Since that time absolutely nothing has changed. In fact, the SEC has allowed the stock market to become an even more dangerous place for “retail investors” (mom and pop) to keep their life savings.
The use of “limit orders” has become a joke. The only reason for using a limit order is to let your enemies (the predatory traders) know the maximum extent to which you will allow yourself to be screwed on a trade. Since July of 2009, I have discussed the threat posed to retail investors by the use of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems. Computers – programmed with predatory algorithms – can engage in “computerized front-running” through the use of “flash orders” to force your own limit order to be executed at its most extreme expense to you. I discussed this situation in more detail on May 18, 2010.
I rarely use “stop loss” orders. They are used by investors to limit their loss if a stock price sinks. The investor specifies a stop price (based on a percentage of the purchase price which is the maximum amount the investor is willing to lose on the stock). If the stock eventually drops to the price in the stop order, the transaction is initiated and the order goes out to the exchange as a market order – to be filled at the best available price at the time. In other words, there is no guarantee that the order will be filled at the price specified in the stop order. In the “flash crash” on May 6 of 2010, many investors lost their shirts because their stop orders were executed and by the time the investors tried to repurchase the stocks, the prices rebounded to where they were before the flash crash. Worse yet, by the time their stop orders were actually filled, the stock prices had dropped tremendously. Not only did those investors lose money on the stop orders for no good reason – but many chose to buy back their stocks at the pre-crash prices. As a result, they lost twice as much money just because of an emotional attachment to the stock. (Emotional attachment to a particular stock is a bad investment habit.) Since that time, a number of “mini flash crashes” have been engineered by predatory traders on particular stocks, forcing investors off their positions to take losses, which ultimately benefit the predators, who use stealthy tactics to reap those profits without being caught.
Maureen Farrell recently wrote an interesting piece for CNNMoney about the consequences of “mini flash crashes”. Here is some of what she had to say:
Stock exchanges have explicit rules for canceling “clearly erroneous trades” and for triggering so-called circuit breakers that halt trading. None of the trades mentioned in this story met that criteria.
Generally, trades can be canceled if they fall 5% to 10% from the last trade, but the rules vary, depending on the market cap of a company and its trading volume.
Investors still have to notify the exchange within 30 minutes if they want their trade to be canceled.
And because many of the wild swings aren’t extreme enough to be considered “clearly erroneous,” individual investors may not even be aware that certain trades are being executed.
Although the article noted that “(t)he SEC continues to make changes to try to combat the frequency and impact of the mini flash crashes”, there is apparently nothing being done by the SEC to prevent the predatory engineering of those crashes. The SEC is apparently doing nothing to allow investors to unwind trades triggered by those crashes. More important, the SEC is doing nothing to track down and prosecute the culprits responsible for engineering and profiteering from these events.
Most investors have been lamenting the recent stock market swoon. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has given up all of the gains earned during 2012. The economic reports keep getting worse by the day. Yet, for some people all of this is good news . . .
You might find them scattered along the curbs of Wall Street . . . with glazed eyes . . . British teeth . . . and mysterious lesions on their skin. They approach Wall Street’s upscale-appearing pedestrians, making such requests as: “POMO?” . . . “Late-day rally?” . . . “Animal Spirits?” These desperate souls are the “POMO junkies”. Since the Federal Reserve concluded the last phase of quantitative easing in June of 2011, the POMO junkies have been hopeless. They can’t survive without those POMO auctions, wherein the New York Fed would purchase Treasury securities – worth billions of dollars – on a daily basis. After the auctions, the Primary Dealers would take the sales proceeds to their proprietary trading desks, where the funds would be leveraged and used to purchase high-beta, Russell 2000 stocks. You saw the results: A booming stock market – despite a stalled economy.
Since I first wrote about the POMO junkies last summer, they have resurfaced on a few occasions – only to slink back into the shadows as the rumors of an imminent Quantitative Easing 3 were debunked.
