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Last week I wrote that markets would move from pillar to post up until the election, and this week I thought it might be useful to revisit the origin of that phrase. The expression was originally ‘from post to pillar’, and it referred to the practice of whipping some miscreant on a post and then moving them over to a pillory for display to a jeering crowd. Here’s someone in a pillory. Not sure if he’s been soundly whipped or not.

I suppose I can’t say that this is what “the market” feels like these days, what with the S&P 500 having its best week in months last week, and the QQQ having its best week in forever. But I do think this is what it feels like to have a view on the market or the election these days. Maybe you’ve already been whipped soundly for that view and maybe you haven’t. But anyone with a view has got to be feeling locked in a pillory. Anyone with a view has got to be worried that a whipping is just around the corner.

Three weeks ago, the common knowledge – what everyone knows that everyone knows – was that a Constitutional crisis was inevitable and that more stimulus was impossible. Last week, the common knowledge was that a “blue wave” was inevitable and that not only was more stimulus on the way, but it could easily be MOAR stimulus. This week … I dunno … it feels like we’re recognizing that the entire world is going to hell in a new Covid-wave handbasket. Next week … well, next week I’m expecting the aliens to land. Or for the large hadron collider at CERN to make contact with a parallel universe. Actually, that last bit is not a joke.

What we’re dealing with here in October 2020 is not risk. It’s uncertainty.

Decision-making under risk is something we’re all very practiced at. All of expected-utility theory, all of portfolio theory – ALL of it – is based on decision-making under risk, where probabilities and outcomes are knowable.

Decision-making under uncertainty, on the other hand, is something we have very little practice at (thank goodness!) and even fewer tools and theories. But there is a strategy that works. From the Epsilon Theory note Once in a Lifetime …

The decision-making strategy designed specifically for uncertainty is Minimax Regret.

Minimax Regret was invented (or at least formalized) in 1951 by Leonard “Jimmie” Savage, one of the founding fathers of what we now call behavioral economics. Savage played a critical role, albeit behind the scenes, in the work of three immortals of modern social science. He was John von Neumann’s right-hand man during World War II, a close colleague of Milton Friedman’s (the second half of the Friedman-Savage utility function), and the person who introduced Paul Samuelson to the concept of random walks and stochastic processes in finance (via Louis Bachelier) … not too shabby! Savage died in 1971 at the age of 53, so he’s not nearly as well-known as he should be, but his Foundations of Statistics remains a seminal work for anyone interested in decision-making in general and Bayesian inference in particular.

As the name suggests, the Minimax Regret strategy wants to minimize your maximum regret in any decision process. This is not at all the same thing as minimizing your maximum loss. The concept of regret is a much more powerful and flexible concept than mere loss, because it’s entirely subjective. But that’s exactly what makes the strategy human. That’s exactly what makes the strategy real when the ultimate human chips of living and dying are on the table.

Minimax Regret downplays or eliminates the role that probability distributions play in the decision-making process.

Minimax Regret doesn’t calculate the odds and the expected utilities over multiple rolls of the dice. Minimax Regret says forget the odds … how would you FEEL if you rolled the dice that one time and got snake-eyes?

More technically, Minimax Regret asks how would you feel if you took Action A and Result 1 occurs? What about Result 2? Result 3? What about Action B and Result 4, 5, or 6?  Now out of those six potential combinations of action + result, what is the worst possible result “branch” associated with each action “tree”? Whichever action tree holds the worst possible result branch … well, don’t do THAT. Doing anything but THAT (technically, doing the action that gives you the best worst-result branch) is the rational decision choice from a Minimax Regret perspective.

The motto of Minimax Regret is not Know the World … it’s Know Thyself.

Because when faced with an uncertain event, where you only have one roll of the dice on a probabilistic event, that’s all we can know.

Ourselves.

We are only given the world once. Usually that’s not a big deal from an investing standpoint, because the possible parallel universes aren’t that far apart in their market consequences. Over the next three weeks (and maybe longer than that!), the fact that we are only given the world once is a very big deal indeed.

My advice over this span … pay less attention to what the world is telling you about the future, and more attention to what your gut is telling you about yourself. Knowing yourself and your maximum regret does NOT necessarily mean playing it safe. I know lots of investors for whom playing it safe IS their maximum regret. What it means is just that – know thyself – and if you’re managing other people’s money – know them, too – and avoid action trees that hold the worst possible result branch given that knowledge.  

