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It’s better to turn cautious too soon…

July 31, 2017

It’s better to turn cautious too soon…

En route to Chile

One of the greatest investors in the world is getting worried…

Howard Marks is the billionaire founder of Oaktree Capital, one of the largest and most successful investment firms in the world.

A few times each year Marks write up his thoughts about financial markets– he calls them ‘investment memos’.

And he just released his latest one with a very clear message: it’s time to be cautious.

From Marks’ memo…

I think it’s better to turn cautious too soon (and thus perhaps underperform for a while) rather than too late, after the downslide has begun, making it hard to trim risk, achieve exits and cut losses.

Marks admits this bull market could continue. But he’s happy taking chips off the table in today’s particularly dangerous market.

Asset prices are high across the board – the S&P 500 is trading at 25 times trailing 12-month earnings compared to a long-term median of 15 – and prospective returns are low.

Meanwhile, we’re also seeing record-low complacency amongst investors.

Just this morning the Wall Street Journal published data from Yardeni Research showing that percentage of ‘bearish’ investors who believe that the market will fall is near its lowest level since 1987.

The Volatility Index (VIX), a statistic which measures ‘fear’ in the market place, is at its ALL-TIME lowest point in its entire 27-year existence – hitting 8.84 last week, compared to above 80 in 2008.

The VIX hit 8.89 on December 27, 1993. From Marks:

The index was last this low when Bill Clinton took office in 1993, at a time when there was peace in the world, faster economic growth and a much smaller deficit. Should people really be as complacent now as they were then?

Compare that today, where market pitfalls abound…

– North Korea is threatening to nuke the US
– Donald Trump is firing his entire cabinet

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

Derivatives Trading Legend: “As Little As A 4% Decline In One Day Could Start A Critical Crash”

July 11, 2017

Derivatives Trading Legend: “As Little As A 4% Decline In One Day Could Start A Critical Crash”

After building out Merrill’s mortgage trading floor basically from scratch, then moving to the buyside at Pimco, several weeks ago Harley Bassman, more familiar to many traders as the “Convexity Maven” – a legend in the realm of derivatives (he helped design the MOVE Index, better known as the VIX for government bonds) – decided to retire (roughly one year after his shocking suggestion that the Fed should devalue the dollar by buying gold).

But that did not mean he would stop writing, and just a few days after exiting the front door at 650 Newport Center Drive in Newport Beach for the last time, Bassman wrote his first full article as a “free man”, in which the topic was, not surprisingly, derivatives and specifically the recent collapse in vol – and convexity – what prompted it, but most importantly and what everyone wants to know: what threshold would be sufficient to finally launch the next “critical mass” market move (i.e. crash) and, just as importantly, what could catalyze it.

He answer all of the above in his latest fascinating note.

Bassman’s full thoughts below:

“Rambling near the Edge”

Last month I attended the EQD (Equity Derivatives) Conference in Las Vegas. Diverse speakers opined upon a variety of topics, but a common theme was noting the near record low of both Implied and Realized Volatility in the financial markets. But despite the VIX kissing its nadir, realized volatility has plumbed even lower depths, and thus it was reported that strategies that engaged in selling Equity Volatility had both superior returns as well as the loftiest Information (Sharpe) Ratios among the dozens of strategies offered.

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

“It’ll Be An Avalanche”: Hedge Fund CIO Sets The Day When The Next Crash Begins

June 25, 2017

“It’ll Be An Avalanche”: Hedge Fund CIO Sets The Day When The Next Crash Begins

While most asset managers have been growing increasingly skeptical and gloomy in recent weeks (despite a few ideological contrarian holdouts), joining the rising chorus of bank analysts including those of Citi, JPM, BofA and Goldman all urging clients to “go to cash”, none have dared to commit the cardinal sin of actually predicting when the next crash will take place.

On Sunday a prominent hedge fund manager, One River Asset Management’s CIO Eric Peters broke with that tradition and dared to “pin a tail on the donkey” of when the next market crash – one which he agrees with us will be driven by a collapse in the global credit impulse – will take place. His prediction: Valentine’s Day 2018.

Here is what Peters believes will happen over the next 8 months, a period which will begin with an increasingly tighter Fed and conclude with a market avalanche:

“The Fed hikes rates to lean against inflation,” said the CIO. “And they’ll reduce the balance sheet to dampen growing financial instability,” he continued. “They’ll signal less about rates and focus on balance sheet reduction in Sep.”

Inflation is softening as the gap between the real economy and financial asset prices is widening. “If they break the economy with rate hikes, everyone will blame the Fed.” They can’t afford that political risk.

