1987 – Olduvai.ca

Thirty one years ago today, on Oct. 19,1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22.6%, its largest one-day percentage-point drop ever.

You may have noticed that the financial media has started to highlight the point drops as opposed to the percentages. To say the Dow lost 500 points makes better news than saying it lost 2%. In percentage terms though this years recent plunges pale in comparison to what “could” happen as we have seen in history.

Here are five of the worst stock market crashes in U.S. history, based on daily percentage losses (source: ajc.com):

Oct. 19, 1987

Percentage change: -22.61 percent

About: Known as “Black Monday,” this devastating crash began in Hong Kong, spread to Europe and then hit the U.S. hard.

Oct. 28, 1929

Percentage change: -12.82 percent

About the crash: The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929 started on Oct. 24 and signaled the beginning of the 12-year Great Depression. Black Monday, the fourth and worst day of the crash, saw a drop of 12.82 percent.

Dec. 18, 1899

Percentage change: -11.99 percent

About the crash: During the Panic of 1896, the U.S. experienced an acute economic depression caused by a drop in silver reserves and deflation.

Oct. 29, 1929

Percentage change: -11.73

About the crash: Black Tuesday was the fifth day of the the Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that started on Oct. 24 and signaled the beginning of the 12-year Great Depression.

Nov. 6, 1929

Percentage change: -9.92

About the crash: Just a week after the height of the 1929 Stock Market Crash, investors saw another dip.

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

Stock Market Crash of 1987

October 19, 2018

The first contemporary global financial crisis unfolded in the autumn of 1987 on a day known infamously as “Black Monday.”¹ A chain reaction of market distress sent global stock exchanges plummeting in a matter of hours. In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped 22.6 percent in a single trading session, a loss that remains the largest one-day stock market decline in history.² At the time, it also marked the sharpest market downturn in the United States since the Great Depression.

The Black Monday events served to underscore the concept of “globalization,” which was still quite new at the time, by demonstrating the unprecedented extent to which financial markets worldwide had become intertwined and technologically interconnected. Black Monday led to a number of noteworthy reforms, including exchanges developing provisions to pause trading temporarily in the event of rapid market sell-offs. In addition, the Federal Reserve’s response set a precedent for the central bank’s use of “liquidity” to stem financial crises.³

Events Leading Up to the Crash

Stock markets raced upward during the first half of 1987. By late August, the DJIA had gained 44 percent in a matter of seven months, stoking concerns of an asset bubble.⁴ In mid-October, a storm cloud of news reports undermined investor confidence and led to additional volatility in markets. The federal government disclosed a larger-than-expected trade deficit and the dollar fell in value. The markets began to unravel, foreshadowing the record losses that would develop a week later. Beginning on October 14, a number of markets began incurring large daily losses.

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

US Stock Market: Conspicuous Similarities with 1929, 1987 and Japan in 1990

March 4, 2018

US Stock Market: Conspicuous Similarities with 1929, 1987 and Japan in 1990

Stretched to the Limit

There are good reasons to suspect that the bull market in US equities has been stretched to the limit. These include inter alia: high fundamental valuation levels, as e.g. illustrated by the Shiller P/E ratio (a.k.a. “CAPE”/ cyclically adjusted P/E); rising interest rates; and the maturity of the advance.The end of an era – a little review of the mother of modern crash patterns, the 1929 debacle. In hindsight it is both a bit scary and sad, in light of the important caesura it represented. In many ways the roaring 20s were the last hurrah of a world in its death throes, a world that never managed to make a comeback. The massive expansion of the State that had begun in the years just before WW1 resumed in full force as soon as the post-war party on Wall Street ended. The worried crowd that formed in the streets around the NYSE in the week of the crash may well have suspected that the starting gun to profound change had just been fired. [PT]

Near the end of a bull market cycle there is always the question of when a decline will begin, and above all, how large will it be. I believe it possible that the retreat in prices will begin soon and that it could possibly even start out with a crash. I will explain in the following what led me to draw this conclusion.

2015 – 2018: the S&P 500 Index Moves Up Along a Well-Defined Trend Line

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

Why the most-recent selloff was just the beginning

February 22, 2018

Why the most-recent selloff was just the beginning

On October 19, 1987, the Dow experienced its biggest one-day percentage loss in history – plunging 22.6%.