The recent spate of awful economic reports and the resulting stock market nosedive have rekindled hopes that the Federal Reserve will crank-up its printing press once again, for the long-awaited QE 3. Economist John Hussman discussed this situation on Monday:
At this point, the S&P 500 has achieved a cumulative total return of less than 10% since April 2010. Meanwhile, of course, there remains a great deal of faith in the “Bernanke put,” because even though it’s fairly obvious that QE has done nothing durable for the economy or the financial markets over the last couple of years, a hit of QE might at least be good for a few months of “risk on” delirium. If the American public can’t get thoughtful economic leadership, at least Wall Street’s speculative junkies can hope for a little taste of Q from Sugar Daddy.
One of the problems with QE here, however, is that it would essentially represent fiscal policy for the benefit of speculators, at taxpayer expense. To see this, note that the 10-year Treasury yield is now down to less than 1.5%. One wonders how Bernanke would be able to argue, with a straight face, that this is not low enough. Nevertheless, a 10-year bond has a duration of 8 years – meaning that each 100 basis point fluctuation in interest rates is associated with a change of about 8% in the price of the bond. So if you buy the bond and hold it for a full year, an interest rate change of of 1.5/8 = .1875, or less than 20 basis points, is enough to wipe out the annual interest and leave you with a negative total return.
* * *
“QE3 – subsidizing banks and bond speculators at taxpayer expense” – there’s a pithy slogan. That doesn’t mean the Fed will refrain from more of its recklessness (which will be nearly impossible to reverse when it becomes necessary to do so), but does anyone actually believe by now that QE would improve the economy, durably elevate risky assets beyond a few months, or materially relieve global debt strains?
Obviously, the POMO junkies have no such concerns. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve’s “third mandate” – keeping the stock market bubble inflated – will be the primary factor motivating the decision, regardless of whether those asset prices hold for more than a few months.
The POMO junkies are finally going to score. As they do, a tragic number of retail investors will be led to believe that the stock market has “recovered”, only to learn – a few months down the road – that the latest bubble has popped.
Comments Off on Wall Streeters Who Support The Occupy Movement
Forget about what you have been hearing from those idiotic, mainstream blovaitors – who rose to prominence solely because of corporate politics. Those bigmouths want you to believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is anti-capitalist. Nevertheless, the dogma spouted by those dunder-headed pundits is contradicted by the reality that there are quite a number of prominent individuals who voice support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the fact that they are professionally employed in the investment business. I will provide you with some examples.
On October 31, I discussed the propaganda war waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement, concluding the piece with my expectation that Jeremy Grantham’s upcoming third quarter newsletter would provide some sorely-needed, astute commentary on the situation. Jeremy Grantham, rated by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, finally released an abbreviated edition of that newsletter one month later than usual, due to a busy schedule. In addition to expressing some supportive comments about the OWS movement, Grantham noted that he will be providing a special supplement, based specifically on that subject:
Meriting a separate, special point are the drastic declines in both U.S. income equality – the U.S. has become quite quickly one of the least equal societies – and in the stickiness of economic position from one generation to another. We have gone from having been notably upwardly mobile during the Eisenhower era to having fallen behind other developed countries today, even the U.K.! The net result of these factors is a growing feeling of social injustice, a weakening of social cohesiveness, and, possibly, a decrease in work ethic. A healthy growth rate becomes more difficult.
* * *
Sitting on planes over the last several weeks with nothing to do but read and think, I found myself worrying increasingly about the 1% and the 99% and the appearance we give of having become a plutocracy, and a rather mean-spirited one at that. And, one backed by a similarly mean-spirited majority on the Supreme Court. (I will try to post a letter addressed to the “Occupy … Everywhere” folks shortly.)
Hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation and the publisher of one of the most widely-read financial blogs, The Big Picture. Among the many pro-OWS postings which have appeared on that site was this recent piece, offering the movement advice similar to what can be expected from Jeremy Grantham:
To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation.
I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:
1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative process
* * *
You will note that these three goals are issues that both the Left and the Right — Libertarians and Liberals — should be able to agree upon. These are all doable measurable goals, that can have a real impact on legislation, the economy and taxes.
But amending the Constitution to eliminate dirty money from politics is an essential task. Failing to do that means backsliding from whatever gains are made. Whatever is accomplished will be temporary without campaign finance reform . . .