“But no one understands the balance sheet, so if something breaks because they reduce it, they’ll get a free pass.”

“The Fed has convinced itself that forward guidance was far more powerful than QE,” continued the same CIO.

“This allows them to argue that reversing QE without reversing forward guidance should be uneventful.” Like watching paint dry. “Balance sheet reduction will start slowly. And proceed for a few months without a noticeable impact,” he said. “The Fed will feel validated.” Like they’ve been right all along.

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

Visualizing What Happens To Trading During A Market Crash?

June 23, 2017

Visualizing What Happens To Trading During A Market Crash?

It’s hard to predict when a stock market crash will occur, so the best defense is to be prepared.

Today’s infographic comes to us from StocksToTrade.com, and it explains what happens when a large enough drop in the market triggers a “circuit breaker”, or a temporary halt in trading.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

As Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, these temporary halts in trading, or “circuit breakers”, are measures approved by the SEC to calm down markets in the event of extreme volatility. The rules apply to NYSE, Nasdaq, and OTC markets, and were put in place following the events of Black Monday in 1987.

CIRCUIT BREAKER RULES

Previously, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was the bellwether for such market interventions.

However, the most recent rules apply to the whole market when a precipitous drop in the S&P 500 occurs:

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

Mark Yusko: I’m Telling You Right Now, the US Is Going to Have a Massive Crash

May 26, 2017

Mark Yusko: I’m Telling You Right Now, the US Is Going to Have a Massive Crash

“I’m telling you right now, the US is going to have a crash and it will be massive,” asserted Mark Yusko at Mauldin Economics’ Strategic Investment Conference.

In his keynote speech, Mark Yusko, CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, outlined where he sees the biggest opportunities and risks for investors are today.

Demographics Are Destiny

Mark began with the big story of the SIC 2017—demographics.

He believes that efforts to generate growth through fiscal stimulus and tax cuts will prove futile because the working-age population in the US is declining. As such, consumption—which makes up 70% of the US—will continue to fall.

Mark thinks instead of taking off, the US economy is on the cusp of a recession.

Headed for Recession

Mark points to key indicators such as credit growth and tax revenues, which are declining, as proof a recession is around the corner.

Source: St. Louis Fed

“Every time a President leaves the White House after two terms, there is a recession within the first year of the new administration. I believe this time will be no different.”

So, what does this mean for investors?

Sell US Stocks

Since 2012, the earnings of S&P 500 companies have gone nowhere, yet the market is up 70%. This rise has all been multiple expansions. As such, US equities are one of the most expensive class of assets in the world today.

With the S&P 500 trading at record highs, top investment management firm GMO projects returns will be negative over the next seven years.

Source: GMO

With US markets fully priced, Mark says his firm is deploying their capital elsewhere.

European Banks Are a Buy

Despite all the hype around US financials due to “Trumponomics,” Mark points out that European financials have vastly outperformed their US counterparts since the beginning of the year.

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

David Stockman Sounds The Alarm – Fiscal Bloodbath and Market Crash to Occur “Between August and November”

May 22, 2017

David Stockman Sounds The Alarm – Fiscal Bloodbath and Market Crash to Occur “Between August and November”

As time goes on, it’s becoming abundantly clear that Trump isn’t going to be able to prevent a major financial crisis in this country. Depending on your beliefs, that’s either because he’s inept in some way, or because he’s being hamstrung by a political system that’s determined to keep our nation on the same unsustainable path. Whatever the case may be, it seems that there is no way that we can change course at this point. We’re headed for a financial crisis, and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

That’s also the opinion of David Stockman, a former Congressman and director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan. In this interview with USA Watchdog, he reveals why the market rally that broke out after the last election, “was the greatest sucker’s rally we have ever seen.” He also explains why the economy could go off the rails this year, after our government endures a major budgetary crisis.

Earlier this month our government avoided a shutdown, because Trump decided to sign Congress’s $1.2 trillion spending bill. In effect, he postponed a serious fight with Congress for later this year.

On May 2nd he tweeted “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” So clearly, next time he’s going to be a lot less compromising in his efforts to change the budget. That’s going to spawn a fight over the budget between Trump and both political parities, and according to Stockman, that’s when the next wave of our financial collapse is going to arrive.

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

‘The Everything Bubble’: Why The Coming Collapse Will Be Even Worse Than The Last

May 17, 2017

‘The Everything Bubble’: Why The Coming Collapse Will Be Even Worse Than The Last

The next crash is coming, and the decision by central banks to paper over their economy’s troubles with a massive injection of debt likely means that the next crash is already overdue.