The day will forever be known as “Black Monday.” The selloff was so fast and so severe, nothing else even comes close.

The second worst percentage loss for the Dow was October 28, 1929 (also Black Monday) when the exchange fell 12.82%. It fell another 11.73% the next day (you guessed it… “Black Tuesday”). Then the Great Depression hit.

A lot of people blame portfolio insurance for the severity of the market drop in 1987.

At the time, portfolio insurance had become a super popular product for the largest institutional investors. Portfolio insurance would “hedge” their portfolios by selling short S&P 500 futures (which profit when the market falls) when stocks fall by a certain amount. The idea was the gains from selling the S&P futures would offset the losses from the falling prices of the underlying portfolio.

If stocks fell more, the big investors would sell more futures.

The problem with portfolio insurance is it was programmatic. And when the losses inevitably came, it created a feedback loop. Selling begot selling.

But what initially ignited that selling back in 1987?

Matt Maley is a former Salomon Brothers executive who was on the trading floor for Black Monday. He shared his thoughts with CNBC last year to mark the 30th anniversary of the event.

Maley reminded us of the popularity of another strategy in those days – merger arbitrage. This was the time of Gordon Gekko, when corporate raiders would borrow tons of money – typically via high-yield bonds – to buy other firms.

Merger arbitrage is simply buying shares of the takeover candidate and shorting shares of the acquiring firm. It’s a speculative strategy that tries to capture the spread between the time the deal is announced and when it (hopefully) closes.

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

Peter Schiff: We’re Ripe for a 1987-Style Crash (Video)

February 21, 2018

Peter Schiff: We’re Ripe for a 1987-Style Crash (Video)

Stock markets have settled down after an awful couple of weeks earlier this month. On Feb. 5, the Dow Jones suffered its largest-ever drop in terms of points. It was down 1,600 at one point and ultimately lost 1,175.21 points, a 4.6% drop that day. At one point during that week, the Dow was off 10% in correction territory. But everything is calm now and most of the mainstream is once again feeling bullish and optimistic.

Peter Schiff spoke at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2018 last month before the market tanked. But his message remains relevant in the aftermath of the plunge and the subsequent recovery because the dynamics in the market remain pretty much the same. Conditions are still ripe for a 1987-style market crash.

Investors have not been this optimistic…since 1987. They are even more optimistic than they were at the height of the technology bubble, the dot-com bubble, the new era. Of course, 1987 didn’t end well, right? We had a stock market crash, and there’s a lot about what’s happening today that reminds me about what was happening in ’87.”

Highlights from the Speech

“The economy has not improved under Trump. We don’t have a booming economy. I mean, Trump keeps telling us we have a booming economy, but nothing is booming.”

“When Donald Trump was a candidate for president, he said that the unemployment numbers were phony. They were fake. They were a fraud. They were a con. He said the real unemployment rate is 30%, 40%. Now, every time there is an unemployment number that comes out, he’s tweeting about how great it is we have this record low unemployment and we should all give him credit for it.”

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

Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

October 21, 2017

Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

Reflexivity in the Shadows of Black Monday 1987

The Ouroboros, a Greek word meaning ‘tail devourer’, is the ancient symbol of a snake consuming its own body in perfect symmetry. The imagery of the Ouroboros evokes the infinite nature of creation from destruction. The sign appears across cultures and is an important icon in the esoteric tradition of Alchemy. Egyptian mystics first derived the symbol from a real phenomenon in nature. In extreme heat a snake, unable to self-regulate its body temperature, will experience an out-of- control spike in its metabolism. In a state of mania, the snake is unable to differentiate its own tail from its prey, and will attack itself, self-cannibalizing until it perishes. In nature and markets, when randomness self-organizes into too perfect symmetry, order becomes the source of chaos (1).

The Ouroboros is a metaphor for the financial alchemy driving the modern Bear Market in Fear. Volatility across asset classes is at multi-generational lows. A dangerous feedback loop now exists between ultra-low interest rates, debt expansion, asset volatility, and financial engineering that allocates risk based on that volatility. In this self-reflexive loop volatility can reinforce itself both lower and higher. In a market where stocks and bonds are both overvalued, financial alchemy is the only way to feed our global hunger for yield, until it kills the very system it is nourishing.