Just do that, and this will all be over soon enough, even if it feels like being in a pillory right now. Minimize that maximum regret and you’ll live to fight (and invest) another day. No matter what parallel universe we end up in!

Talking about our October narrative monitor reports released last Friday morning, both our Central Bank monitor and our Securities Analysis Methods monitor …

As you may recall (and it’s in the monitor report if you don’t), the S&P 500 returns are typically positive in the month following an Inflation-focused regime reading (+1.6% on average), and typically negative in the month following a Fundamentals-focused regime reading (-0.9% on average). This may seem like a wash, but in our model portfolio construction we actually give substantially more weight to the negative signal of the Fundamentals-focused regime than the positive signal of the Inflation-focused regime.

Why? Because markets (and narrative impact on markets) happen at the margins.

Narrative signals are most impactful when they indicate a change in regimes. Narrative signals are most impactful when they exist at the edges of the narrative regime spectrum. Narrative signals are not a smooth variable, something to be z-scored, in the econometric lingo. They are a state of the world, which is why we use the term “regime”, and they change in quantum steps.

For Central Bank narratives, then, we’re most confident that we’re reading an actionable market signal when there’s a regime change (like we saw going into May when the narrative state of the world moved from the highly market-positive Fed Put regime to the slightly market-positive Inflation regime in April) or when the narrative state of the world is at the edges of the regime spectrum (Fed Put on the positive end, and Hawkish on the negative end).

Ditto for Securities Analysis Method narratives (the way that market participants talk to each other about how to think about stock prices). We’re most confident that we’re reading an actionable market signal when there’s a regime change (like we saw going into August when the narrative state of the world moved from the highly market-positive Technicals regime to the market-negative Fundamentals regime in July) or when the narrative state of the world is at the edges of the regime spectrum (Technicals on the positive end, and Fundamentals on the negative end).

So if you ask what our macro narrative signals are telling us as we go into October, they’re moderately bearish. We don’t have negative signals from both narrative monitors, but we do from the SAM monitor.

And then we had the first week of October. LOL. When I say LOL, I don’t mean that I think our macro narrative signals are wrong. I mean that I don’t think they matter very much.

From last Thursday night until 2:49 pm today, the only thing that mattered to markets was the news flow of a White House in free fall (so odds of a decisive Biden victory went way up with maybe a Senate switch, too) plus the news flow of an on-again multi-trillion dollar stimulus package, the combination of which led to the long end of the yield curve spiking ferociously (10-yr UST backing up from 0.66% to 0.78%) and an even more ferocious “Buy Cyclicals!” market narrative.

And then at 2:49 pm today, with a Trump tweet that the stimulus negotiations were kaput, that narrative and that trade collapsed, with the S&P 500 falling 2% in 15 minutes.

And then at 10 pm tonight, with another tweet that maybe stimulus negotiations could start back up again, futures are back to flat.

LOL.

I understand the “Buy Cyclicals!” market narrative. It’s an instantiation of the Fourth Horseman / Inflation Cometh I’ve been writing about since October 2018 (“Things Fall Apart (Part 3) – Markets”). If there’s no big issue with a transition of Presidential power … if there’s a an unfettered path for the Democrats to unleash the mother of all fiscal stimulus packages with their MMT theology … well then, we’re off to the cyclical/inflation races! Until they raise taxes, of course.

I also understand the “Sell Cyclicals!” market narrative. If there’s no fiscal stimulus coming … if the Fed is pushing on the string of a string … if the outcome of the election (in whichever direction ) is contested and sparks the mother of all Constitutional crises … well then, we’re off to the defensive/deflation races! Until there’s a massive fiscal stimulus after all, of course.

So … I have no idea what’s going to happen next. These are essentially mutually exclusive paths. I mean, I’m sure there’s some muddle-through scenario here, and that’s probably what will actually transpire in November. But markets (and narrative impact on markets) happen on the margins. This market is going to continue to swing from pillar to post until that muddle-through event actually happens, and there is no hedge for that. Or rather, the only hedge is the best hedge – you take down gross exposure, not just net exposure. You reduce your market risk. You minimize your maximum regret.