Soon, investors will be forced to reconcile a massive expansion of debt and falling productivity and growth with a host of potentially disruptive crises: The advent of government-sponsored cyberwarfare, followed by the collapse of the global dollar-based monetary system. Whereas the last crisis trigger massive devaluations in the real estate and stock markets, the next crash will be the result of a triple bubble in stocks, real estate and bonds as investors bail out of traditional assets in favor of the safety of gold, silver and – perhaps – cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

Gold analyst Mike Maloney believes that traditional assets will plunge, and gold, silver and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin will outperform, as investors seek protection from the coming collapse of the global dollar system. Maloney explains his thinking in a new YouTube video “The Everything Bubble.”

In the U.S., housing prices have experienced a halting recovery since the subprime crisis. But in other markets, like New Zealand, Canada, a frenzy of buying by wealthy Chinese hoping to stash their money abroad kept prices afloat, driving the ratio of home prices to incomes to all time highs. In Canada, the affordability index – the ratio of housing prices to incomes – has risen to an all-time high of 1.4.

In the stock market, a few vulnerabilities have emerged; the ratio of debt borrowed against investors’ brokerage account balances has reached all-time highs, which tells you that recent gains are vulnerable to a short-squeeze – which is when brokerages close clients out of their positions.

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

Why This Market Needs To Crash

March 25, 2017

bofotolux/Shutterstock

Why This Market Needs To Crash

And likely will

Like an old vinyl record with a well-worn groove, the needle skipping merrily back to the same track over and over again, we repeat: Today’s markets are dangerously overpriced.

Being market fundamentalists who don’t believe it’s possible to simply print prosperity out of thin air, we’ve been deeply skeptical of the financial markets ever since the central banks began their highly interventionist policies. Since 2009, they have unleashed over $12 Trillion in new money into the world, concentrating wealth into the hands of an elite few, while blowing asset price bubbles everywhere in the process (see our recent report The Mother Of All Financial Bubbles).

Our consistent view is that price bubbles always burst. Which is why we predict the world’s financial markets will implode spectacularly from today’s heights — destroying jobs, dreams, hopes, economies and political careers alike.

When this happens, it will frighten the central bankers enough (or merely embarrass them enough, being the egotists that they are) that they will respond with even more aggressive money printing — and that will then cause the entire money system to blow up. Ka-Poom! First inwards in a compressed ball of deflation, then exploding outwards in a final hyperinflationary fireball (see our recent report When This All Blows Up…).

It really cannot end any other way. Money is not wealth; it is merely a claim on wealth. Debt is a claim on future money. The only way to have faith in our current monetary policies is if one believes that we can always grow our debts at roughly twice the rate of GDP — forever. That is, compound the claims at twice the rate of income year after year from here on out.

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

A Murderous Complacency

February 4, 2017

A Murderous Complacency

Dark omens are circling everywhere in today’s markets

murder: a flock of crows

~ Miriam-Webster dictionary

Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.

~ “Nature”, PBS.org

Running PeakProsperity.com requires me to read and process a lot of data on a daily basis. As it’s hard to digest it all in real-time, I keep a running list of charts, tables and articles that catch my attention, to return to when I have the time to give them my full focus.

Lately, that list has been getting quite long. And it’s largely full of indicators that concern me; signals that the long era of “extend and pretend” in today’s markets may finally be at its terminus.

Like crows circling overhead, every day brings with it new worrisome statistics that portend an ill change ahead. Indeed, these omens are increasing so quickly now that it’s hard not to feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s suspense classic The Birds:

So what are the data that make me think these crows will soon be feasting on the carcass of the great bull market that has powered stock, bonds, real estate and most other asset classes to record highs since 2009?

Rogue’s Gallery

Complacent Investors

Investors have enjoyed remarkably gentle treatment by the stock markets over the past half-decade. Retracements have occurred much less frequently than historical norms, and have been shallow and short-lived when they happened.

Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat and often referred to as “Wall Street’s biggest bull” notes that 2016 was the mildest year on record for the S&P 500, with only 7 days in which the index traded at less than 3% of its 52-week high.

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

Hell To Pay

September 24, 2016

SkillUp/Shutterstock

Hell To Pay

The final condition for a market crash is falling into place

Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to run out of new things to say about the economy. Nothing interesting has happened in a long time.

Our liquidity-drunk “markets” remain over-priced due to the chronic intervention of the global central banking cartel, which has demonstrated over and over again that it won’t tolerate even the slightest drop in asset prices.

