Global Market Comments
April 24, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THEY’RE NOT MAKING AMERICANS ANYMORE)
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Regular readers of this letter are well aware of my fascination with demographics as a market driver.
They go a long way towards explaining if asset prices are facing a long-term structural headwind or tailwind.
The great thing about the data is that you can get precise, high quality numbers 20, or even 50 years in advance. No matter how hard governments may try, you can?t change the number of people born 20 years ago.
Ignore them at your peril. Those who failed to anticipate the coming retirement of the baby boomer generation in 2006 all found themselves horribly long and wrong in the market crash that followed shortly.
The Moody?s rating agency (MCO) has published a report predicting that the number of ?super aged? countries, those with more than 7% of their population over the age of 65, will increase from three to 13 by 2020, and 34 in 2030.
Currently, only Japan (26.4%) (EWJ), Italy (21.7%) (EWI), and Germany (EWG) are so burdened with that number of old age pensioners. France (EWQ) (18.7%), Switzerland (EWL) (18.2%), and the UK (EWU) (18.1%) are about to join the club.
The implication is that the global demographic dividend the world has enjoyed over the last 40 years is about to turn into a tax, a big one. The consequence will be lower long-term growth, possibly by 0.5%-1.0% less than we are seeing today.
This is what the bond market may already be telling us with its unimaginably subterranean rates for its long term bonds (Japan at -0.13%! Germany at 0.14%! The US at 1.75%!).
Traveling around Europe last summer, I was struck by the number of retirees I ran into. It certainly has taken the bloom off those topless beaches (I once saw one great grandmother with a walker on the beach in Barcelona).
For the list of new entrants to the super aged club, see the table below.
This is all a big deal for long-term investors.
Countries with inverted population pyramids have lots of seniors saving money, spending very little, and drawing hugely on social services.
For example, in China, the number of working age adults per senior plunges from 6 in 2020, to 4.2 in 2030, to only 2.6 by 2050!
Financial assets do very poorly in such a hostile environment. Your money doesn?t want to be anywhere near a country where diaper sales to seniors exceed those to newborns.
You want to bet your money on countries with positive demographic pyramids. They have lots of young people who are eager to work and to spend on growing families, drawing on social services little, if at all.
Fewer seniors to support keeps tax and savings rates low. This is all great for business, and therefore, risk assets.
Be careful not to rely solely on demographics when making your investment decisions. If you did that, you would have sold all your American stocks in 2006, had two great years, but then missed the tripling in markets that followed.
According to my friend, noted demographer Harry S. Dent, Jr., the US will not see a demographic tailwind until 2022.
When building a secure retirement home for yourself, you need to use all the tools in your toolbox, and not rely just on one.
A demographic headwind does not permanently doom a country to investment perdition.
The US is a prime example, where a large number of women joining the labor force, high levels of immigration, later retirement ages, and lower social service payouts all help mitigate a demographic drag.
A hyper accelerating rate of technological innovation also provides a huge cushion.
You Want to Invest in This Pyramid?
...Not This One
Markets are overbought now, especially given that the US economy is only growing at a subpar 2% annual rate. But the S&P 500 (SPY) will close higher by yearend. Despite the fact that 30-year Treasury prices (TLT) are near all time highs, there are still huge opportunities in the fixed income space. And both the Japanese yen (FXY) (YCS) and the Tokyo stock market (EWJ) (DXJ) have more to run.
These were a few choice investment nuggets I gleaned from my wide-ranging interview with my friend, Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a leading fund of funds for alternative investments. To learn more about SkyBridge Capital, please go to their website at http://www.skybridgecapital.com/.
After getting a law degree from Harvard, he started his investment career at Goldman Sachs in 1989, where he spent 7 years in the wealth management division. He went on to start his own money management firm, which he sold to Neuberger Berman in 2001. When Lehman Brothers bought Neuberger Berman in 2003, Scaramucci spent a short stint there as managing director of its Investment Management Division.
Anthony is the author of two books: The Little Book of Hedge Funds: What You Need to Know About Hedge Funds but the Managers Won?t Tell You and Goodbye Gordon Gekko: How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul.
Scaramucci is focusing his heaviest weighting in fixed income strategies that benefit from improving credit ratings in the US real estate market and low prepayment rates. This brilliant, reasonably well risk adjusted strategy is earning him 11%-13% annual returns, or 5-7 times the cash flow of ten-year Treasury bonds.
Anthony has been consistently negative on gold, which makes him look like a genius for the past two years. He has a small weighting in emerging markets, which offer higher risk and volatility, but potentially greater returns. His picks there include the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia (IDX), Singapore (EWS), and Malaysia (EWM).
He thinks Apple (AAPL) is very cheap, but is facing an innovation headwind. Still, investors in Steve Jobs? creation should do well over the long term.
SkyBridge Capital uses 28 sub managers to generate outsized market returns. He came out ahead by 20% in 2012 and is up 9% so far this year. It has won awards for the best fund of funds with over $1 billion in assets for the last three years in a row. The firm now has over $7.7 billion in assets under management or advisement.
