Behavioral Macro

Human nature anchors on the high tick of mark-to-market gains. It’s virtually impossible not to. And this makes it excruciatingly hard to stay fully positioned during a melt up. Every intra-day dip, every tape bomb, every ominous indicator du jour begs us to lock in paper gains before they slip away.

Even if you are fully cognizant of this problem you can’t make this feeling disappear. But there are some modest tricks that can help you, at the margin, manage it:[signinlocker id=675]

1. Remind yourself every day that markets tend to go up over time, and that the greater sin in money management is overthinking your way to the sidelines and not being able to get back in, not getting caught in a vicious draw down.

2. Throw a virgin into the volcano. Take a smaller, less strategic position (we all have them in bull markets) and sacrifice it. It won’t be material to your performance, and will go a disproportionately long way towards stretching that itch.

3. Sell half of a strategic position, but commit to stopping yourself back in if it doesn’t come in and starts to get away from you. (See the recent post about $GM and $F.)  If you are tactically selling part of a strategic position, having a plan for getting back in that doesn’t require you nailing the call is as important as having stops.

4. If one of your large, strategic positions has had a particularly feverish run, sell short-tenor upside OTM calls against half of your position. Either current month or next month–any further out than that and you’re giving away too much upside in a name you like strategically. I am not a huge fan of selling OTM calls, but it is a less damaging way of, again, scratching that itch.

5. Plan for the draw down. Make a list of areas that you think would sell off first and hardest and track them for signs that their price action is weakening and/or their prevailing correlation matrix is changing. This usually comprises the areas that hot money has most recently flowed into as a result of the narrative–in today’s case ‘global reflation’. This list should always evolve with the narrative. Being prepared for the inevitable drawn down doesn’t guarantee you will be able to sidestep it, but it increases your odds and makes staying fully invested easier.[/signinlocker]

For some people all of this is just too hard. It certainly is not easy for me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. If you find yourself chronically under-invested because of a macro hair trigger, maybe passive investing or systems-based trend following is a better approach. Discretionary trading–especially in macro–is not for everyone. It’s better to go with what works best for your forma mentis. There is certainly no shame in that.

[signinlocker id=675]For the past few weeks interest in the big auto companies ($F, $GM) has picked up. The narrative is simple and, I believe, will persist.

1.  Global growth is good.

2. We are past the ‘peak auto’ obsession.

3. Natural FOMO favorites at this juncture. At 6-7 PEs and high dividend yields, it is one of the only sectors to offer both beta and some sense of value protection. For skeptics who have been light beta or ppl who have to buy because of inflows, this the downside protection provides enormous psychological comfort.

4. Free option on getting lucky with innovation. GM and F have shown signs of life on the innovation front. We don’t know how successful they will be, but we do know they are not priced for it. And some 2nd mouse is likely to get TSLA’s cheese.

Here are the charts:

Ford is breaking out from a low base and looks poised to run. GM has already had a primary breakout and appears to be consolidating in preparation for a leg higher.

This is how you can play them if you are not already involved:

Because short term both names–especially F–are a bit stretched, ideally you’d want to see a low volume pullback into the areas indicated by the red circles. The way a pullback happens in terms of both volume and pattern matter. You want the pattern to look like it’s quietly wedging back. But given the longer term patterns, the odds of a pullback into the red circles being a good one are pretty high. If they drift back into the red circles, you could buy a full position with stops on a close somewhere below the bottom of the consolidation structure in GM, and somewhere not too far below the breakout in F.

(NB: The distance of the stops from the entry point is important in considering the absolute size of the position.)

If, however, GM doesn’t pullback and starts to break out, you can still buy it but no more than a half position, and the stop would have to be higher, somewhere not too far below the breakout point from the consolidation pattern (eg ~43.5).

For Ford it would be a little bit harder to buy a continuation with no pullback because the natural stop is further away than is the case with GM and it doesn’t have a secondary consolidation pattern to emerge from. But in theory it could still be bought if it continues, just in much smaller size.[/signinlocker]

Good luck and happy driving.

[signinlocker id=675]On Friday I put out two bare-bones polls asking, yes or no, if there is a bubble in stocks and bonds. The results were more balanced (I expected more Noes in both) and more similar to each other (almost identical) than I thought would be the case.

POLL #2: Are stocks in a bubble?

— Dow (@mark_dow) January 5, 2018

POLL: Are bonds in a bubble?

— Dow (@mark_dow) January 5, 2018

[/signinlocker]

[signinlocker id=675]Up until recently, when yields when higher the dollar got bid. But this has now demonstrably changed: the broad dollar has been getting weaker in the face of rising USD rates.

