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The Greatest Fear Today: The Lack of Fear

November 3, 2017

The Greatest Fear Today: The Lack of Fear

Market crashes often happen not when everyone is worried about them, but when no one is worried about them.

Complacency and overconfidence are good leading indicators of an overvalued market set for a correction or worse. Prominent magazine covers are notorious for declaring a boundless bull market right at the top just before a crash or correction.

October 19 saw the thirtieth anniversary of the greatest one-day percentage stock market crash in U.S. history — a 22% fall on October 19, 1987. In today’s Dow points, a 22% decline would equal a one-day drop of over 5,000 points!

I remember October 19, 1987 well. I was chief credit officer of a major government bond dealer. We didn’t have the internet back then, but we did have trading screens with live quotes. I couldn’t believe what I was watching at first, but by 2:00 in the afternoon we were all glued to our screens.

It was like being a passenger on a plane that was crashing, but you had no way out of the plane. Our firm was fine (bonds rallied as stocks crashed), but we were concerned about counterparties going bankrupt and not being able to pay us on our winning bets in bonds.

What’s troubling is that a lot of commentators said that the kind of crash that took place in 1987 couldn’t happen today and that markets were much safer. It’s true that circuit breakers and market closures could temporarily halt a slide better than we did in 1987. But those devices buy time, they don’t solve the underlying fear and panic that causes market crashes.

In any case, when I hear market pros say “It can’t happen again” it sounds to me like another market crash is just around the corner.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Second Crash Warning From The IMF – This Time It’s About Vol

October 31, 2017

Second Crash Warning From The IMF – This Time It’s About Vol

Another week, another warning regarding financial crash scenarios from those keen minds at the IMF.

In “Here Is The IMF’s Global Financial Crash Scenario” last week, we highlighted the institution’s surprisingly candid discussion hidden away in its latest Financial Stability Report “Rising Medium-Term Vulnerabilities Could Derail the Global Recovery”…or as we paraphrased the IMF’s “politically correct way of saying the financial system is on the verge of crashing”.

As we noted previously, in the section also called “Global Financial Dislocation Scenario” because “crash” sounds just a little too pedestrian, the IMF uses a DSGE model to project the current global financial situation, and ominously admits that “concerns about a continuing buildup in debt loads and overstretched asset valuations could have global economic repercussions” and – in modeling out the next crash, pardon “dislocation” – the IMF conducts a “scenario analysis” to illustrate how a repricing of risks could “lead to a rise in credit spreads and a fall in capital market and housing prices, derailing the economic recovery and undermining financial stability.”

This week the IMF has gone a step further, courting the mainstream financial media to publicise its warning about the dangers of historically low volatility and related short volatility strategies.

As The FT reports, The International Monetary Fund has warned that the increasing use of exotic financial products tied to equity volatility by investors such as pension funds is creating unknown risks that could result in a severe shock to financial markets. In an interview with the Financial Times Tobias Adrian, director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the IMF, said an increasing appetite for yield was driving investors to look for ways to boost income through complex instruments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are You Infuriated Yet?

October 21, 2017

Are You Infuriated Yet?

You should be. I certainly am…

More and more, I’m encountering people who are simply infuriated with how our “leaders” are running (or to put it more accurately, ruining) things right now. And I share that fury.

It’s perfectly normal human response to be infuriated when an outside agent hurts you, especially if the pain seems unnecessary, illogical or random.

Imagine if your neighbor enjoyed setting off loud explosives at all hours of the day and night. Or if he had a habit of tailgating and brake-checking you every time he saw your car on the road. You’d been well within your rights to be infuriated.

Or to use a much more common example from the real world : When your politicians repeatedly pass laws that hurt you in favor of large corporations — that, too, is infuriating. Especially if those actions run directly counter to their campaign promises.

There’s a lot of be infuriated about in the world today, so go ahead and embrace your rage. By doing so, you’ll be in a better mindset to understand things like Brexit, Catalonia, and Trump, each of which is a reflection of the fury of your fellow citizens, who are finally waking up to the fact that they’ve been victims for too long.

An easy prediction to make is that this simmering anger of the populace is going to start boiling over more violently in the coming years. Welcome to the Age of Fury.

‘Over The Top’ Dumb

Do you ever get the sense that, as a society, we’re being dangerously reckless? Perhaps so dumb that we might not recover from the repercussions of our stupidity for many generations, if ever?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Stock Market Panic Like 1987 Could Happen Again

October 19, 2017

Frenzied traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 19, 1987. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A Stock Market Panic Like 1987 Could Happen Again

Oct. 19, 1987, was one of the worst days in stock market history. Thirty years later, it would be comforting to believe it couldn’t happen again.

