Trader’s Narrative

At the start of the week we contrasted the strange pessimism that has gripped the US retail investor to the levitation act of Wall Street. It is almost as if Wall Street threw a party and other than institutional investors, a few day traders and algo quant jocks jamming high frequency trades, no one else showed up. If you ask Paul Desmond, of Lowry Research, this is a real bull market that will last another 3 years.

With all due respect to Desmond, today I wanted to entertain some bearish counter arguments to temper that cheery outlook and delve a little deeper into the market condition both in the short and longer term.

While considering the same ICI fund flow data, it is conceivable to come to bearish conclusions. Take for instance the fact that domestic equity funds have attracted less than $8 billion of fresh capital since the lows in March. Had this rally provoked the same pattern of retail investor participation as previous ones, we should have seen $150 billion flow to equity mutual funds, according to TrimTabs.

Maxims ad Nauseum
While it has become an accepted maxim repeated ad nauseum that a bull market likes to climb a “wall of worry”, the historical evidence is otherwise. The stock market actually tends to float higher on gradually increasing levels of optimism - until that optimism reaches a crescendo and then the whole thing unwinds. And we start all over again. So generally speaking, the stock market performs better following periods where there are net inflows of funds.

Whether retail investors are acting intelligently by avoiding this rally or more accurately, by selling this rally, is something that only history can answer. It isn’t hard to imagine though, the possibility that they are reacting emotionally. Think of it. Having first experienced severe loss in their portfolios and watching Wall St. insiders ride on a cushion of bonuses, insult is added to injury when they have to fend for themselves in a new harsh economy.

What if we are seeing the rejection of the great “equity culture” and the almost religious belief in “buy and hold”? What if the record inflows to bond funds are being driven by a traumatized populace seeking the one shelter of income investing?

So far, this has been so relentless that it has pushed the fixed income share of US household wealth above 6% once again. But if you notice, the last time there was a similar increase happened during one of the strongest bull markets in equities:

However, what is undeniable is that if the US retail investor doesn’t return to equities eventually, what we could see is another lost decade; where markets flop around like a dead fish, but don’t really go anywhere. This is what happened before the great super-bull market was launched in 1982.

The completely stark scenario is one where retail investors continue to ratchet up their sales of equities and push the stock market lower as a cascade effect takes place where gloomy sentiment and fear feeds on itself. Think of it as the great unwinding; or the negative wealth effect.

Technical Weakness
Returning to more present and short term matters, the market came perilously close to the invisible 20% distance from its long term moving average. Yesterday I mentioned that stocks have little room to the upside and while I’m not surprised to see the weakness today, it by no means guarantees that we won’t see a final push to 1120.

On Monday 94% of the S&P 500 stocks closed above their 10 day moving average. That’s the highest since mid July. Since then this measure of breadth has backed off slightly but is still hovering above 90%. Other negative technical considerations are that prices are pressing against the downtrend line at 1100 - from the top of the bear market (in October 2007). And that other major market indexes like the Nasdaq, Russell 2000, the Philadelphia Banking Index (BKX) and the Semiconductors (SOX) are still below their previous swing highs. Finally, volume continues to be anemic as it has been for most of this whole trip.

The US financial system was resuscitated by the largess of the taxpayer. Without any real quid pro quo, transparency nor discussion, they were made whole. Their losses made public while their profits were guaranteed to remain private (as the recent obscene bonuses attest).

So now that the US economy is still on the ropes, fighting for its very survival and in dire need of a liquidity transfusion of its own via the credit markets, where are the banks?

Surely they are pumping the lifeblood they received from the US treasury and the Fed back into large and small businesses that are the engines of growth to allow the economy the same recovery they enjoyed. Right? right? Well, no. In fact, if you assumed that you couldn’t be more wrong.

As you can see from the chart above, bank lending in the US has contracted to an unprecedented degree. You may notice that a contraction of some shape or form happens each time we have a recession (the dark bars). And you would be right. But we are not taking a random walk down Wall Street these days. These are extraordinary times, which required extraordinary measures - whether rightly or wrongly.

So what are the banks doing with all the cash they received from the hard working American Joe and Jane Sixpack?

