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Flows over fundamentals…

When you are a fish swimming in a pond with less and less water, you had best pay attention to the currents. The last decade we’ve seen central banks supply liquidity, providing an artificial bid underneath markets. Now water is being drained from the pond as the Fed, ECB, and Bank of Japan shrink their balance sheets and raise interest rates.

Despite this trend, U.S. equities will very likely escape 2018 without a crisis or volatility regime shift because of the onetime wave of corporate liquidity unleashed by tax reform. Expect a crisis to occur between 2019 and 2021 when a drought caused by dust storms of debt refinancing, quantitative tightening, and poor demographics causes liquidity to evaporate.

The first signs of stress from quantitative tightening are now emerging in credit, international equity, and currency markets. Financial and sovereign credits are weakening and global cross asset correlations are increasing. Meanwhile, China is executing a stealth devaluation of the Yuan which, since 2015, has been a reliable signal of turbulence in global markets.

Artemis predictive models have been consistently bearish through June and July, and as a result we have tactically increased tail exposure in S&P 500 index options and VIX. A higher than average exposure to tail risk has contributed to negative performance the last few months as volatility has remained in the low-teens.

Equity volatility is underperforming credit risk trend by some of the widest margins in history in both the U.S. and in Europe (see below).

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Understanding The Volatility Storm To Come, Part 1: Fragility In The Market’s Medium

September 23, 2018

Understanding The Volatility Storm To Come, Part 1: Fragility In The Market’s Medium

What Is Water In Markets? Volatility and the Fragility of the Medium

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”.

-David Foster Wallace, This is Water (2005)

“This is Water” is the title of a commencement speech delivered by David Foster Wallace that has become a masterpiece of meta-thinking. If you haven’t listened to it, put down this paper and do so now. It is worth 20 minutes of your life.

The Foster Wallace parable of two young fish ignorant of the medium that defines their reality is so important on many levels. Foster Wallace contends that we swim in a world defined by self-centered thoughts, that serve to make reality visible, but should never be mistaken as fundamental truth.

In capitalism the medium that defines reality is fiat money. To this point, does money exist? This seems silly to ask but it is very important philosophically. Yes, money exists in the sense that you can purchase goods and services with it. At the same time, money is only important because of a collective belief in it, and is worthless without that. This is true of any human construct: markets, words, brands, and nation-states… all abstract mediums that have meaning because we collectively believe they do, and hence they give form to reality, but are not real independent of our thoughts.

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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.

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