My take is that the market is now confidently saying the Fed is going to find itself behind the curve, either by design or by accident. This is why this rally has much more of a reflationary feel to it when you look across sectors.

If you want to track the reflation trade, I think you can boil it down to these two charts:

For the past 2-3 weeks US 5 year nominal yields climbed higher, while 5 year real yields fell (BEs of course, rose). This is a potentially important change in correlation.

Three investment inferences

1.  The dollar is responding to the real rate and not the nominal rate until further notice.

2.   The spread in real-to-nominal and the general price action are saying reflation trade.

3.   At some point the reflation trade will overshoot, and the correlation of these two yields will likely be a good ‘tell’ when it does.[/signinlocker]

I hope this is the shortest 2018 post you will read. In my battle against overthinking, I’ve tried to boil this down to bare bones. Feel free to follow up with questions.

Here are the three thoughts to which I attach the most importance for 2018. Things never turn out ex post as neatly as you lay them out ex ante, but this is my base case/point of departure for the year:

We are probably underestimating the positive effect of tax cuts on earnings. I think we have two biases holding us back. One, many of us dislike the policy and reflexively want to short anything Trump does. Two, after the fantastic run the market has been on, it is hard at some deep intuitive level to believe it can continue apace. And if we really are underestimating the effect on earnings, multiples are very likely to continue expanding as well. The US has a disproportionately large effect on global market psychology, so this would also be very positive for risk assets around the world.

Easy to imagine a shortage of assets narrative emerging this year. Moreover, it might even be true. We know it’s probably true in bonds. Might be true in equities as well. True or not, though, it would provide good cover for multiples to expand further, and could open the door to some really ludicrous valuations down the road as well.

Solid global cycle + markets tend to go up over time = It’s still too risky to position bearishly.

Yes, I know markets always top on good news, and I know it’s going to end badly sooner or later. But we also have to remind ourselves that, over time, getting caught out long in a bear is a less costly than getting left behind in a bull. If you got out 3 or 4 years ago and let valuations and macro ‘possibilities’ keep you out, you’ve been in pain. I’m not trying to mock anyone with this, just pointing out that for institutional asset managers right now not enough beta is real talk.

So, bottom line is this is the backdrop I have to run with—or at least should try to run with—until abundantly indicated otherwise. In other words: be generous with the benefit of the doubt. Especially given that this is the phase when things could easily accelerate to the upside, as if often happens later in cycles. I know it’s natural for it to feel wrong to be bullish after such a run, but you’ve got to focus on playing the odds.

And frankly I like the embedded odds that the Fed won’t make a disruptive policy error. They could, but the market in the aggregate has convinced me that it’s still clinging to too much expectation/hope of one. Also, for the first time in a long time, you can’t dismiss out of hand the risk of inflation upside, making bonds a much more balanced bet. Lastly, if/as we move out the risk cycle from here, I would expect it to continue to impart a bearish bias to the dollar.

Basically, if these points are even close to being right, that’s AYNTK.

I love tracking the assets that develop cult-like status. The kind where the narratives are powerful and the emotions run high, where our behavioral biases become most transparent. It’s why it impossible to take your eyes off of bitcoin these days.

But it’s also true for TSLA. Over the past two months, TSLA for me went from financial entertainment to an investment idea, and I wanted to walk followers through how that happened and how I’d manage it.

Back in October I noticed that TSLA was forming a bearish pattern. It made sense to short it based on the pattern alone.

Since it’s not core to what I do, I did it in small size, mostly for sport. But as I tracked it it became clear to me that TSLA’s financial runway was getting shorter every time there was an announcement of a large car company making up ground in the EV space. And these announcements were becoming more frequent. It was equally clear that Elon Musk is the kind of guy who has a dream and would go for broke trying to achieve it. I wrote a quick post about it here.

So, with TSLA forming a large topping formation and with falling odds of achieving the ‘good’ binary outcome, it has become an attractive risk/reward short from both a fundamental and technical standpoint. I suspect that below 300 is where the TSLA fan boys would start to abandon ship.

The problem though, is that TSLA, if things do work out, could go Amazon on you, which for a short position would be deadly. So, you have to set parameters to manage the risk.

Here’s how I’d do it.

If you have no position, decide how much of your NAV you’re willing to lose if wrong. That’s the first thing you need to do. Then look at where a natural stop would be if you were to short some here. My read of the chart is you want to be totally out if 350—the top (roughly) of the current range. If I saw TSLA hit 350, I would be convinced that my topping scenario is not playing out. It might play out later, but it is not playing out now.

I would then size my initial position. TSLA is currently trading at ~330, so a break of 350 would generate a loss of 6%. As an example—because this is a very portfolio-specific choice—if I were willing to lose 50bps of NAV, this would allow me a position size of 8.3%.

