reason for the B shares to trade at a huge premium except that the Russell 2000 index has to keep buying them as more money is allocated to the index.

Two years ago, I noted how index funds and ETFs were warping asset valuations and creating opportunities for those who were willing to seek them out.

This trend has only accelerated since then and has grown from something of a curiosity in certain asset classes into a true bubble that is doomed to eventually pop. There are now hordes of overvalued assets that have no justification for their overvaluation, except that index funds have to own them. Like all bubbles, this one too will burst.

In the interim, there will be huge opportunities created by how index funds misallocate capital. As I said earlier, I know nothing about Crawford, but if I wanted to own it, I sure as hell wouldn’t be buying the B shares when compared to the A shares. Additionally, I feel pretty confident in saying that at some point in my career, the A shares will trade at a premium to the B shares—as they deserve to.

At the same time, I wouldn’t be betting that this spread collapses any time soon either. Shorting indexing has been a widow-maker for many in the hedge fund industr y— it’s hard to fight against fund flows.

In finance, when a trend gets in motion and the marketers start pushing it (indexing and ETFs today) you can expect it to go further than is logically possible, but the hangover will be pretty epic. Along the way, there will be a lot of money made by better understanding the flaws in these indexes and front running them — much as I front-ran the marketing department back in March.

As a final note, I’d like to share a chart with you from Passport Capital showing the median total returns of markets graduating to the MSCI EM since 1994. If you can’t beat the indexers, you might as well make money off of them by getting there first.

I think it"s probably worth going back to that article from 2 years ago because it shows exactly how we made money on similar anomalies.

Think of it this way, as the indexing movement has grown, so have the assets under management — leading index funds to become key factors in access to capital. You now have really bad companies that have overstated market valuations, simply because the index has to buy it — yet you have high quality companies that should get access to capital, but are starved because they are not in the index, or not in the index at an adequate weighting.

In the real world, we call this socialism—basically starving the strong in order to prop up the stragglers. In the investment world, this is called indexing.

Rather than continue to bemoan modern portfolio theory, I’d rather focus on how this shift in asset allocation will create opportunities. No chart better illustrates this than the performance of Banco Espirito Santo 2023 subordinated debt:

Does anyone not know that European banks have issues (remember this was 2 years ago)? Does anyone actually believe that the European financial crisis is “solved?”

Any proper perusal of the financial statements would tell you that many European banks have “issues.”

Banco Espirito Santo didn’t suddenly have a problem — it has been troubled for a very long time. The difference is that about four weeks ago, a payment at the parent company was missed and someone suddenly noticed that the problems mattered.

Look at the chart above—the sub debt traded over par, just 5 weeks ago!! That is what happens when the financial system is managed by indexers. They simply buy what they’re told to buy—they do no research. If it is in the index, they need to own it, and we all know that bonds have been a very hot product with lots of inflows over the past few years.

How do you make money off of this? The key is research and knowledge. The good news is that all sorts of assets are mispriced. In the past, these would be mispriced because humans made mistakes in valuing them. Now they’re mispriced because they are part of a big index and some computer keeps buying them—creating a situation of overvaluation. Or they aren’t yet part of the index and no one knows they exist.

An 80% gain in a month from having realized that a debt payment at a parent company would be missed, is a huge gain. There are more gains like this out there.

Chris again...

My question for today:

Cast your vote here and also see what others think

Ok, so there"s a couple of granular examples for you to chew on.

Bottom line: there is no such thing as passive investing. It"s like passive sex. How it works I"ve no idea. But I just know that it doesn"t.

- Chris

“I own last year’s top performing funds. Unfortunately, I bought them this year.” — Anonymous

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