Kolanovic: The Tech Bubble Is Driven By Central Banks And Will Collapse; “This Time Is Not Different”
Having been a must-read voice of contrarian originality and market structure insight especially in the arcane realm of quant finance and derivatives for much of 2013-2016, about 3 years ago something flipped and JPM’s head quant, Marko Kolanovic abandoned his traditional skeptical perch and became ideologically aligned with the pro-central bank cabal of Fed apologists who refuse to see any signs of an asset bubble, claim the Fed can do no wrong, and generally mock anyone who warns that the injection of nearly $20 trillion in liquidity into the stock market will have a very unhappy ending. Kolanovic’s bizarre reversal went so far as to calling sites, such as this one, “fake news” as he continued to push for a bullish outcome to the debacle that was Q4 2018, if for all the wrong reasons (as this site explained repeatedly). In fact, Kolanovic’s forced transformation resulted in in-house confrontations with other JPM quants such as Nick Panigirtzoglou.
Well, in a world devoid of any logic or sense, some normality could have finally returned today when in his latest market commentary note, the real Kolanovic may be finally bacl, calling the market, or rather it best performing strategy – the low-vol/growth/momentum factor which is really just a fancy name for the handful of market-leading tech stocks- for what it is, namely one overinflated asset bubble, made possible by “central banks pushing global yields into negative territory (propping up defensive and secular growth/tech bond proxies), growth of passive indexation and momentum strategies (pushing assets into momentum, mega caps and low volatility stocks) as well as flows based on simplistic ESG schemes that just exponentiate the same crowding trends (e.g. very high correlation of ESG with low volatility, large size and momentum scores as well as sector concentration in tech).”
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