Hoarding it like a miser:

So we have banks flush with cash, not lending to those who need it and deserve it, but rather sitting on the cash or in Goldman’s case, using it to generate billions of dollars in profit which then is promptly cut in half to be paid as bonuses.

As David Rosenberg of the Toronto boutique firm, Gluskin Sheff posits, this may be why the US government bond market is so subdued:

The banks are deploying the cash in the government bond market, buying a net
$27 billion in the latest week and $130 billion in the past 18 weeks. Meanwhile, cash reserves keep piling up and just reached an all-time high of $1.2 trillion — enough to finance the entire U.S. fiscal deficit. This is a nice back-of-the-door mechanism for how the Fed is monetizing the government’s endless need for money: bolster reserves at the big commercial banks and have these banks buy the bonds that Uncle Sam sells in order to raise the capital needed to fund all the government’s fiscal stimulus measures.

Here is a very long term chart of the US 30 year bond yield:

The Chinese have a saying: ‘May you live in interesting times.‘ All I dare hope is that things don’t get any more interesting than this.

By the way, here is an almost too good to be true offer for my US readers. For a limited time, you can get a complimentary subscription (aka FREE) to SFO magazine (Stocks, Futures, and Options).

It takes less than a minute to sign up and you need to provide some basic information. But as I mentioned, you need to be a resident of the US (because you need to provide a US address). Enjoy!

The fabled trillion dollar cash hoard that US mutual fund investors are sitting on is well known by now. But what isn’t equally well known is just what they are doing with all that cash. We do know that after reaching a peak right at the March lows, the shell shocked US retail investor stopped stuffing cash into their accounts.

At its peak the cash hoard was about $4 trillion dollars. By the start of this month, it was down to $3.56 trillion and the most current data shows that retail investors have continued to slowly exit their safe haven, taking the number further down to $3.48 trillion. So where have all those billions of dollars gone?

From the fund flows data it seems that the vast majority of it has been funneled to the fixed income market, and more specifically, taxable bond funds. I showed a pie chart of the fund flows in last week’s sentiment overview to juxtapose the extremely skewed ratio of money flowing into bond funds vs. equity funds.

But a pie chart doesn’t really do the data justice. To get a much clearer idea of what is going on in the hearts and minds of the average US retail investor, let’s take a look at how they’ve allocated their money between domestic equity funds and bond funds:

The data for the bond funds is for both taxable and municipal bond funds. As well, this month’s data point (shown in a darker shade) is partial because it including only the first 3 weeks. Nevertheless, this chart is a telling a remarkable story.

First, not surprisingly, as the bear market took hold, people started to react by taking their money off the table. The worst month was October 2008 (not March 2009) when $72 billion was withdrawn from equity funds - $47 billion of that from domestic funds. At this point of maximum panic, US investors sold everything, even bond funds. They only trusted one thing: cash.

But by the start of the year, while they still distrusted the stock market, they began to change their mind about bonds. Each month they put more and more money into bonds, even as the stock market launched on an astonishing rally.

Month after month, as the S&P 500 went on to higher highs, US investors continued to ignore equity mutual funds. Then most shockingly, during the first 3 weeks of this month, they actually withdrew funds from this asset class! At this rate, by the end of the month, we’ll see outflows equivalent to December 2008. All the more astonishing as the S&P 500 is hundreds of points higher.

This is simply astonishing. What exactly does a stock market have to do to get some respect around here?

Bullish
There are two ways we could look at this. If you’re bullish, you would say that the fact that the retail investor (or “dumb money”) has not jumped on the bull market bandwagon means that this is the real deal. After all, secular bull markets are known for pulling out of the station and leaving all but the most savvy investors and traders behind. And as contrarians, we want to zig where the crowd is zagging. So let them shiver, coiled in the fetus position, terrified of the last (and past) bear market. This is a new dawn. A new day.

Bearish
On the other hand, if you are bearish, you would point out that retail participation is vital to create momentum in a trend. Unless the US retail mutual fund investors start to believe in a bull market, there won’t be a bull market. After all, if the considerable amount of money sitting in fixed income is not used to bid up equity prices, how will we create the virtuous cycle of higher prices (which pulls in more money and so on)? Every secular bull market feeds on this self-perpetuating mechanism.