Writing for the DealBook blog at The New York Times, Jesse Eisinger provided us with the laments of a few Wall Street insiders, whose attitudes are aligned with those of the OWS movement:
Last week, I had a conversation with a man who runs his own trading firm. In the process of fuming about competition from Goldman Sachs, he said with resignation and exasperation: “The fact that they were bailed out and can borrow for free – it’s pretty sickening.”
* * *
Sadly, almost none of these closeted occupier-sympathizers go public. But Mike Mayo, a bank analyst with the brokerage firm CLSA, which is majority-owned by the French bank Crédit Agricole, has done just that. In his book “Exile on Wall Street” (Wiley), Mr. Mayo offers an unvarnished account of the punishments he experienced after denouncing bank excesses. Talking to him, it’s hard to tell you aren’t interviewing Michael Moore.
* * *
I asked Richard Kramer, who used to work as a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs until he got fed up with how it did business and now runs his own firm, Arete Research, what was going wrong. He sees it as part of the business model.
“There have been repeated fines and malfeasance at literally all the investment banks, but it doesn’t seem to affect their behavior much,” he said. “So I have to conclude it is part of strategy as simple cost/benefit analysis, that fines and legal costs are a small price to pay for the profits.”
Mr. Kramer’s contention was supported by a recent analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission documents by The New York Times, which revealed “that since 1996, there have been at least 51 repeat violations by those firms. Bank of America and Citigroup have each had six repeat violations, while Merrill Lynch and UBS have each had five.”
At the ever-popular Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden provided us with the observations of a disillusioned, first-year hedge fund analyst. Durden’s introductory comments in support of that essay, provide us with a comprehensive delineation of the tactics used by Wall Street to crush individual “retail” investors:
Regular readers know that ever since 2009, well before the confidence destroying flash crash of May 2010, Zero Hedge had been advocating that regular retail investors shun the equity market in its entirety as it is anything but “fair and efficient” in which frontrunning for a select few is legal, in which insider trading is permitted for politicians and is masked as “expert networks” for others, in which the government itself leaks information to a hand-picked elite of the wealthiest investors, in which investment banks send out their “huddle” top picks to “whale” accounts before everyone else gets access, in which hedge funds form “clubs” and collude in moving the market, in which millisecond algorithms make instantaneous decisions which regular investors can never hope to beat, in which daily record volatility triggers sell limits virtually assuring daytrading losses, and where the bid/ask spreads for all but the choicest few make the prospect of breaking even, let alone winning, quite daunting. In short: a rigged casino. What is gratifying is to see that this warning is permeating an ever broader cross-section of the retail population with hundreds of billions in equity fund outflows in the past two years. And yet, some pathological gamblers still return day after day, in hope of striking it rich, despite odds which make a slot machine seem like the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In that regard, we are happy to present another perspective: this time from a hedge fund insider who while advocating his support for the OWS movement, explains, in no uncertain terms, and in a somewhat more detailed and lucid fashion, both how and why the market is not only broken, but rigged, and why it is nothing but a wealth extraction mechanism in which the richest slowly but surely steal the money from everyone else who still trades any public stock equity.
The anonymous hedge fund analyst concluded his discourse with this point:
In other words, if you aren’t in the .1%, you have no access to the derivatives markets, you have no access to the special deals that hedge funds and other wealthy investors get, and you have no access to the resources, information, strategic services, tax exemptions, and capital that the top .1% is getting.
If you have any questions about what some of the concepts above mean, ask and I will try my best to answer. I’m a first-year analyst on Wall Street, and based on what I see day in and day out, I support the OWS movement 100%.
You are now informed beyond the influence of those presstitutes, who regularly attempt to convince the public that an important goal of the Occupy Movement is to destroy the livelihoods of those who work on Wall Street.
There seems to be a consensus that bond traders are smarter than stock traders. Consider this thought from Investopedia’s Financial Edge website:
Many investors believe bond traders understand the economy better than equity traders. Bond traders pay very close attention to any economic factor that might affect interest rates. Equity traders recognize that changes in bond prices provide a good indication of what bond traders think of the economy.