Anthony?s team of professionals does all the spadework in finding great managers, doing the due diligence, and cross hedging exposures. He charges 1.50% management fee, but last year earned back 77 basis points for his clients in manager discounts. So on a net basis the fees are really quite reasonable.
New investors can open an account for as little as $50,000. This is a big deal because some of the best managers have minimums as high as $10-$15 million. It is the only way the little guy can get access to the best of the best. Customers must be accredited investors with at least $200,000 in annual income and a net worth of over $1 million.
Anthony comes across as polished and erudite, yet cautious. He clearly spends a lot of time thinking about how to invest other people?s money.
As if Scaramucci didn?t have enough to do, he devotes much energy to organizing the SkyBridge Alternatives Conferences, the annual Woodstock for the high and the mighty of the hedge fund industry. The most recent event in Las Vegas presented heavyweight hedge fund legends Paulson & Co.?s John Paulson, Third Point?s Daniel Loeb, and Omega?s Leon Cooperman (click here for my coverage of this love fest).
I will be attending the next SkyBridge Alternatives Conference in Singapore during September 24-27, 2013 (click the link http://www.saltconference.com/saltasia2013/). Former Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, and the last European Central Bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, will be the keynote speakers.
To learn the precise details of the SkyBridge high return strategy, please follow the instructions for downloading the full interview below. There you can also get his list of the best US stocks to buy in the current environment.
Just go to the AUDIO menu tab and click on the pull down menu for RADIO SHOW (click here for the link at http://madhedgefundradio.com/radio-show/). Click on the green BUY NOW button and complete the order form. A blue link will appear telling you to ?click here to proceed?. Then click on the small blue box with the question mark inside to download. Hit the PLAY arrow to listen. You can pause, fast forward, or rewind at any time. Given the quality of the information you will obtain, the $4.95 price is a bargain.
To buy The Little Book of Hedge Funds at a discounted Amazon price, please click here. To buy Goodbye Gordon Gekko, please click here.
SkyBridge Capital?s Anthony Scaramucci on Hedge Fund Radio
?Oh, how I despise the yen, let me count the ways.? I?m sure Shakespeare would have come up with a line of iambic pentameter similar to this if he were a foreign exchange trader. I firmly believe that a short position in the yen should be at the core of any hedged portfolio for the next decade, but so far every time I have dipped my toe in the water, it has been chopped off by a samurai sword.
I was heartened once again this week when Japan?s Ministry of Finance released data showing that the country suffered its first annual trade deficit since 1980. Specifically, the value of imports exceeded exports by $39 billion. Japan still ran healthy surpluses with the US and Europe. But it ran a gigantic deficit with the Middle East, its primary supplier of energy.
You can blame the March tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown that followed for much of this. Japan depended on nuclear power for 25% of its electric power generation, and since then the number of operating plants has been cut from 54 to just 5. Conventional plants powered by oil and LNG have had to make up the difference, causing a surge in imports. Crude?s leap from $75/barrel in the fall to $100 made matters worse.
It also hasn?t helped that Japan has offshored much of its low end manufacturing to China over the last 30 years, as America has done. Exacerbating the problem were the Thai floods, which caused immense supply chain problems, further eroding exports.
To remind you why you hate all investments Japanese, I?ll refresh your memory with this short list of the other problems bedeviling the country:
* With the world?s weakest major economy, Japan is certain to be the last country to raise interest rates.
* This is inciting big hedge funds to borrow yen and sell it to finance longs in every other corner of the financial markets.
* Japan has the world?s worst demographic outlook that assures its problems will only get worse. They?re not making Japanese any more.
* The sovereign debt crisis in Europe is prompting investors to scan the horizon for the next troubled country. With gross debt exceeding 200% of GDP, or 100% when you net out inter-agency crossholdings, Japan is at the top of the hit list.
* The Japanese long bond market, with a yield of 0.98%, is a disaster waiting to happen.
* You have two willing co-conspirators in this trade, the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan, who will move Mount Fuji, if they must, to get the yen down and bail out the country?s beleaguered exporters.
When the big turn inevitably comes, we?re going to ?100, then ?120, then ?150. That could take the price of the leveraged short yen ETF (YCS), which last traded at $41.43, to over $100.? But it might take a few years to get there. The fact that the Japanese government has come on my side with this trade is not any great comfort. Many intervention attempts have so FAR been able to weaken the Japanese currency only for a few nanoseconds.
If you think this is extreme, let me remind you that when I first went to Japan in the early seventies, the yen was trading at ?305, and had just been revalued from the Peace Treaty Dodge line rate of ?360. To me the ?78 I see on my screen today is unbelievable.
Noted hedge fund manager Kyle Bass says he is already in this trade in size. All he needs for it to work is for Japan to run out of domestic savers essential to buy the government?s domestic yen bond issues, who have pitifully had sub 1% yields forced upon them for the past 17 years. Then the yen, the bond market, and the stock market all collapse like a house of cards. Kyle says that could happen as early as the spring.
It?s All Over For the Yen