Yet that’s true only in the narrowest sense: Regulatory and technological change has made an exact repeat of that terrible day impossible. We are still at risk, however, because fundamentally, that market crash was a mass stampede set off through viral contagion.

That kind of panic can certainly happen again.

I base this sobering conclusion on my own research. (I won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013, partly for my work on the market impact of social psychology.) I sent out thousands of questionnaires to investors within four days of the 1987 crash, motivated by the belief that we will never understand such events unless we ask people for the reasons for their actions, and for the thoughts and emotions associated with them.

From this perspective, I believe a rough analogy for that 1987 market collapse can be found in another event — the panic of Aug. 28, 2016, at Los Angeles International Airport, when people believed erroneously that they were in grave danger. False reports of gunfire at the airport — in an era in which shootings in large crowds had already occurred — set some people running for the exits. Once the panic began, others ran, too.

That is essentially what I found to have happened 30 years ago in the stock market. By late in the afternoon of Oct. 19, the momentous nature of that day was already clear: The stock market had fallen more than 20 percent. It was the biggest one-day drop, in percentage terms, in the annals of the modern American market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BofA Lists 10 Triggers For The Next Crash: “It’s Coming Between Thanksgiving And Valentine’s Day”

October 19, 2017

BofA Lists 10 Triggers For The Next Crash: “It’s Coming Between Thanksgiving And Valentine’s Day”

Back in mid-July, BofA’s chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett predicted that the “most dangerous moment for market will come in 3 or 4 months.” Well, we are now “between 3 and 4” months since the forecast fate and the most dangerous moment we have experienced since then, ironically, is today’s modest selloff on the 30 year anniversary of Black Monday. So looking back at his forecast, has Hartnett thrown in the towel on calls for a correction, and joined all the other BTFDers? Not quite: instead, Hartnett’s thesis has merely shifted, and he now contends that having entered the market’s melt up somewhat late, a bubble which as shown before has unleashed raging purchases of tech stocks and credit, especially junk bonds…

… he expects the upside S&P momentum to linger, bursting to 2,670 before finally getting swept under the bubble tide. When will this happen? “We believe sometime between Thanksgiving & Valentine’s Day,” or between 1 and 4 months, so even as Hartnett keeps the long-end of his forecast horizon fixed, he continues to expect that the next major move lower may come as soon as 1 month from today.

So how does Hartnett get to this conclusion, and what specific triggers is he looking for to launch the selling? Before we get there, here is an explanation of why we are where we are right now, i.e., what is the consensus trade.

What is consensus?

The zeitgeist of Wall Street can be summarized as follows:

Bullish credit and equities with “Goldilocks” macro conviction
No fear of the Fed (or ECB, BoJ…), expectations for a “good” rise in bond yields
Long positions in stocks, IG/HY/EM bonds, EAFE & EM equities, banks, a “sellers strike” in tech, shorts in commodities & government bonds…i.e. the death of mean reversion

Following his latest Fund Managers Survey (profiled here earlier this week), Hartnett notes that, obviously, “Clients are bullish risk assets”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Crash Of ’87 Remembered: “It Was Clear The Acapulco Cliff-Dive Was On For Monday”

October 16, 2017

The Crash Of ’87 Remembered: “It Was Clear The Acapulco Cliff-Dive Was On For Monday”

“The markets in a panic are like a country during a coup, and seen in retrospect that is how they were that day,” wrote a young Salomon bond salesmena named Michael Lewis, of the chaos he witnessed. “One small group of people with its old, established way of looking at the world is hustled from its seat of power.”

As Bloomberg details, most of the people willing to share their memories count themselves as winners who seized the moment as an opportunity not only to make money, but also to insert themselves in the new financial order – Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Their story, and the story of Black Monday, is the birth story of modern financial markets – a wild ride of shock, angst, and, for some, glory.

In the weeks before Black Monday, a few investors spotted patterns that gave them pause.

he most confident were Paul Tudor Jones and Peter Borish, young partners at a small hedge fund in Lower Manhattan. In a prescient Sept. 24 note to investors, Jones even signed off with “caveat emptor” – buyer beware.

PETER BORISH, head of research at Tudor Investment Corp. and Paul Tudor Jones’s No. 2:

We were tracking exponential moves in the equity market. The main one was the equity move in the 1920s, and the market in 1987 looked almost identical. The week before Black Monday, the technical and fundamentals aligned, and so we thought Monday would be the day.

