Epsilon Theory Professional
This note isn’t about our common knowledge of central banks. It’s about the common knowledge within the crowd of people who are engaged in the profession of central banking. It’s about the common knowledge OF central banks. It’s about the one thing that everyone in central banking knows that everyone in central banking knows: you can’t taper and tighten at the same time.
Our directional equity narrative signals have switched from bullish to bearish, and our equity trend narrative signals now point to a 0% allocation to directional trend-following strategies, their lowest possible state.
The rest, as they say, is commentary.
Labor inefficiencies are so bad for FedEx that their return on invested capital (and FedEx has a LOT of capex) is, like, maayyybe greater than their weighted average cost of capital during the most insanely cheap financing period in the history of man. I mean, FedEx margins are SO BAD that this was actually a detailed point of conversation.
This is insane.
Is Evergrande a systemic risk? Is this China’s Lehman moment?
I don’t know. Could be. But unless and until the market loses confidence in China’s response to Evergrande, it’s not a Lehman moment. It can’t be.
Banks have a problem. Deposit growth is too high and loan growth is too low.
It’s all just another signal that real economic growth is struggling, even as inflation becomes more embedded.
For the past several months our Narrative Monitors have been quite bullish on risk assets, despite all of the Fed-related and Delta-related and China-related and inflation-related concerns that have been on my personal radar screen. Rusty’s, too. The fact is, though, the Monitors have been spot-on and I’ve been dead wrong, which is … well, it’s exactly why we’re so excited about this research program!
I learn a lot from Camp Kotok, the 5 day fishing trip up in the wilds of Maine that David Kotok, founder and CIO of Cumberland Advisors, hosts every summer for wealth managers, economists, traders, etc.
Most of what I learn at Camp Kotok has nothing to do with the actual facts being discussed and debated, but on whether topics are being discussed and debated at all.
This month we are adding an entirely new “cuisine” to ET Professional by applying our methods to predicting strength/weakness in the US Dollar (specifically the DXY index). We’re taking the techniques and tools and ingredients that we’ve been using to understand central bank narrative archetypes, and applying them to an analysis of dollar index price movements instead of equity index price movements.
A replay of the July 2021 Epsilon Theory webinar covering our latest narrative research and the release of our new ET Pro Monitors: the Consolidated Directional Equity Dashboard and the Consolidated Equity Trend Dashboard.
Will the politically-motivated slamming of Chinese ADRs pass? Sure. But that’s small comfort if you’re getting crushed in the meantime. Here’s what I’m looking at to see if this gets worse (ie, systemic) before it gets better.
Today we’re releasing the first research findings from the Narrative Machine 3.0, a process for measuring the patterns of individual linguistic components of narrative archetypes that comprise narrative structure – what we call narrative DNA. Yes, we think we’ve unlocked the genetic code of market-driving narratives.
Have I changed my views about the reality of inflation? Nope.
But will that impact market world? Not until it shows up in the narrative, and I have no idea when that will be.
Coming into June, the dominant market narrative around central banks is a constructive what-me-worry attitude about inflation and the Fed’s ability to deal with it.
Personally, I think this is nonsense. But that’s the core strength of systematic narrative analysis … who cares what I think!
We have been working on developing a platform for expanding our narrative monitors for almost a year now.
We are really excited to show it to you – and to work with you to develop something that will be USEFUL and ACTIONABLE.
The head-on narrative collision between ESG and crypto, which has been building for months, finally happened.
It’s the biggest threat that Wall Street’s Bitcoin! ™ has ever faced.
We believe that looking at momentum and trend-following in narrative-space through the lenses of Bullish, Bearish, Expensive, and Cheap gives a much sharper and more predictive view of this behavioral phenomenon than looking at it through the lenses of price-space alone.
New from the Narrative Machine, coming to ET Pro this summer!
The investment question you hear constantly today is whether or not supply-driven inflation will eventually make its way into wage and price inflation. This is the wrong question … wage and price inflation are already here.
The right question is how bad this wage and price inflation cycle will be.
The growing narrative resignation to a future hawkish Fed and a future tough road for high-flying, high-multiple stocks is a martingale … it makes market exuberance impossible, but also keeps the market from getting totally spooked.
I’m building a target list of individual companies where I want to do further research in developing a dedicated short or long-vol portfolio with highly asymmetric risk/reward qualities. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
The hallmark of Information Theory is this: information is neither true nor false; it is only more or less powerful, with power defined by how much it changes your mind from what you believed before.
For stocks to go up on good news, there must be a negative story of woe and doubt that the good news “overcomes”.
The internal narrative consistency – cohesion in Narrative Machine-speak – changed dramatically in both our Central Bank and Security Analysis Methods monitors this month. This is the necessary next step in the creation of market common knowledge and (I suspect) a longer-term investable trade/direction for markets.
There is a tide that is flowing out today, and it’s revealing Lex Greensill and Bill Hwang just as surely as it revealed Jeff Skilling in 2001 and Bernie Madoff in 2008. The big trade around Skilling and Madoff wasn’t directly on their specific scams and frauds, but on what their specific scams and frauds showed us about systemic rot in the financial system.
I think Jay Powell and the Fed have locked themselves into a two to three year commitment to treating inflationary pressures as “transitory”, just like an NFL GM and organization lock themselves into supporting a “franchise” quarterback they draft in the first round.
And that’s pretty exciting for a discretionary alpha-oriented investor like me.
I think we are hitting an inflection point in a thirty-year globalization trade and a forty-year deflation trade at the same time that the Lex Greensills and Masayoshi Sons of the world have had 13 years to build their scams to the breaking point.
The game is afoot!
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