Could it be that this bear market left a traumatic mark on the psyche of the average US investor? If so, then this generation of investors will simply not be the same. We know from previous brutal bear markets that while the wounds heal, the scars are not forgotten. The generation that lived through the Great Depression continued to distrust banks, the stock market and all manner of ’speculation’ even after the US economy righted itself and went on to new heights of prosperity.

Let me know what you think
In any case, those are my thoughts. What do you think accounts for this aberrant behavior of the US mutual fund investor?

One of the sophisticated investors I track is Jeremy Grantham of GMO. Back in 2007 he warned that the financial world was full of bubbles. The only asset class he liked then was an alternative one: timber.

He was right of course. Bubbles popped in the credit market, mortgages, real estate, the stock market, etc. Then in early 2009 just in time for the March rally he began to soften his staunchly bearish stance and then ultimately became bullish at those valuations: Reinvesting When Terrified.

Setting aside these two calls, Grantham is a long term market timer. He’s not interested in catching short term fluctuations nor would he be able to exploit them since he manages billions in assets as an institutional money manager. With that in mind, here is a chart - released today - of GMO’s most recent 7 year asset class return forecast:

To download the full reports, register then login at GMO’s website. To sum up, they predict that:

• the S&P 500 will return less than 5% annually over the next 7 years.
• international equities are expected to perform better, but not by that much
• US government bonds are among the lowest return asset class (1.7%)
• once again, timber makes an appearance with a 7.5% expected return

In comparison, GMO’s prediction of asset class returns just before the financial markets went into a tailspin in 2007 looked quite different:

• the S&P 500 forecast was -2%
• US ‘low quality’ stocks were expected to return -10%
• US government bond returns were forecast at just 3%
• and timber was still high, at 6.5% annual return

Clearly, GMO is signaling that they expect the US equity market to recover. Their ‘highest quality’ US equity forecast was 4.2% in October 2007 while it currently stands at 11.8%. Time will tell if they will continue to be correct.

Here is the round up of sentiment data for this week:

Sentiment Surveys
According to the weekly AAII sentiment survey, US retail investors are pretty much split evenly between the bullish and bearish camps. The bulls are at 42% ( that’s a 5% point increase from last week) while the bears are at 40% (4% point decrease from last week).

ChartCraft’s Investor Intelligence measure of stock newsletter editors has taken the bullish mantle from the retail investor’s survey for several weeks now. And it continues this week as well. The latest II poll shows the bulls commanding a 47.8% share of the respondents (down slightly from last week) and the bulls, 24.4%. The simple bear/bull ratio continues to run at about 2:1 - giving contrarians a clear signal.

German ZEW Survey of Investor Confidence
Turning our attention to the other side of the pond, the German ZEW sentiment survey of investor confidence (green line in chart below) came in slighly short of the 60 expectation but still managed to climb to 57.7 - its most bullish level since April 2006. However, the survey’s “current economic” outlook - while slightly off its recent lows - is still mired at historic depths (blue line):

This month’s survey results mark one of the few times in the history of this statistic where there is a large mismatch between the two measures. While the current economic situation is still deemed to be very poor, confidence in the future is very high. This should be familiar as it is the same tune that everyone is humming in the US markets. The question then is what happens if the rosy expectations of the future do not come about?

Option Traders
Both the CBOE put call ratio and the ISEE index are showing an excessive bullishness. This should be normal but since they have disagreed with one another so much, it made me sit up and take notice.

The CBOE put call ratio (equity only) dropped to a low of 0.45 earlier in the week (Wednesday - September 16th, 2009). That’s a lot of call buying! The short term moving average of the daily put call ratio continued to decline as it has for the past few months. It is already below its long term channel so it is difficult to determine what if any sort of signal it is giving now.

The ISEE index (equity only) meanwhile jumped to 242 on Wednesday’s long range candlestick. That means for every 100 puts, 242 calls were bought (to initiate a position). To find a more bullish one day statistic, we’d have to hop into our time machine and travel back to November 6th, 2007 when the ISEE index hit 245. At that time the S&P 500 was trading around the 1500 level. More important than just the one day spike, the 10 day moving average for the ISEE is now also significantly high as shown on the chart below:
Continue reading ‘Sentiment Overview: Week Of September 18th, 2009′