Widespread belief that Ben Bernanke’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has created a stock market “bubble” has led to fear that the bubble may soon pop and cause the market to crash. It was strange to see that subject discussed by John Melloy at CNBC, given the news outlet’s reputation for stock market cheerleading. Nevertheless, Mr. Melloy recently presented us with some ominous information:
The Yale School of Management since 1989 has asked wealthy individual investors monthly to give the “probability of a catastrophic stock market crash in the U.S. in the next six months.”
In the latest survey in December, almost 75 percent of respondents gave it at least a 10 percent chance of happening. That’s up from 68 percent who gave it a 10 percent probability last April, just before the events of May 6, 2010.
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The Flash Crash Commission – containing members of the CFTC and SEC – made a series of recommendations for improving market structure Friday, including single stock circuit breakers, a more reliable audit trail on trades, and curbing the use of cancelled trades by high-frequency traders. They still don’t know what actually caused the nearly 1,000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in a matter of minutes.
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Overall volume has been very light in the market though, as the individual investor put more money into bonds last year than stocks in spite of the gains. Strategists said this has been one of the longer bull markets (starting in March 2009) with barely any retail participation. Flows into equity mutual funds did turn positive in January and have continued this month however, according to ICI and TrimTabs.com. Yet the fear of a crash persists.
Whether or not one is concerned about the possibility of a market crash, consensual ambivalence toward equities is on the rise. Felix Salmon recently wrote an article for The New York Times entitled, “Wall Street’s Dead End”, which began with the observation that the number of companies listed on the major domestic exchanges peaked in 1997 and has been declining ever since. Mr. Salmon discussed the recent trend toward private financing of corporations, as opposed to the tradition of raising capital by offering shares for sale on the stock exchanges:
Only the biggest and oldest companies are happy being listed on public markets today. As a result, the stock market as a whole increasingly fails to reflect the vibrancy and heterogeneity of the broader economy. To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite.
At risk, then, is the shareholder democracy that America forged, slowly, over the past 50 years. Civilians, rather than plutocrats, controlled corporate America, and that relationship improved standards of living and usually kept the worst of corporate abuses in check. With America Inc. owned by its citizens, the success of American business translated into large gains in the stock portfolios of anybody who put his savings in the market over most of the postwar period.
Today, however, stock markets, once the bedrock of American capitalism, are slowly becoming a noisy sideshow that churns out increasingly meager returns. The show still gets lots of attention, but the real business of the global economy is inexorably leaving the stock market — and the vast majority of us — behind.
His latest investment letter identifies four scenarios in which bondholders would get burned. Basically these are sovereign default, currency devaluation, inflation, and poor returns relative to other asset classes.
In other words, you can’t win. Gross compares Ben Bernanke to the devil and calls ZIRP a devil’s haircut: “This is not God’s work – it has the unmistakable odor of Mammon.”
Gross recommends putting money in foreign bonds and other assets that yield more than Treasuries.
I was particularly impressed with what Bill Gross had to say about the necessary steps for making America more competitive in the global marketplace:
We need to find a new economic Keynes or at least elect a chastened Congress that can take our structurally unemployed and give them a chance to be productive workers again. We must have a President whose idea of “centrist” policy is not to hand out presents to the right and the left and then altruistically proclaim the benefits of bipartisanship. We need a President who does more than propose “Win The Future” at annual State of the Union addresses without policy follow-up. America requires more than a makeover or a facelift. It needs a heart transplant absent the contagious antibodies of money and finance filtering through the system. It needs a Congress that cannot be bought and sold by lobbyists on K Street, whose pockets in turn are stuffed with corporate and special interest group payola. Are record corporate profits a fair price for America’s soul? A devil’s bargain more than likely.
You can’t discuss bond fund managers these days, without mentioning Jeffrey Gundlach, who recently founded DoubleLine Capital. Jonathan Laing of Barron’s wrote a great article about Gundlach entitled “The King of Bonds”. When I reached the third paragraph of that piece, I had to re-read this startling fact:
His DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund (DBLTX), with $4.5 billion of assets as of Jan. 31, outperformed every one of the 91 bond funds in the Morningstar intermediate-bond-fund universe in 2010, despite launching only in April. It notched a total return of 16.6%, compared with returns of 8.36% for the giant Pimco Total Return Fund (PTTAX), run by the redoubtable Bill Gross . . .