Wall Street, like Hollywood, is geared to sell happy endings. Ultimately I think we’ll have, if not a happy ending for markets when this election is all said and done, then at least a happy-ish ending. But until THAT narrative takes shape, then it’s a narrative and market rollercoaster, where every marginal outcome is just a tweet or a Covid diagnosis away. No one has an edge in this environment, and anyone who says they do is kidding you or kidding themselves.

Stay safe! And when the smoke clears, let’s get to work.

I’m old enough to remember when cartoons were only on TV for a few hours each week, every Saturday morning.

I’m also old enough to remember when the market cared deeply about wage inflation. Unlike Saturday morning cartoons, this wasn’t a 1970s thing. It was all of two years ago. Back in 2017 and 2018, if you recall, we waited with bated breath on the first Friday of every month when the jobs numbers came out at 8:30 AM, so very anxious to see if wage inflation was going to come in “disappointingly low” and “miss expectations”. Again. Because, you see, if wage inflation was disappointingly low, then naturally the Fed should maintain extraordinarily low interest rates to “spur” inflation. Oh golly, we were SO concerned with wage inflation!

If you look up “concern trolling” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of our 2017-2018 narrative fascination with wage inflation.

All this lasted until it became impossible by late 2018 to claim that wage inflation was “disappointingly low”, so naturally we moved on to the REAL reason for insanely easy monetary policy … this addict market and its silly-town valuations collapse without it. I’m old enough to remember the bear market of Q4 2018 and Jay Powell’s Christmas Eve conversion dinner with Donald Trump. I bet you are, too.

Anyway, speaking of cartoons, I thought about our old friend wage inflation when I saw this tweet from Liz Ann Sonders at Schwab:

Why is this important for the jobs report this Friday? Because the cartoon of our wage growth report is based on average hourly wages.

Why does the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculate the average hourly wages for all Americans, even though most working Americans get an annual salary? Because back in 1915 when the BLS was established for the purpose of supporting government policy with “data”, that’s how most Americans got paid and how all Americans thought about wages. Back in 1915, the common knowledge about wages was that it was an hourly thing. Everyone knew that everyone knew that wages should be talked about and thought about in terms of an hourly wage. So today, more than 100 years later, the BLS still goes through the now hilariously inappropriate statistical exercise of forcing all of our jobs through a monthly-hours-worked survey and calculation, even if we’re paid on a weekly, monthly or annual basis.  

I am not making this up.

You can see where this is going. If salaried Americans work fewer hours in September as they help their kids navigate a terribly challenging school situation – but receive the same salaries regardless – this will show up as a wage inflation “shock”. It’s not a real shock, of course. No one is getting a raise. But because of the way this particular data cartoon is constructed by the BLS, a decline in monthly hours worked for salaried employees will mechanistically increase their “hourly wages”. And because of the sensitivity of the calculations to a stable monthly-hours-worked survey number (I wrote a long Epsilon Theory note about this and other data cartoons if you want to dig in here: The Icarus Moment), it only takes a small decline in average monthly hours worked – say twenty minutes – for a spurious 1% increase in wage inflation.

So look … it’s possible that for whatever reason, all this time off from work won’t show up in a major way within the BLS monthly hours worked survey. It’s also possible that no one cares if there’s a shockingly high wage inflation number this Friday, and these spurious results can get explained away pretty quickly. But there are plenty of algos that trade these releases immediately as they are reported, and this is classic example of how an algo can get really wrongfooted when the underlying ultra-stable data series goes haywire. Forewarned is forearmed.

It’s very difficult to keep a beach ball submerged underwater when you’re playing around in a swimming pool. No matter how hard you try to keep it under … pushing it, sitting on it, laying on top of it … it seems to have the mind of a trapped animal, turning and spinning to get to the surface at all costs.

I think exactly the same thing is true when it comes to volatility in markets.

Recently, every central bank in the world with a truly sovereign currency has made a commitment to keep sovereign rates at ZIRPy levels or better … forever. Or if not forever, then what passes for forever in banker-speak. The upshot of all this, given that the Central Banker Omnipotence narrative is still the most powerful force in global markets, is that interest rate volatility has collapsed all over the world, all at the same time. And because all of these central banks have told us that they are at least yield curve control-curious, interest rate volatility hasn’t just collapsed for short-term interest rates, but across the entire yield curve.