If we hit 350, then you’re out and you’ve lost 50bps of performance. However, if you’re right and 300 breaks and the major top is completed, that means the odds of the Zero scenario have increased and you can add to the position.

This is how I would do add to it. If TSLA closes below 300 for two consecutive days, you can add to the short. I would—again this is a very portfolio-specific decision—double the position. I would then put a stop on the new portion of the position at a close back above 305. And I would lower my stop on the first portion of my position from 350 down to a close above 315. This would give you an all-in breakeven on the trade if the breakdown turned out to be false (which happens a fair amount), and a first target of 200 if the break plays out. Once you get to 200, you could then take profits on one half of the position, and let the rest run—after lowering the stop on it to 250.

I am not a TSLA expert. I have no emotion or pride invested in TSLA failing. In fact, I very much admire all of the amazing innovation Elon Musk has catalyzed. But patterns and the psychology drive most of my trading decisions, these factors are telling me TSLA is a good risk/reward short here.

For the past few sessions we are seeing a new vibe creep into markets, driven by bonds.

The Federal Reserve currently holds about $2.5 trillion in Treasury securities and about $1.8 trillion in mortgage-backed securities. These securities were purchased in the aftermath of the GFC to help the Fed achieve its policy objectives once the Federal Funds rate ran into the ZLB.

In October, the unwind began.

We live in an increasingly complex world moving at an increasingly fast pace. The way it comes at us, it feels like we’re at the receiving end of a firehose. It demands quick reactions and baits us into quick conclusions. Compound this by our ever-shorter attention span, and the age-old challenge of battling conformation bias is today a lot tougher.

Typically, when we confronted with an issue where we have little knowledge, we’ve looked to public figures whose views we’ve come to trust. But in today’s world, the pressures of social media/cable TV forces these people to have impossibly immediate, confident answers, so they—just like us–tend to shoot from the hip and fill their own information gaps with some combination of ideology and tribalism. As a result, bad (often partisan) ideas proliferate wider and faster than ever before. It’s not a coincidence that measures of political polarization started going haywire after the advent cable TV and have accelerated in the age of social media.

So how do you deal with the partisan cacophony? Here’s my policy hack: Look abroad. One of the best ways to cut through the bullshit is to look around at other countries’ experiences. My general rule is if you see the same problem in a raft of other countries, it’s almost certainly a global phenomenon and not about policy.

This doesn’t mean policy doesn’t matter or can’t attenuate the problem. Certainly, it does and it can. But when the phenomenon is global, policy is unlikely the primary cause and policy remedies might not be able to do all that much to fix it.

Not all policy issues lend themselves to international comparison, but many do. Let me give you two prominent examples.

Income inequality

The popular divide is conservatives want to blame low interest rates over the last 15 years and progressives want to put it all on tax cuts that didn’t trickle down. There is a mountain of evidence in the US that pushes back against these views, but in the clamor of partisan politics and tribal allegiances it is all too easy to find a way to dismiss them.

But not when you look abroad. When you look around world what you see very clearly is income inequality is increasing within most countries, even as it decreases across countries. And that it started in the late 70s-early 80s—well before we in the US had ever heard of the Greenspan put or The Bernank.

Here’s a handy chart of the timeline of income inequality in the US from a Bloomberg post last week:

Again, I’m not saying that tax cuts and Fed policy didn’t play any role. Tax cuts that didn’t trickle down certainly did and Fed policy could have. But when you look around the world across countries that have an array of different monetary and fiscal policies and see the same basic pattern, it puts our parochial talking points into better perspective.

The Global Financial Crisis

There was a very strong ideological narrative that persists in certain quarters that the Global Financial Crisis was caused by Congress forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to crank out sub-prime mortgages and the Federal Reverse keeping interest rates too low for too long.

Again, there is plenty is data here at home to beat this thesis down. We know that Fannie and Freddie’s CRA lending was very small in the grand scheme of things and their market share shrank sharply in the bubble years, and that the collapse in credit standards was a market-driven shadow banking affair. We also know that the years of most aggressive mortgage lending were 2005-2007, when the Fed fund rate was around 5%, making it hard to pin the market frenzy on low rates.

But the easier path is to look around the world, to countries that didn’t have a Fannie or Freddie, whose central banks had different policies from the Fed. And when you see countries like Ireland, Spain, Iceland, who had real estate bubbles magnitudes larger than ours, it becomes much easier to recognize it was at its core a global, private-sector phenomenon.

Using international comparisons in policy analysis is not a panacea, but in macro it should be the first tool you reach for to beat back confirmation bias.