Global Market Comments
April 6, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FRIDAY, JUNE 15, DENVER, CO, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(DON'T MISS THE APRIL 11 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(A NOTE ON OPTIONS CALLED AWAY),
(TLT), (GOOGL), (JPM), (VXX)
Posts
There is no better sight to a hungry trader than blood in the water.
?Buy them when they?re cryin? is an excellent investment strategy that always seems to work.
There are rivers of tears being shed over the banking industry right now.
Federal Reserve officials openly told investors that after the December ?% rate hike that they would continue to do so on a quarterly basis. Only weeks later, a collapse in the stock market shattered this scenario to smithereens.
I doubt we?ll see any more Fed action in 2016.
This caught investors in bank shares wrong footed in a major way.
But wait! It gets worse!
Among the largest holders of American bank shares are the Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds, including those for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, my old stomping grounds. Pieces of me are still there.
The collapse in oil prices (USO) has put their budgets in tatters and they now have to sell stock to fund wildly generous social service programs. The farther Texas tea drops, the more shares they have to sell, and at $26 a barrel they have to sell bucket loads.
Had enough? There?s more.
The junk bond market (JNK) and oil company shares are suggesting that up to half of all American oil companies will go bankrupt sometime this year, mostly small ones. It all depends on how long oil stays under $40.
Unfortunately, the oil industry has been the most prolific borrower from banks for the last decade. The covenants on many of these loans require borrowers to pump and sell oil to meet interest payments NO MATTER THE PRICE! It?s a perfect formula for maxing out production and selling into a hole.
So fear of widespread energy defaults has also been dragging down bank shares as well.
Some of the moves so far in this short year have been absolutely eye popping. Bank of America (BAC) has plunged 31% from its recent high, while Citibank (C) is down 32% and JP Morgan is off 19%. Basically, they all had a terrible year just in the month of January.
Bank shares have been beaten so mercilessly that they are approaching levels last seen at the nadir of the 2009 financial crisis.
Except that this time, there is no financial crisis, not even the hint of one. For the past seven years, banks have been relentlessly raising capital, reducing leverage, and growing BIGGER.
They proved last time that they were too big to fail. Now they are REALLY too big to fail. Default rates aren?t even a fraction of what we saw during the bad old days. Energy industry borrowing is only a tenth the size of bank home loan portfolios going into the crisis.
Blame the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, which requires banks to hold far more capital In US Treasury bonds (TLT) than in the past, which by the way, are doing spectacularly well.
Blame ultra cautious management.
Whatever the reason, Big US banks are now solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.
Which means I?m starting to get interested. Interest rates don?t go down forever, nor does the price of oil. And scares about loan defaults are being wildly exaggerated by the media, as always.
But there is more than one way to skin a cat.
All of these companies issue high yield preferred stock with exceptionally high dividends. For example, Bank of America issued 6.2% yielding paper as recently as October. It is paying something like 8% now.
Since these securities are stock, you get to participate in price appreciation when the panic subsides. A guaranteed 8% return, plus the prospect of substantial capital appreciation? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Google bank preferred shares and you will find an entire world out there of specialist advisors, dedicated newsletters and even day trading and hedging recommendations.
One thing to keep in mind here is that you should only buy ?non callable? paper. This prevents issuers from stealing your paper when better times return to cut their interest payouts.
There is another way to play this beleaguered sector.
You can buy the iShares S&P US Preferred Stock Index Fund ETF (PFF), which owns a basket of preferred stocks almost entirely made up of bank shares. As of today it was yielding 5.62%. To visit the fund?s website, please click link: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239826/ishares-us-preferred-stock-etf.
Time to BUY?
It?s fall again, when my most loyal readers are to be found taking transcontinental railroad journeys, crossing the Atlantic in an a first class suite on the Queen Mary 2, or getting the early jump on the Caribbean beaches.
What better time to spend your trading profits than after all the kids have gone back to school, and the summer vacation destination crush has subsided.
It?s an empty nester?s paradise.
Trading in the stock market is reflecting as much, with increasingly narrowing its range since the August 24 flash crash, and trading volumes are subsiding.
Is it really September already?
It?s as if through some weird, Rod Serling type time flip, August became September, and September morphed into August. That?s why we got a rip roaring August followed by a sleepy, boring September.
Welcome to the misplaced summer market.
I say all this, because the longer the market moves sideways, the more investors get nervous and start bailing on their best performing stocks.
The perma bears are always out there in force (it sells more newsletters), and with the memories of the 2008 crash still fresh and painful, the fears of a sudden market meltdown are constant and ever present.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
What we are seeing unfold here is not the PRICE correction that people are used to, but a TIME correction, where the averages move sideways for a while, in this case, some five months.
Eventually, the the moving averages catch up, and it is off to the races once again.
The reality is that there is a far greater risk of an impending market melt up than a melt down. But to understand why, we must delve further into history, and then the fundamentals.
For a start, most investors have not believed in this bull market for a nanosecond from the very beginning. They have been pouring their new cash into the bond market instead.