Now that’s wonderful news for sovereign borrowers. Corporate borrowers, too. Probably it’s good news for investors in Treasuries or Bunds or whatever, although that can get … tricky … particularly with longer-dated bonds if we get past the deflationary mega-shock of Covid-19 and the central bank commitment or firepower for yield curve control comes into question. But it’s definitely bad news in two quarters – rates trading desks on the sell-side and global macro funds on the buy-side.

It’s bad news for rates traders because their desk is now the most boring place in the world. There’s no juice, no spread … no profit. It’s bad news for global macro funds because their strategies are almost always long carry and so almost always depend on differences between countries, particularly interest rate differences and currency exchange rate differences. (Rusty has a fantastic article on this from 2018: The Many Moods of Macro).

And this is where the beach ball comes in.

Here’s the big question for global macro funds and FX trading desks and multi-asset managers: will the collapsed volatility in global interest rates result in similarly reduced FX volatility, or will it result in increased FX volatility?

If you believe that currency exchange rates are – at their core – a reflection of interest rate differentials between countries (and this is pretty much the standard view of FX fundamentals), then crushing volatility in rates is definitely going to crush volatility in FX. In fact, when you stop to think about it, it’s probably going to crush volatility in everything.

But if you believe that currency exchange rates are – at their core – a reflection of narrative differentials between countries, then there’s no ironclad mechanism that forces FX volatility down when interest rate volatility goes down. This is what I believe.

And if you also believe, as I do, that the business of Wall Street and global banking requires narrative differentials between countries, that in fact their business is the creation of these narratives to drive trading activity, then it’s just a matter of time before we see the emergence of new national difference narratives that drive FX volatility (and other asset class volatility) regardless of the iron grip central banks have on interest rate volatility. Like “OMG, there’s a second Covid wave in Europe”. This is the beach ball.

It’s not a beach ball of volatility based on fundamentals. It’s a beach ball of volatility based on narratives. And not even the concerted action of every central bank in the world can keep that underwater for long.

Six years ago I wrote a series of Epsilon Theory notes on what I called the Hollow Market (here, here, and here), my phrase for a market structure where humans trading to express an interest in the fractional ownership of a real-world company accounts for less than 30% of market activity, where liquidity might seem normal on the market surface but is nonexistent once the shell of normality is pierced, and where the opportunity for market mischief by pools of capital allied with new technologies is immense.

Well, all of those factors are only worse today, and Softbank is the result.

By now you’ve probably read the articles, both from mainstream financial media: SoftBank unmasked as ‘Nasdaq whale’ that stoked tech rally (FT); SoftBank’s Bet on Tech Giants Fueled Powerful Market Rally (WSJ)

and from non-mainstream media: Connecting the Dots: How SoftBank Made Billions Using The Biggest ‘Gamma Squeeze’ in History (ZeroHedge)

and maybe you’ve read some articles or Twitter threads from very smart options traders who think there’s less to this than meets the eye: https://twitter.com/bennpeifert/status/1302725084075810817 (Benn Eifert)

and maybe you need a quick Epsilon Theory refresher course on delta and gamma and how these invisible threads pull at the more visible equity market: Invisible Threads: Matrix Edition (ET from October, 2015)

So I want to be careful in what I’m saying …

First, everything that happens in markets is overdetermined – which is a ten-dollar word that means there are way more smart and plausible reasons for why something happened than are needed to actually explain it – and I’m sure this is no exception.

Second, I don’t have special knowledge about SoftBank’s trading strategy or a comprehensive view into their counterparties’ trading desks. I hear things, you hear things, we all hear things. I think I probably hear more than most, but I’m not an insider on any of this.

Third, I’m not a lawyer.

So put it all together and here’s what I’m saying …

I don’t know if this is what SoftBank did. But this is how I would do it. Although I wouldn’t because I think it’s probably illegal.

Step #1: I’d buy “story stocks”. I’d buy billions of dollars worth of large-cap and mega-cap stocks that get enormous press coverage and trade at a high multiple.

Step #2: I’d buy call options on these stocks. I’d spend another billion dollars or two in call option premium across a wide range of strikes and tenors. I’d do this over as many accounts and in as small an individual trade amount as possible. I would tell all of my friends. I would funnel funds and purchases through as many cut-outs as possible. I would look for story stocks where there was an organic, retail option buying wave, and I would increase/shift my Step #1 holdings into those stocks. I would describe my call option strategy with the metaphor of rolling as many snowballs down the hill as I can, trying to make them bigger and bigger snowballs, trying to merge them with other snowballs, so that eventually I trigger an avalanche in derivative, invisible threads that tie the visible market together.