ALLAN ROGERS, head of government bond trading at Bankers Trust Co.:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

DARPA Asks HFT Traders How Hackers Will Crash The Market

October 15, 2017

DARPA Asks HFT Traders How Hackers Will Crash The Market

Having been responsible for the biggest flash crashes in recent years, it is no surprise that when it comes to the market’s growing structural vulnerabilities, high frequency traders have emerged as the primary authority on how to crash the market in the blink of an eye. Which is perhaps why none other than the Pentagon is seeking advice from HFTs on how hackers could “unleash chaos” in the US financial system.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Department of Defense’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, has been consulting with executives at HFT firms and quant hedge funds as well as people from exchanges and other financial companies, over the past year and a half. Officials described the effort as an early-stage pilot project aimed at “identifying market vulnerabilities.” The WSJ notes that meeting participants described meetings as informal sessions in which attendees brainstorm about “how hackers might try to bring down U.S. markets, then rank the ideas by feasibility.”

Why approach HFTs? Because of all market participants, it is the “high freaks” who, better than anyone, know how to force a market crash at will. The WSJ was a bit more diplomatic:

High-speed traders and quant-fund managers, who use sophisticated computer programs to buy and sell stocks, sometimes in fractions of a second, form the core of the group. Such traders tend to have deep expertise in the inner workings of financial markets and the automated systems that account for huge swaths of trading activity today.

Among the potential scenarios probed by the Pentagon: Hackers could cripple a widely used payroll system; they could inject false information into stock-data feeds, sending trading algorithms out of whack; or they could flood the stock market with fake sell orders and trigger a market crash.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1987, 1997, 2007… Just How Crash-Prone are Years Ending in 7?

October 12, 2017

1987, 1997, 2007… Just How Crash-Prone are Years Ending in 7?

Bad Reputation

Years ending in 7, such as the current year 2017, have a bad reputation among stock market participants. Large price declines tend to occur quite frequently in these years.

Sliding down the steep slope of the cursed year. [PT]

Just think of 1987, the year in which the largest one-day decline in the US stock market in history took place: the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 22.61 percent in a single trading day. Or recall the year 2007, which marked the beginning of the GFC (“great financial crisis”).

Given that the current year is ending in 7 as well, is there a reason to be concerned, or is the year 7 crash pattern a myth?

The Pattern of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the Course of a Decade

Below you can see a chart of the typical pattern of the DJIA in the course of a decade. This is not a standard chart. Instead it shows the average price pattern of the DJIA in the course of a decade since 1897.

The horizontal axis shows the years of the decade, the vertical axis the average performance of the index. Thus one can discern at a glance how the index typically performs in individual years depending on what their last digit happens to be.

DJIA, typical pattern in the course of a decade since 1897. Years ending in 7 did tend to be marked by large setbacks on average.

As you can see, in the first half of the decade, i.e. in the years ending in 0 to 4, the DJIA barely rose on average. By contrast, in years ending in 5 (highlighted in yellow above) the performance of the index tended to be particularly strong.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could Market Complexity Trigger The Next Crash?

September 14, 2017

Could Market Complexity Trigger The Next Crash?

Complex systems are all around us.

By one definition, a complex system is any system that features a large number of interacting components (agents, processes, etc.) whose aggregate activity is nonlinear (not derivable from the summations of the activity of individual components) and typically exhibits hierarchical self-organization under selective pressures.

In today’s infographic from Meraglim we use accumulating snow and an impending avalanche as an example of a complex system – but really, such systems can be found everywhere. Weather is another complex system, and ebb and flow of populations is another example.

MARKETS ARE COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Just like in the avalanche example, where various factors at the top of a mountain (accumulating volumes of snow, weather, temperature, geology, gravity, etc.) make up a complex system that is difficult to predict, Visual Capitalists’ Jeff Desjardins notes that markets are similarly complex.

1. Diverse
System actors have different points of view. (i.e. bullish, bearish, long, short, leveraged, non-leveraged, etc.)

2. Connected
Capital markets are over-connected, and information spreads fast. (i.e. chat rooms, phone calls, emails, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, trading systems, order entry systems, etc.)

3. Interaction
Trillions of dollars of securities are exchanged in transactions every day (i.e. stocks, bonds, currencies, derivatives, etc.)

4. Adaptive Behavior
Actors change their behavior based on the signals they are getting (i.e. making or losing money, etc.)

And like the avalanche example, where a single snowflake can trigger a much bigger event, there are increasing signs that the complexity behind the stock market has also reached a critical state.