Now that bonds have given up a third of 2015?s gains in just a few weeks, the fear of God is in them, and dreams of reallocation are dancing in their minds.
Some 95% of active managers are underperforming their benchmark indexes this year, the lowest level since 1997, compared to only 76% in a normal year.
Therefore, this stock market has ?CHASE? written all over it.
Too many managers have only three months left to make their years, lest they spend 2016 driving a taxi for Uber and handing out free bottles of water. The rest of 2015 will be one giant ?beta? (outperformance) chase.
You can?t blame these guys for being scared. My late mentor, Morgan Stanley?s Barton Biggs, taught me that bull markets climb a never-ending wall of worry. And what a wall it has been.
Worry has certainly been in abundance this year, what with China collapsing, ISIL on the loose, Syria exploding, Iraq falling to pieces, the contentious presidential elections looming, oil in free fall, , the worst summer drought in decades, flaccid economic growth, and even a rampaging Donald Trump.
We also have to be concerned that my friend, Fed governor Janet Yellen, is going to unsheathe a giant sword and start hacking away at bond prices, as she has already done with quantitative easing (I?ve been watching Game of Thrones too much).
This will raise interest rates sooner, and by more.
Let me give you a little personal insight here into the thinking of Janet Yellen. It?s all about the jobs. Any hints about rate rises have been head fakes, especially when they come from a small, anti QE Fed minority.
When in doubt, Janet is all about easy money, until proven otherwise. Until then, think lower rates for longer, especially on the heels of a disappointing 173,000 August nonfarm payroll.
So I think we have a nice set up here going into Q4. It could be a Q4 2013 lite--a gain of 5%-10% in a cloud of dust.
The sector leaders will be the usual suspects, big technology names, health care, biotech (IBB), and energy (COP), (OXY). Banks (BAC), (JPM), (KBE) will get a steroid shot from rising interest rates, no matter how gradual.
To add some spice to your portfolio (perhaps at the cost of some sleepless nights), you can dally in some big momentum names, like Tesla (TSLA), Netflix (NFLX), Lennar Husing (LEN), and Facebook (FB).
You Mean it?s September Already?
War threatens in the Ukraine. Iraq is blowing up. Rebels are turning our own, highly advanced weapons against us. Israel invades Gaza. Ebola virus has hit the US. Oh, and two hurricanes are hitting Hawaii for the first time in 22 years.
Should I panic and sell everything I own? Is it time to stockpile canned food, water and ammo? Is the world about to end?
I think not.
In fact the opposite is coming true. The best entry point for risk assets in a year is setting up. If you missed 2014 so far, here is a chance to do it all over again.
It is an old trading nostrum that you should buy when there is blood in the streets. I had a friend who reliably bought every coup d? etat in Thailand during the seventies and eighties, and he made a fortune, retiring to one of the country?s idyllic islands off the coast of Phuket. In fact, I think he bought the whole island.
Now we have blood in multiple streets in multiple places, thankfully, this time, it is not ours.
I had Mad Day Trader, Jim Parker, do some technical work for me. He tracked the S&P 500/30 year Treasury spread for the past 30 years and produced the charts below. This is an indicator of overboughtness of one market compared to another that reliably peaks every decade.
And guess what? It is peaking. This tells you that any mean reversion is about to unleash an onslaught of bond selling and stock buying.
There is a whole raft of other positive things going on. Several good stocks have double bottomed off of ?stupid cheap? levels, like IBM (IBM), Ebay (EBAY), General Motors (GM), Tupperware (TUP), and Yum Brands (YUM). Both the Russian ruble and stock market are bouncing hard today.
There is another fascinating thing happening in the oil markets. This is the first time in history where a new Middle Eastern war caused oil price to collapse instead of skyrocket. This is all a testament to the new American independence in energy.
Hint: this is great news for US stocks.
If you asked me a month ago what would be my dream scenario for the rest of the year, I would have said an 8% correction in August to load the boat for a big yearend rally. Heavens to Betsy and wholly moley, but that appears to be what we are getting.
It puts followers of my Trade Alert service in a particularly strong position. As of today, they are up 24% during 2014 in a market that is down -0.3%. Replay the year again, and that gets followers up 50% or more by the end of December.
Here is my own shopping list of what to buy when we hit the final bottom, which is probably only a few percent away:
Longs
JP Morgan (JPM)
Apple (AAPL)
Google (GOOG)
General Motors (GM)
Freeport McMoRan (FCX)
Corn (CORN)
Russell 2000 (IWM)
S&P 500 (SPY)
Shorts
Euro (FXE), (EUO)
Yen (FXE), (YCS)
No, Not This Time
I have discovered a correlation in the market that you can use for the rest of this year, for all of 2014, and probably for the next 20 years. Whenever the Treasury bond market (TLT) takes a dive, bank shares rocket. This is a particularly happy discovery, as my model-trading portfolio is long bank shares and short the Treasury bond market.