I’d be doing all this for two reasons.

First, I’d want to use the leverage that’s inherent in a call option that’s being bid up to force my counterparties to buy a lot of stock in the open market to hedge the position on their books. This is the ‘gamma squeeze’ that the ZeroHedge article is talking about. If you’ve ever been on a trading desk, you know what this feels like. You’re not in the business of taking a view one way or another on a stock, so if your book gets too lopsided in the risk you’re taking for a particular view, you MUST hedge that risk. The result, of course, is that as the underlying stock goes up (my Step #1 positions!), more and more retail investors buy new call options, which is exactly what I want in my snowball strategy.

Second, I’d want to use all of this option buying activity to drive up the implied volatility of these stocks. In other words, I want to see the price of ALL options (or at least all call options … the skew is a feature for me, not a bug) to go up. I not only want to trigger a gamma avalanche (taking advantage of convexity on price), but I also want to trigger a vega avalanche (taking advantage of convexity on volatility) … I want to make the call options themselves go up in price, separate from the mechanistic increase in option price driven simply by the underlying stock going up in price. Now this may seem odd. If I want to encourage more and more call buying activity, why would I also want to make those call options more expensive in and of themselves?

Because I need to exit the trade.

Step #3: I’d sell call options on these stocks. To be clear, I’d be selling way out-of-the-money covered call options throughout this process. But as the price action got more and more furious and my Step #1 stocks and Step #2 call options got bid up more and more, I’d be selling call options more and more aggressively. I’d be pocketing as much premium as I could on my underlying Step #1 stocks, and if I get called away at these crazy prices … well, that’s just fine. I’d be offsetting my long call options with these short call options (setting up a call spread). I’d just be outright selling some of my long call options at a nice profit. I’d be doing all of this, while at the same time I’d be starting new snowballs down the hill wherever it makes sense.

But that’s just me.

Where’s the illegal part of this? It’s in Step #2 where you’re trying to funnel these call option buys through as many cut-outs and allied accounts as possible. It’s what Cornelius Vanderbilt would have called “making a corner” and Andrew Carnegie would have called “painting the tape”  … creating non-bona fide trades to give the illusion of volume and activity and interest … but with the modern twist of acting through trades in derivative securities rather than trades in the underlying security itself.

Like I say, I’m not a lawyer. And these aren’t the clear and obvious wash trades that are the classic examples of painting the tape frauds. But a snowball strategy like this – where the intent is to create a market illusion – was Cornelius Vanderbilt’s go-to robber baron move back in the mid-19^th century, and the intent of all of the Wall Street reforms of the early 20^th century (including the formation of the SEC) was to eliminate these constructed market illusions. Today, of course, Wall Street regulators are in on the act. It’s all edge cases and cheesing, all the time.

What’s the takeaway? I’ve got two, one specific and one general.

The specific takeaway is whenever the WHY? is answered in narrative-world – WHY have tech stocks run-up so much? WHY did we have the sell-off in the past few days? It’s SoftBank’s fault! – this narrative answer will dominate price action for a good while to come. That means steady downward pressure on all of the megacap story stocks that led the market up over the past few months. A narrative that answers the WHY? is the most powerful narrative in markets, and it lasts until another narrative answer rises to combat it (which always happens … eventually). This is true whether or not the narrative answer – it’s SoftBank’s fault! – is a little bit true or a lot true or not true at all. Right now this narrative answer to the WHY? has legs, and it’s going to play out like all dominant narratives always do.

As for the general takeaway, I don’t think I can say it better than I did five years ago:

“I suppose that’s the big message in this note, that you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t have a basic working knowledge of what, say, a volatility surface means. I’m not saying that we all have to become volatility traders to survive in the market jungle today, any more than we all have to become game theorists to avoid being the sucker at the Fed’s communication policy table. … Nor am I suggesting that anyone fight the Fed, much less fight the machine intelligences that dominate market structure and its invisible threads. Not only will you lose both fights, but neither is an adversary that deserves “fighting”. At the same time, though, I also think it’s crazy to ignore or blindly trust the Fed and the machine intelligences. The only way I know to maintain that independence of thought is to identify the invisible threads that enmesh us, some woven by machines and some by politicians, and start disentangling ourselves. That’s what Epsilon Theory is all about, and I hope you find it useful.”