The Global Short Volatility trade now represents an estimated $2+ trillion in financial engineering strategies that simultaneously exert influence over, and are influenced by, stock market volatility(2). We broadly define the short volatility trade as any financial strategy that relies on the assumption of market stability to generate returns, while using volatility itself as an input for risk taking. Many popular institutional investment strategies, even if they are not explicitly shorting derivatives, generate excess returns from the same implicit risk factors as a portfolio of short optionality, and contain hidden fragility.

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

Kyle Bass: “Today’s Market Resembles The 1987 Debacle On Steroids”

October 21, 2017

Kyle Bass: “Today’s Market Resembles The 1987 Debacle On Steroids”

The US stock market celebrated the 30th anniversary of Black Monday with the 2017 version of a rocky trading day: Stocks sold off early, with S&P 500 futures recording their steepest post-midnight drop of the year. But the dip was reflexively and aggressively bought, and stocks even poked back into the green seconds before the close as algos mistook a repetitive Politico headline about Jay Powell’s chances of becoming the next Fed chair for news – leaving us with yet another record close.

Of course, the historical juxtaposition of the 1987 crash with today’s unnaturally placid markets practically forced even the most bullish of traders to question how much longer the present market paradigm – where markets listlessly drift through a seemingly interminable series of record highs while trading volume and volatility remain suppressed – can possibly last.

With that question in mind, Real Vision released a video early today containing interviews with some of the biggest names in the hedge fund universe. Though the interview was shot a few weeks ago, remarks from Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass resonated with market’s mood.

Bass discussed what he sees as the many short- and long-term risks to the US equity market, including the rise of algorithmic trading and passive investment, which have enabled investors to take risks without understanding what they’re doing, leaving the market vulnerable to an “air pocket.”

And with so many traders short vol, Bass said investors will know the correction has begun when a 4% or 5% drop in equities snowballs into a 10% to 15% decline at the drop of a hat.

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

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

October 21, 2017

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

The week left me with an uneasy feeling. There were a number of articles noting the 30-year anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. I spent “Black Monday” staring at a Telerate monitor as a treasury analyst at Toyota’s US headquarters in Southern California. If I wasn’t completely in love with the markets and macro analysis by that morning, there was no doubt about it by bedtime. Enthralling.

As writers noted this week, there were post-’87 crash economic depression worries. In hindsight, those fears were misplaced. Excesses had not progressed over years to the point of causing deep financial and economic structural maladjustment. Looking back today, 1987 was much more the beginning of a secular financial boom rather than the end. The crash offered a signal – a warning that went unheeded. Disregarding warnings has been in a stable trend now for three decades.

Alan Greenspan’s assurances of ample liquidity – and the Fed and global central bankers’ crisis-prevention efforts for some time following the crash – ensured fledgling financial excesses bounced right back and various Bubbles hardly missed a beat. Importantly, financial innovation and speculation accelerated momentously. Wall Street had been emboldened – and would be repeatedly.

The crash also marked the genesis of government intervention in the markets that would evolve into the previously unimaginable: negative short-term rates, manipulated bond yields, central bank support throughout the securities markets, Trillions upon Trillions of central bank monetization and the perception of open-ended securities market liquidity backstops around the globe. Greenspan was the forefather of the powerful trifecta: Team Bernanke, Kuroda and Draghi. Ask the bond market back in 1987 to contemplate massive government deficit spending concurrent with near zero global sovereign yields – the response would have been “inconceivable.”

…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…

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…

Personal Recollections of the Crash of 1987

October 14, 2017

Personal Recollections of the Crash of 1987

The following guest post is a first-hand account of the events surrounding the Crash of 1987 by JLFMI President, John S. Lyons.

Personal Recollections of the Crash of 1987 on its 30th Anniversary

“There was no ‘smart money’ that day.”

What do the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the beginning of Desert Storm and 9/11 have in common? Provided you are old enough to recall JFK’s assassination, the answer probably is that you remember exactly where you were on the day of those events. If not that old, there is most likely another event that is so memorable that you recall where you were and what you were doing at that moment.