MARKETS IN A CRITICAL STATE

Here are just some examples that show how the market has entered into an increasingly critical state:

Record-Low Volatility
The VIX, an index that aims to measure the volatility of the market, hit all-time lows this summer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Asset Markets, The Sports Illustrated Jinx, And The Dodgers

September 9, 2017

Asset Markets, The Sports Illustrated Jinx, And The Dodgers

Why do stocks and assets markets crash?

Why is there is a Sports Illustrated jinx and magazine cover stories often signal a sign of a top or bottom of the subject being portrayed?

Regression to the mean, or, more simply, just moving back to the long-run averages.

Dodgers Tank After SI Cover Story

After going on a tear of 51-9, the best 60 game winning stretch in 105 years, the ink was barely dry on the August 28th Sports Illustrated’s cover, which read, “Best Team Ever,” before the Dodgers went into a major tailspin.

Dodgers_SI_Jinx

“Best. Team. Ever?” The ink was barely dry the cover of our Aug. 28 issue—which hit newsstands Aug. 23, with a corresponding comparison to the greatest teams in history online—when the Dodgers fell into a tailspin that they have yet to escape. Through Aug. 25, they had gone 91-36 for a .717 winning percentage, which put them on a 116-win pace, good enough to tie the 2001 Mariners for the highest total of the 162-game expansion era. Since then, they’ve lost 10 of 11 to the Brewers, Diamondbacks and Padres, and while they still have an ample cushion to win the NL West and wrap up homefield advantage in the National League playoffs, they’ve shown that even if the infamous Sports Illustrated cover jinx is a myth, this squad is hardly invincible. – Sports Ilustrated, September 6

Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx A Myth?

We disagree.

Teams, players, politicians, companies, markets or, whatever or whoever, always seem to be cover stories either at at their peak or nadir. For sure, the Dodgers 51-9 winning stretch was unsustainable, and the law of averages had to kick in.

Black Swans Are Rare

We do admit there are on rare occasions when Black Swans come along that defy all probabilities and shatter age old records. Rarely.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Van Halen, M&Ms, And The Next Market Downturn

September 3, 2017

Van Halen, M&Ms, And The Next Market Downturn

How watching the right indicators will avoid disaster

The planet-sized egos of rock & roll performers are legendary.

Few things symbolize this better than the outrageous requests they often make when on tour.

These requests are referred to as “riders”, and appear in the contract a tour venue receives in advance of the artist’s arrival. These contract riders specify the physical conditions that the singer/band requires to be in place before arriving to perform. Stage lighting settings, sound equipment, furnishings, etc — that kind of stuff.

And these rider requests can get pretty funky – often extremely so — when it comes to backstage perks the performers want.

For example: A wooden pond filled with koi carp (Eminem). A driver who will not speak or make eye contact (Katy Perry). 20 white kittens and 100 doves (Mariah Carey). Seven dwarves (Iggy Pop). 50,000 bees (Slayer). A sub-machine gun (Mötley Crüe). And, yes, even a great white shark (Hank III).

The practice of making these kind of outrageous demands stems from a rider Van Halen inserted into the contract for its 1982 world tour, which insisted on a bowl of M&Ms to be provided backstage, but with all of the brown M&Ms removed.

As this image below of the actual rider shows, the band was very explicit in its seriousness about this:

Once the media got whiff of this, it had a field day roasting the band’s narcissistic chutzpah. A new high-water mark of diva capriciousness had been established, which quickly became legend. A feat of prima donna pampering that subsequent performers have been trying to top ever since.

But as crazy as it sounds, Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” rider had nothing to do with caprice. There was a solid rationale behind it.

In fact, it was quite brilliant.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bill Blain: “I’ve Got October 12th As The Day The Big Equity Crash Occurs”

August 31, 2017

Bill Blain: “I’ve Got October 12th As The Day The Big Equity Crash Occurs”

Submitted by Bill Blain of Mint Partners

The big risk? The ECB taper… what follows?

“It will not always be summer; build barns.”

Today’s sermon is about complacency.

Yesterday, I read in a Fixed Income analyst comment something about the: “robust macro backdrop ahead of the ECB meeting on Sept 7th creating a solid base for risk assets and prompting a steady flow of borrowers to get funding programmes underway..” Sure enough, there is a feeding frenzy developing in the new issue bond market…

Meanwhile, my stock picking chartist Steve Previs warns the gauges he follows, like put/call ratios and VIX, reflect an “overly confident” market. He thinks a top is coming.