First, we published our September Central Bank and Securities Analysis narrative monitors yesterday, which you can access here and here. There’s no change in the narrative regime from August to September in either monitor … an inflation-focused regime (typically market-positive) remains dominant in Central Bank narrative-world, and a fundamentals-focused regime (typically slightly market-negative) remains dominant in Securities Analysis narrative-world.

The “internals” on these narrative regime measures show a weakening in strength for the Central Bank inflation-focused regime, although the narrative cohesion and sentiment remain at crazy high levels. Put simply, there’s less drum-beating today in financial media about what the Fed is doing (less attention is being paid to ALL of the standard Fed narrative regimes), but more drum-beating about the Fed’s uber-dovish stance on inflation than any other story about the Fed, and it’s an insanely focused and market-positive drumbeating.

As for the fundamentals-focused narrative regime in Securities Analysis, we continue to see a lot of strength and positive sentiment, with a slight decline in cohesion. We believe this means that stories and news about macroeconomic fundamentals (is the US economy “bouncing back”? are we seeing “signs of growth”?) will continue to dominate market outcomes. If the stories and news remain positive, that’s constructive for markets. If they’re not …

Second (and relatedly), I saw this graphic in the FT today and wanted to use it as a follow-up to last week’s post, where I said that the time to be thinking about portfolio adjustment for the inflation genie getting out of the bottle is now, but that there was a strong chance IMO for the Mother of All Recessionary Shocks with the US election in November …

Not gonna lie, I don’t think this VIX election premium is big enough. This isn’t a “fiscal cliff” we’re talking about here, which was about as manufactured a “crisis” as I’ve seen. This is an honest to god non-trivial chance that we have an intractably disputed election and Constitutional crisis in the United States, against a backdrop of widespread violence in American cities. If that sounds like a VIX of 30 to you … well, bless your heart.

I’ll write more about this next week, because I also think that the rally coming out of successful transition of power and diminution in urban violence could be historic, as well. But as November 4^th approaches, I get less and less confident that we can avoid a deflationary shock of epic proportions. Particularly when you consider that the Fed is going to be as much of an ultimate arbiter on the election outcome as the Supreme Court and the US military.

Before I share the two charts that have kinda thrown me for a loop, a quick housekeeping item. The screenshare recording and presentation deck for the webinar we hosted last Thursday on our new narrative monitor – Security Analysis Methods – has been posted on the ET Pro website here: https://www.epsilontheory.com/webinar-on-security-analysis-narrative-monitor/. If you didn’t get a chance to join us live (or even if you did), I hope you get a chance to check out the work we’re doing with this narrative monitor. Understanding whether market participants are primarily focused on either multiples, fundamentals, or technicals in the way they talk and think about investing is both an important signal in and of itself (IMO), and is the starting point for asking and answering a lot of crucial questions about how investing actually works today.

And now onto the charts …

The first chart shows US Household Formation (the annual change in the number of occupied housing units, both owned and rented) on a monthly basis over the past 30 years.

It’s rare to find a chart that speaks for itself, but this one does. Most of this spike is people buying empty homes. The rest of this spike is people renting empty apartments. Together, this is maybe the most bullish data point I’ve seen since the GFC for real-world spending and economic dynamism. This is the sort of real-world behavioral change that absolutely drives real-world inflation higher. Maybe much higher.

The second chart shows the 21-day correlation between the S&P 500 and 10-yr US Treasury yields. It was part of a Credit Suisse report by their derivatives strategist, Mandy Wu (who I think does solid work), and reprinted in a Bloomberg article titled “Bonds No Longer Work to Diversify Stock Risk, Credit Suisse Says”.

Unlike the Household Formation chart, this one doesn’t speak for itself. The crux of the chart is the little red box at the bottom right … for the first time in a long time, when stocks go down, yields are going up. And since yield is the inverse of price in bond-world, we’re seeing the price of both stocks and bonds move in tandem … stocks go up in price AND bonds go up in price or stocks go down in price AND bonds go down in price.