Those familiar with my writing know I put the word “markets” in quotes because we no longer have a financial system where legitimate price discovery is a regular — or even recognizable — feature.

It’s destined to fail. What more can be said about such a flawed system?

Well, a lot as it turns out.

And failure to pay attention at this stage of economic and ecological history will prove to be exceptionally painful.

The Beginning of the End

It’s been a long 7 years for those of us who believe fundamentals matter. For quite some time they have not.

So we reality-based fundamentalists have largely been reduced to pointing at the parade of policy failures and ham-fisted market manipulations and saying, essentially, That’s just dumb.

But ‘dumb’ mistakes have become ‘stupid’, and ‘stupid’ became ‘idiotic’, and now ‘idiotic’ mistakes are piling up, accumulating into a mountain of stored potential energy that will someday topple destructively across the global markets. We’ve all known, deep down, that money printing is not the same as capital formation, and that prosperity never truly results from redistributing wealth from one group to another. And yet, far too many have been willing to play along and place their trust in the central banks.

Well, we’ve finally reached the beginning of the end.

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

A Desperate China Begged Fed For “Plunge Protection Playbook” As Its Market Crashed

March 21, 2016

A Desperate China Begged Fed For “Plunge Protection Playbook” As Its Market Crashed

Last June, China’s stock market miracle ended in tears.

The SHCOMP’s inexorable, parabolic ascent was to a large degree facilitated by an explosion of margin debt, the likes of which could not be found in any other major market across the globe. For instance, by the end of June, the outstanding balance of margin transactions as a percentage of the SHCOMP’s free float market cap was nearly 14% compared to just 5.5% for the S&P and less than 1% for the TOPIX.

A dramatic unwind in the half dozen backdoor margin lending channels that had funneled an additional CNY1.5 trillion into equities brought the party to a thunderous end and by late July, the market was off by more than 30% from its peak.

Chinese officials had already begun to panic by mid-month and then, on the 27th, the bottom fell out.

A harrowing bout of late day selling led the SHCOMP to post its worst one-day drop since February of 2007 and its second worst single session decline in history as the market collapsed by 8.5%.

More than two-thirds of stocks in the index traded limit down that day.

At that point, China was out of ideas. It had been nearly three weeks since Beijing announced it would inject capital into China Securities Finance Corp., effectively giving the PBoC a mandate to not only underwrite brokers’ margin lending businesses but in fact to buy A-shares directly, and nothing seemed to be working to arrest the slide.

Indeed, starting on June 27 (by which time the Shenzhen had fallen by more than 20% from its peak) the PBoC unleashed an eye watering array of measures that encompassed everything from an RRR cut to the easing of regulations to state mandated investments by pension funds to verbal interventions in the form of threats against “malicious” shorts. Nothing was working.

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

This Chart Shows the First Big Crash Is Likely Just Ahead

March 15, 2016

This Chart Shows the First Big Crash Is Likely Just Ahead

The story on Wall Street and CNBC continues to be that we’re in a correction and this is a buying opportunity. Even Warren Buffett joins the chorus of stock market cheerleaders for the skeptical public. Well, I agree with the skeptical public, not the experts here!

The bull market from early 2009 into May 2015 looks just like every bubble in history, and I’m getting one sign after the next that we did indeed peak last May. The dominant pattern in the stock market is the “rounded top” pattern:

S&P 500 rounded top

After trading in a steep, bubble-like channel from late 2011 into late 2014, with only 10% maximum volatility top to bottom, the market finally lost its momentum… just as the Fed finished tapering its QE. That’s because the Fed was the primary driver in this stock bubble in the first place!

But the first sign that the bubble had indeed peaked was the break of that upward channel last August. Surprise, surprise! Without the Fed’s stimulus, stocks started to sputter out!

With that sign we can point to what now looks like a series of major tops, in one major index after the next, since late 2014:

Dow Transports, November 2014.
Dow Utilities, January 2015.
The DAX in Germany and the FTSE in the UK: April, 2015.
The Dow and S&P 500: May 2015.
The Shanghai Composite: June 2015.
The Nasdaq, Biotech and the Russell 2000: July 2015.
And finally, the Nikkei in Japan: August 2015.

The Shanghai Index crashed 45% in 2.5 months, similar to the Dow in late 1929 on its first 2.5-month wave down. That one was so obvious that when I said it was about to burst, it peaked that day and rolled over the next!

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

Has The Market Crash Only Just Begun?

February 19, 2016

Has The Market Crash Only Just Begun?

Having successfully called the market’s retreat in the fall of 2015, Universa’s Mark Spitznagel is not taking a victory lap as he warns Bloomberg TV that “the crash has only just begun.”