Personally, I’ve still got October 12th at 10.30 in the morning tagged as the moment the big equity crash occurs and I get out my buying boots ready for the opportunities that will follow. (Why Oct 12th? Why not..? The date has a nice ring about it as day of manic market mayhem – and the following day is a Friday the 13th… meaning it will panic folk even more!” Mwwwhahahaha..! )

n the fixed income markets I think we’re glossing over the likely pain to come courtesy of the ECB.

What happens post the next ECB meeting, (or more likely the ECB meeting after that, or the one after that, based on the ECB’s predilection for kicking the can down the road)? Forget inflation and growth nonsense.. at some stage the ECB has no choice but to ‘fess up how it’s actually been mutualising European debt, and cut its buying programme. We’re all talking about European normalisation, wondering when, but when it actually happens, please explain exactly how that “solid base for risk assets” works.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late

August 22, 2017

livelifehappy.com

Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late

Preparation only has value if it’s done in advance

He who hesitates is lost.
~proverb

Change, especially a collapse scenario, often happens quite fast. So fast that there’s little to no time to react in the short frenzy between “before” and “after”.

This is true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. Old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees can be decimated by a single wildfire. The bubonic plague “Black Death” pandemic of the Middle Ages killed one-third of the Earth’s human population within just four short years.

Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer — suddenly reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. The outbreak of World War I. The Civil Rights movement. The dissolution of the USSR. The Digital Age.

When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.

I’ve witnessed this time and time again since co-founding PeakProsperity.com. And in pretty much every instance, I notice that the vast majority of people — including even many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.

Fukushima

A good example of this was the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011. Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. So in the immediate aftermath of the plant’s failure, the world looked on in sympathy, not fear.

But on March 12th, that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. And then my phone rang.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Signs Of Distress

August 12, 2017

Signs Of Distress

The need to change is becoming more obvious than ever

The world is edging closer to the final moments after which everything will be forever changed. Grand delusions, perpetuated over decades, will finally hit the limits of reality and collapse in on themselves.

We’re over-budget and have eaten deeply into the principal balances of all of our main trust accounts. We are ecologically overdrawn, financially insolvent, monetarily out past the Twilight Zone, consuming fossil fuels (as in literally eating them), and adding 80,000,000 net souls to the planet’s surface — each year! — without regard to the consequences.

Someday there will be hell to pay financially, economically, and ecologically as there simply isn’t any way to maintain these overdrafts forever. Reality does not renegotiate. Its deal terms aren’t compromisable.

For those who have the neural plasticity to actually see what’s happening around us, the changes are already here, blatant and frightening. Younger folks, with their fresher eyes and fewer ties to the past, can see them a lot easier than their elders.

The prosperity enjoyed by the past few generations — especially the Baby Boomers — was stolen from future generations. All the while, they pretended as if their borrowing-heavy standards of living were the result of sheer genius and intelligence; like trust fund babies who mistake being born on third base for hitting a triple.

Young people have sussed this out; and are now pulling back from many of the principal occupations of their forebears — like marriage, babies and buying homes and cars. This perplexes older folks, who are beginning to find themselves increasingly at odds with the generations following after them.

Humans can be very very smart, but the flip-side of our ingenuity is our capacity for self-delusion. We’ve very consistently preferred to look past our faults. That can work for a while, but eventually an incomplete view will lead to a complete disaster.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Volatility in Housing: What Surges & Crashes the Most?

August 11, 2017

Volatility in Housing: What Surges & Crashes the Most?

It depends on the value of the home.

What happens to home prices during the current housing boom and the next housing bust depends to some degree on whether the home is relatively “affordable” — whatever that means at today’s prices — or more expensive.

This is an important data point in the consideration for lenders that have to worry about their collateral value and for residential property investors and for homeowners who might want to get a foretaste of what is next.

The CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index offers an index based on three tiers of prices — low tier, middle tier, and high tier. Like small-cap stocks versus large-cap stocks, the less expensive homes show much more price movements up anddown and are thus far more volatile during booms and busts than their more expensive counterparts.

The Tiered Home Price Index (TPI) comprises 16 metro areas: Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco (five-county Bay Area), Miami, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, and Tampa.

Prices in the low tier rose 10.8% year-over-year, according to the TPI, published in August. For mid-tier homes, the index rose 7.5%. And for expensive homes prices rose 4.8%.

That principle has been true for the past 17 years of the index, covering two housing booms and one housing bust so far. The chart below shows how prices of homes in the low tier (yellow line) rise much faster than higher priced homes, but during the bust, they also plunge much faster and bottom out a lot lower (chart via John Burns Real Estate Consulting):

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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