By buying bank shares here you are playing the second derivative of the short bond trade. Banks are about to go from being less profitable to more profitable during a falling bond, rising interest rate environment. Every trader on the street knows this, hence the sudden renaissance of the financials.
Take a look at the charts below prepared by my friends at Stockcharts.com. They show that after tracking nicely with the S&P 500 for most of the year, Financials suddenly started to drastically lag the market in October. That was on the heels of the bond market rally triggered by the Federal Reserve?s failure to taper in September.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I correctly called the top of the bond market and started slamming out the Trade Alerts to buy puts as fast as I could write them. Since November 1, financials have become the top performing sector of the market, and it is dragging the (SPY) upward kicking and screaming all the way.
I?ll tell you what is happening here. Traders are dumping story driven momentum stocks like Tesla (TSLA), and piling into the biggest lagging sectors for fresh meat. The dive in Treasuries gave them all the excuse they needed. That?s why the Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLF) has bolted out of nowhere to a new five year high. The same is also true for Wells Fargo (WFC) and our favored Citigroup (C).
The financials rally could continue until the sector becomes overbought relative to the rest of the market, which could be well into next year. And yes, before you ask, that includes Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS), which are really more structured like banks now in the wake of the Dodd Frank bill.
So I am going to take profits here on my existing long position in the Citigroup (C) December $45-$47 bull call spread. With the shares now trading just short of $52, we are now too far in-the-money to get much further benefit from a continued appreciation. Better to go into cash now, so I can reload on the next dip, which could happen next week.
We grabbed 80% of the potential profit holding the position a mere seven trading days. This is my 15th consecutive closing Trade Alert, and the 20th including my remaining open profitable positions. I have only six more to go until a break my previous record of 25. It doesn?t get any better than this.
Time to enter more bids on eBay for Christmas presents. That black Chanel Classic handbag with gold trim is looking pretty good. Do you think a new Brioni suit will fit into Dad?s stocking over the fireplace? Santa?.hint, hint!
This is far and away the world?s premier banking institution. Estimates of the huge trading losses by the London ?whale?, initially pegged at $2 billion, have since skyrocketed to $6 billion. I?ll ignore the Internet rumors that speculate about a $30 billion hickey. As you well know, almost everything on the net is not true, except what you read in my own newsletter.
Back in the 1980?s when I was at Morgan Stanley, the inside joke was to look for nice office space for ourselves whenever we visited clients at (JPM). The expectation was that they would take us over when Glass-Steagle ended, as they were both the same institution before the Securities and Exchange Act broke them up in 933. When the separation of commercial and investment banking finally came in 1999, Morgan Stanley had grown far too big to swallow and the egos too big to manage.
I?ll tell you another way to look at this trade. (JPM) lost 4.7% of its capital, so Mr. Market chewed 30% out of its capitalization. Sounds a bit overdone, no? The bad news is already in the price. A large part of the offending position has already been liquidated.
I have known Jamie Diamond for a long time, and can tell you that he is the best manager of a financial institution anywhere. I have been warnings him for years that his traders were understating risk and leverage in esoteric derivatives in order to boost their own bonuses. It was just a matter of time before they blew up. Presumably, by now Jamie has tightened up internal controls and in the future won?t pay so much attention to presentations by wet behind the ears traders pitching schemes that are too good to be true. As a result, you can now buy (JPM) at the blow up price.
I have analyzed the specific trade that got (JPM) into so much trouble, the now infamous ?Investment Grade Series 9 Ten Year Index Credit Default Swap.? The chart of its recent performance and its hedge is posted below. It was in effect a $100 billion ?RISK ON? trade that came to grief in early May.
The trader involved, Bruno Iksil, broke every rule in the trading Bible: too much leverage in an illiquid credit derivative with no real risk control and hedges that were imprecise at best. As I never tire of pointing out to hedge fund newbies, when your longs go down and your shorts go up in a hedge fund, you lose money twice as fast as a conventional long only fund. Play at the deep end of the pool, but be aware of the risks.
Few outside the industry are aware that this was a $6 billion gift to two dozen hedge funds who are now shouting about record performance. It is, after all, a zero sum game. Didn?t Bruno get the memo to ?Sell in May and go away?? He obviously doesn?t read The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader either.
Even if the worst case scenario is true and the $6 billion numbers proves good, that only takes a 4.7% bite out of the bank?s $127 billion in capital. It is in no way life threatening, nor requiring any bailouts. These shares at this price are showing an eye popping low multiple of 7X earnings, and have already been punished enough. Getting shares this cheap in this company is a once in a lifetime gift, and twice in a lifetime if you count the 2009 crash low.
You don?t have to run out and bet the farm right here. Scale in instead, and if the market drops, you can always cost average down. If Greece forces us into major meltdown mode, we can also hedge this? ?RISK ON? trade through taking more aggressive ?RISK OFF? positions, like selling short the (FXE), (SPX), (IWM), (GLD), or the (SLV) by buying puts.
Short Red and Long Black Was Not Good