Being in the securities business for many, many years, the Crash of ’87 on October 19th of that year is right up there with JFK’s assassination and 9/11 as one of the mind-numbing catastrophes I’ve witnessed. In retrospect only, it was fortunate that I had entered the brokerage business in 1969 and immediately weathered a 36% market decline into 1970. On the heels of that decline, I then endured one of the worst bear markets in modern history in 1973-74 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 50% of its value. As a result, I was weaned on risk in my new profession. And I learned early on that if a career that centered around the stock market were to be endurable, I had to find a way to practice risk management.

As a result, I developed a risk model during the 1970’s as a means of guarding against such disastrous losses in the future. Fortunately, the model has been of very valuable assistance, protecting clients from every major decline since its inception in 1978.

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

One Chart Says It All

May 5, 2016

One Chart Says It All

People sense the ‘recovery” is bogus, and their rational response is to save more money rather than squander it.

Sometimes one chart captures the fundamental reality of the economy: for example, this chart of money velocity and the civilian-population ratio. (thank you, Joseph Y. for posting it on my Facebook feed.)

When the blue line is up, more of the population has a job. (the blue line is the Employment-Population ratio.)

The red line is money velocity, the rate at which money changes hands. (Money buried in the coffee can in the back yard has a money velocity of zero.)

As Joseph noted, the correlation between the percentage of people working and money velocity was strong until 2010. In the post-2009 recession “recovery,” the percentage of the populace with jobs rose modestly, but money velocity absolutely cratered to unprecedented lows.

(The one other disconnect was triggered by the 1987 stock market crash, which caused money velocity to dip even as more people entered the workforce. This absence of correlation was relatively brief.)

The correlation between more people working and money velocity is commonsensical. More people working = more household income = more spending = higher money velocity.

But something changed in 2010. Did the quality and compensation of work change? Joseph observed: People started going back to work after the official recession ended in Q4 2009 but they were working for lower pay. With lower pay comes less disposable income, hence the cliff-like drop off in velocity.

Another potential factor is higher inflation. Some recent estimates (Where’s The Beef? ‘Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics’) suggest the gap between official inflation and actual inflation in rent, food, energy and medical care in the past 20 years has subtracted 20% from paychecks.

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

All is Not Well

March 28, 2016

All is Not Well

The 1987 stock market crash raised concerns for the dangers associated with mounting U.S. “twin deficits.” Fiscal and trade deficits were reflective of poor economic management. Credit excesses – certainly including excessive government borrowings – were stimulating demand that was reflected in expanding U.S. trade and Current Account Deficits. Concerns dissipated with the revival of the bull market. These days we’re confronting the consequences of 30-plus years of mismanagement.

Japan was the early major recipient of U.S. Bubble excess (throughout the eighties). The world today would be a much different place if the policy onus had fallen upon the Fed and congress to rein in U.S. borrowing excesses. Instead, enormous pressure was placed on Japan (and, later, others) to ameliorate trade surpluses with the U.S. by stimulating domestic demand. Such stimulus measures were instrumental in (repeatedly) stoking already powerful Bubbles to precarious extremes.

Fiscal and Current Account Deficits exploded in the early-nineties post-Bubble period. And as the nineties reflation gathered momentum, the boom in Wall Street and GSE finance pushed the Current Account to previously unimaginable extremes. Then, as the decade progressed, the associated global boom in dollar-based finance proved ever more destabilizing. Always ignoring root causes, each new crisis provided an excuse to further stimulate/inflate.

The fundamentally unsound dollar proved pivotal for European monetary integration, as the strong euro currency coupled with global liquidity abundance ensured runaway Bubble excesses throughout Europe’s periphery. If the U.S. could run perpetual Current Account Deficits, why not Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal? Having ignored problematic financial and economic imbalances for years, when European troubles erupted everyone turned immediately to pressure the big surplus economy (Germany) to further stimulate their Bubble economy.

Economists traditionally viewed persistent Current Account Deficits as problematic. But as New Paradigm and New Era thinking took hold throughout the nineties, all types of justification and rationalization turned conventional analysis on its head.

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

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