Investors are facing the most binary “let’s make a deal” market in history in Spitznagel’s view: choose Door #1 to bet on Keynesianism, central planners, and monetary interventionism; or Door #2 to bet on free markets and natural price discovery.

“There is massive cognitive dissonance here,” Spitznagel explains as history teaches us that door #2 is the right choice… but it’s not possible to do that today as investors have been coerced to choose door #1, but when door #1 is slammed open “we will see that dreaded black swan monster.”

That is what is going on right now:

“Investors want to go with The Fed when it’s working – like David Zervos… the problem is, when do you know that it is not working?”

“At some point this stops working…”

“the market is going through a resolution process, transitioning from the cognitive dissonance of Door #1 to the harsh reality of Door #2… if everyone were to change doors at the same time, that is a market crash… it can’t be done in a non-messy way.”

Must watch reality check behind the smoke and mirrors we call markets… (we note Mark’s excellent analogy starting at around 3:10)

A Contagious Crisis Of Confidence In Corporate Credit

February 14, 2016

A Contagious Crisis Of Confidence In Corporate Credit

Credit is not innately good or bad. Simplistically, productive Credit is constructive, while non-productive Credit is inevitably problematic. This crucial distinction tends to be masked throughout the boom period. Worse yet, a prolonged boom in “productive” Credit – surely fueled by some type of underlying monetary disorder – can prove particularly hazardous (to finance and the real economy).

Fundamentally, Credit is unstable. It is self-reinforcing and prone to excess. Credit Bubbles foment destabilizing price distortions, economic maladjustment, wealth redistribution and financial and economic vulnerability. Only through “activist” government intervention and manipulation will protracted Bubbles reach the point of precarious systemic fragility. Government/central bank monetary issuance coupled with market manipulations and liquidity backstops negates the self-adjusting processes that would typically work to restrain Credit and other financial excess (and shorten the Credit cycle).

A multi-decade experiment in unfettered “money” and Credit has encompassed the world. Unique in history, the global financial “system” has operated with essentially no limitations to either the quantity or quality of Credit instruments issued. Over decades this has nurtured unprecedented Credit excess and attendant economic imbalances on a global scale. This historic experiment climaxed with a seven-year period of massive ($12 TN) global central bank “money” creation and market liquidity injections. It is central to my thesis that this experiment has failed and the unwind has commenced.

The U.S. repudiation of the gold standard in 1971 was a critical development. The seventies oil shocks, “stagflation” and the Latin American debt debacle were instrumental. Yet I view the Greenspan Fed’s reaction to the 1987 stock market crash as the defining genesis of today’s fateful global Credit Bubble.

The Fed’s explicit assurances of marketplace liquidity came at a critical juncture for the evolution to market-based finance.

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

This Is What Central Bankers Think Of Retail Investors

February 3, 2016

This Is What Central Bankers Think Of Retail Investors

We previously covered the recently burst mega-Ponzi scheme fraud, Ezubao, the biggest in Chinese history which conned more than 900,000 investors out of $7.6 billion in less than two years under the guise of being a P2P lending platform, in this is what happens when “Chinese Investors Find Out They Got Fleeced By A $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme” and in “We Need To Rise Up”: Bilked Chinese Investors Call For Nationwide Uprising After Massive Ponzi Uncovered.”

Of course this being China, even the Ponzi schemes are next level: as we noted before, police had to use two excavators and dug for 20 hours to unearth 80 bags of evidence that Ezubo executives had buried six meters underground on the outskirts of Hefei, a city in the eastern province of Anhui.

Then overnight, Reuters added some more juicy details to this epic fraud: executives at Ezubao’s parent company, Yucheng Group, now say it was “a complete Ponzi scheme”, which used investor funds to support a lavish lifestyle, the official Xinhua News Agency reported this week.

Among gifts that Yucheng Chairman Ding Ning gave his president, Zhang Min, were a $20 million Singapore villa, a $1.8 million pink diamond ring, luxury limousines and watches and more than $83 million in cash, Xinhua stated.

Amazing, but the real question is just how many other Ezubao are lurking. The short answer: many.

China’s P2P and the online finance industry also serve as a critical channel for the emerging small business and consumer market, which is often ignored by banks and mainstream financial institutions. iResearch predicts China’s unsecured consumer finance market alone will triple in size by 2019, reaching outstanding loans of over $1.7 trillion.

By November, there were over 3,600 P2P platforms as the industry raised more than 400 billion yuan, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC). More than 1,000 of those were problematic, it said.

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

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