Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings
ALL INVESTORS ARE BULLISH, TIMING MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –
I often relate financial markets to horse race betting. At each point in the race there is a leader and a laggard. Their position is not important if the investor’s time period is a distant finish line. Thus, forecasts of future returns should include the length of the investor’s race. It would also be helpful to identify the near-term winners. Are they likely to be fixed income, commodities, real estate, or other asset types?
SOME CONTRARIAN INDICATORS
Good analysts should always be looking for signs that generally accepted views and their own views could be wrong. I have found some candidates in the US marketplace that are worthy of consideration:
- In aggregate, stocks traded on the NASDAQ have outperformed those listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the last couple of years. Generally, heavy users of NASDAQ stocks are more speculative than those trading primarily on the NYSE. Speculative stocks are driven by future projections, whereas larger NYSE companies rely more on reported results. This suggests that NASDAQ users are more likely to react to changes in sentiment than the more seasoned investors trading on the senior exchange. NASDAQ stocks have been doing better than those on the NYSE for some time, but recently the order has been reversed:
- The ratio of new highs to lows is 2.16x for the NYSE and 1.45x for the NASDAQ
- The advance to decline volume is 3.44x vs 1.88x
- The bond market is not only larger than the stock market, it is more risk averse. Thus, when high credit quality bonds sell at lower yields than lesser quality bonds, it is a sign of a concern for safety. In the latest week’s Barron’s, high quality bond yields dropped 14 basis points vs. 7 basis points for intermediate quality bonds. This demonstrates a willingness to trade less income (yield) for greater perceived safety.
- A typical sign of a market top is an extreme concentration of winners. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising to a record 28,004 on Friday, it is worth noting that 434 of the last 1000-point gain, came from Apple.
- The average performance for mutual funds has been way above historic rates of return for the year-to-date through Thursday night period. Below are the year-to-date average performances for selected investment categories (it’s worth noting that the averages include funds that do both better and worse than the peer averages):
Diversified General
Equity Funds Sector Oriented Funds
Mid Cap Growth +28.37% Technology +30.55%
Large Cap Growth +26.53% Global Tech +30.11%
Multi Cap Growth +25.46% Precious Metals +25.93%
S&P Index Funds +25.22% Real Estate +25.79%
Industrials +25.52%
LONGER-TERM CONSIDERATIONS
Many of the portfolios we manage are designed for longer-term beneficiaries and we therefore need to think about both finite and indefinite longer-term periods. The following is my current thinking based on what I perceive today:
1) Yields on US Treasuries should be calibrated to perceived inflation rates, which are already imbedded in the yields. Yields are therefore a reflection of perceived future inflation rates. Currently, yields are 1.61% for two-years, 1.833% for ten-years, and 2.31% for thirty-years. I fully expect significant spikes in the latter two periods and possibly the earliest period as well, due to expanding federal deficits and weakened credit constraints on individual and institutional borrowers.
2) China has been the leading source of world GDP growth for several years. Over the next generation, or sooner, this is likely to be less pronounced for the following three critical reasons.
- Due to the one child policy, now abandoned, the overall population of China is scheduled to peak within 15-years.
- China’s growth engine is shifting from external to greater internal development, with more of the growth coming from a rise in the standard of living. This is likely to continue until most of the remaining seven hundred million people have moved from the farms to a more urban society. (Today, the US farm population is closer to 1% vs over 50% following the Civil War) This transition should continue to fuel the internal growth.
- China is already wealthy as a nation, but not on a per capita basis. It therefore needs to earn foreign currency to cover its imports, which consist principally of energy and other absent raw materials. Chinese leaders recognize that an aggressive export drive might be viewed negatively by others. In the future, centrally controlled economies will likely lower tensions by balancing exports and imports. At some point India and possibly the rest of the sub-continent might be replaced by one or more African countries.
3) Quite possibly the most difficult trend to understand is the capturing by thought leadership of digitalization over historic analog relativism. Today, most activities are increasingly driven by digital computers. The heart of computer programming is what we used to call the “nor gate”. It quickly compares one digital point to another and essentially derives right from wrong. There is no middle ground. This type of thinking has penetrated our thought process to such a degree that our political views have migrated to extreme positions, either far right or far left. Computer selection of products and services is also based on these extreme positions. Increasingly, we see investment positions being based on optimizing extreme positions. We have not yet constructed enough historic computer memory to show that extreme positions don’t last very long, in part because conditions change. The violence of both the French and Russian revolutions destroyed a few generations of more moderate and successful leadership and this concerns the history student in me. (I will shortly outline an investment approach that could allow most of us to escape the violence of extreme investing)
SURVIVING IS THE BEST INVESTMENT STRATEGY
I clearly do not know what the future will bring. Further, I am cautioning that extreme positions generally don’t work. However, I do offer a reasonable plan for our investment accounts to survive.
The earliest attempt at human thinking was not digital, but analog. Numbers were invented later as a shorthand for reality, but not for reality itself. In the absence of digitization we could still array or rank alternatives based on a personal scale, from good to bad. (As a contrarian this is still how I rank opportunities. I have not found perfection in anything and nothing is extremely bad either.) Thus, one might call me an analog investment thinker.
I have one tremendous advantage in achieving investment survival, an advantage available to investors large or small. The advantage is building portfolios of diverse and diversified mutual funds. All too often when examining the extreme best performers in short time periods they have concentrated portfolios emphasizing a sector or type of investing. Interestingly, the lagging group also tends to emphasize sectors or investment styles.
Each portfolio can be structured to meet account needs. The key to the selection of individual funds is the desired level of diversity. In its simplest form this could be a well-chosen short list of growth and value, plus a few middle of the road equity funds. At the extreme end of diversity it could include international funds, some concentrated on a region or method of investing, with others more regional or global. Different levels of sophisticated fixed income instruments and funds can also be added, as can funds not registered with the SEC and only available to select audiences. I do not construct portfolios to produce an overall performance record, but to satisfy a specific need.
WHAT TO DO NOW?
Since most accounts have achieved a couple years of expected performance for the ten-month period, the focus should have shifted to investment survival and maintaining reasonable performance as long as the current market upsurge lasts. Typically, our biggest dollar risks are in our most successful investments. While we are particularly fond of them, at some point they need to be pruned back or totally redeemed. Perhaps the best starting point for the scale back is the original allocation when you started investing in the name. Depending on the size of the exposure and your willingness to tolerate losing some of your gains, setting up a schedule of sales based on future prices or dates makes sense. I prefer a limited number of decision points, perhaps five or less.
If you have positions invested in value stocks that have not participated in the current market price increase. Review them to determine the odds of being near an inflection point, or a near term price move. If you have been waiting a long time for this type of move you should probably cut back or sell the entire position, as we are late in the cycle.
If you are having difficulty executing the strategies of cutting back big winners or laggards, let us know. Hylton and I would be happy to confidentially work with you.
Did you miss my past few blogs? Click one of the links below to read.
https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/11/where-are-we-and-so-weekly-blog-602.html
https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/11/top-down-dictums-measured-digitally-are.html
https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/10/two-questions-length-of-recession-near.html
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A. Michael Lipper, CFA
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