To be sure, we’ve seen this movie before. You can find lots of periods in US market history – many quite recently, and some which last for years – where there is a positive correlation between stock prices and bond prices (I prefer to call it a positive correlation between stock and bond price rather than a negative correlation between stock price and bond yield … just seems cleaner to me). But here’s what’s special about today. There has never been a positive correlation between stock prices and bond prices with Treasury yields so low. Never.

Combine these two charts with Jay Powell’s Jackson Hole-remote speech today, where he basically announced that it will be years before the Fed even thinks about raising rates because of inflation, and you get this: the time to start preparing your portfolio for an inflationary shock and the havoc it will wreak on what you think is a well-diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds is NOW.

I’m not saying you sell out of your bond portfolio now. I think we could have the Mother of Deflationary Shocks if we have a close election (that’s the subject for another note!), so I wouldn’t be making any big Treasury sales between now and Nov. 4^th. I’m saying you figure out NOW what you’re going to do with your portfolio once we’re through the election.

Massive real-world household formation growth + positively correlated stock and bond prices + ZIRP forever and ever amen = an inflationary shock to your portfolio.

I don’t know when, and I don’t think it happens before the election, but this is the recipe.

Here’s the replay for the Security Analysis Narrative Monitor webinar we held via conference call and screenshare for ET Pro subscribers.

We think we can identify the periods where market participants are primarily focused on either multiples, fundamentals, or technicals in the way they talk and think about investing.

Each of these narrative regimes – multiples-focused, fundamentals-focused, and technicals-focused – generates a powerful signal of subsequent market dispersion (cross-sectional volatility) and subsequent market performance.

I’ve also attached the slide deck we used in the presentation here: ET Pro Narrative Monitor deck.

I’ve also attached the slide deck we used in the presentation here: ET Pro Narrative Monitor deck.

Three brief observations today, all of which deserve more thought and a longer note. Would be delighted to hear any of your ideas on these topics, as we figure all this out together.

One – and the titular subject of today’s note – the Fed’s expansion of their corporate bond buying SPV makes credit default swaps (CDS) useless as a portfolio hedging instrument. Here are the 1-year and 5-year US investment grade (IG) CDS index charts.

If you need a refresher course in how to read or understand CDS spreads, check out the ET Pro CDS primer: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About CDS … But Were Afraid to Ask. The point here is that with direct Fed intervention to prop up IG corporate credit (and HY, too, through junk bond ETF and “fallen angel” purchases), credit default swaps are no longer effective hedging instruments. You can’t fight City Hall and you can’t fight the Fed, and that means that our long/short investment quiver just lost a bunch of its best arrows.

Sigh. It’s not depressing so much as it is sad. It’s just another brick in the wall of the transformation of capital markets into a political utility. That’s a mixed metaphor, but you get what I mean. Seriously, it’s just sad.

Two – and this is the biggest thematic macro idea I’ve got – everyone is underestimating the degree to which the EU and Japan and China got their Covid-19 response right, and the US and the ROW got their Covid-19 response wrong. Take a look at Covid-19 stats over the past three weeks … ubiquitous testing + contact tracing works, and the EU proves it. The upshot is that the EU in particular is going to have a much more vibrant internal market economy than the US for the next 18 months … maybe much longer than that. So long as Covid-19 remains endemic and uncontrolled in the US – and there is nothing to suggest that is going to improve in 2020 – Europe will ‘take share’ from the US in global free trade regime benefits and enjoy a large internal market that looks much like its pre-Covid self.

I have no idea what the right way to play this macro idea would be … weak dollar / strong euro? … long EU banks / short US banks? … I dunno. But for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am more bullish on European growth fundamentals than US growth fundamentals. Honestly, I feel weird and kinda dirty just typing those words. But it’s the truth.

Three – and I have no idea what to do with this, but I think it’s vitally important – there’s a fascinating new Gallup report out on American pride. The skinny: “US National Pride Falls to Record Low”.

You really have to read this to get a feel for the breadth and depth to which Americans’ pride in being American has been pummeled over the past four years in general and the last year in particular. Even among Republicans, fewer are “extremely proud” of being an American than at any point since this poll began 20 years ago.

Just check out this demographic breakdown. The numbers for young Americans (18-29) and nonwhite Americans are heartbreaking.

Like I say, I don’t know what to do with this … yet. But I think it’s everything.