The essay described how Gundlach’s former employer, TCW, feared that Gundlach was planning to leave the firm. Accordingly, TCW made a pre-emptive strike and fired Gundlach. From there, the story gets more interesting:
Five weeks after Gundlach’s dismissal, TCW sued the manager, four subordinates and DoubleLine for allegedly stealing trade secrets, including client lists, transaction information and proprietary security-valuation systems. The suit also charged that a search of Gundlach’s offices had turned up a trove of porn magazines, X-rated DVDs and sexual devices, as well as marijuana.
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He charges TCW with employing “smear tactics … to destroy our business.” As for “the sex tapes and such,” he says, they represented “a closed chapter in my life.”
That’s certainly easy to understand. Porn just hasn’t been the same since Ginger Lynn retired.
Jeff Gundlach’s December webcast entitled, “Independence Day” can be found here. Take a good look at the graph on page 16: “Top 0.1% Income Earners Share of Total Income”. It’s just one of many reminders that our country is headed in the wrong direction.
Comments Off on Stock Market Bears Have Not Yet Left The Building
The new year has brought an onslaught of optimistic forecasts about the stock market and the economy. I suspect that much of this enthusiasm is the result of the return of stock market indices to “pre-Lehman levels” (with the S&P 500 above 1,250). The “Lehman benchmark” is based on conditions as they existed on September 12, 2008 – the date on which Lehman Brothers collapsed. The importance of the Lehman benchmark is primarily psychological — often a goal to be reached in this era of “less bad” economic conditions. The focus on the return of market and economic indicators to pre-Lehman levels is something I refer to as “pre-Lehmanism”. You can find examples of pre-Lehmanism in discussions of such diverse subjects as: the plastic molding press industry in Japan, copper consumption, home sales, bank dividends (hopeless) and economic growth. Sometimes, pre-Lehmanism will drive a discussion to prognostication based on the premise that since we have surpassed the Lehman benchmark, we could be on our way back to good times. Here’s a recent example from Bloomberg News:
“Lehman is the poster child for the demise of the banking industry,” said Michael Mullaney, who helps manage $9.5 billion at Fiduciary Trust Co. in Boston. “We’ve recovered from that. We’re comfortable with equities. If we do get a continuation of the strength in the economy and corporate earnings, we could get a reasonably good year for stocks in 2011.”
Despite all of this enthusiasm, some commentators are looking behind the rosy headlines to examine the substantive facts underlying the claims. Consider this recent discussion by Michael Panzner, publisher of Financial Armageddon and When Giants Fall:
Yes, there are some developments that look, superficially at least, like good news. But if you dig even a little bit deeper, it seems that more often than not nowadays there is less there than meets the eye.
The optimists have talked, for example, about the recovery in corporate profits, but they downplay the layoffs and cut-backs in investment that contributed to those gains. They note the recovery in the banking sector, but forget to mention all of the financial and political assistance those firms have received — and are still receiving. They highlight signs of stability in the housing market, but ignore lopsidedly bearish supply-and-demand fundamentals that are impossible to miss.
In an earlier posting, Michael Panzner questioned the enthusiasm about a report that 24 percent of employers participating in a survey expressed plans to boost hiring of full-time employees during 2011, compared to last year’s 20 percent of surveyed employers:
Call me a cynic (for the umpteenth time), but the fact that less that less than a quarter of employers plan to boost full-time hiring this year — a measly four percentage-point increase from last year — doesn’t sound especially “healthy” to me.
No matter how you slice it, the so-called recovery still seems to be largely a figment of the bulls’ imagination.
As for specific expectations about stock market performance during 2011, Jessie of Jesse’s Café Américain provided us with the outlook of someone on the trading floor of an exchange:
I had the opportunity to speak with a pit trader the other day, and he described the mood amongst traders as cautious. They see the stock market rising and cannot get in front of it, as the buying is too well backed. But the volumes are so thin and the action so phony that they cannot get comfortable on the long side either, so are buying insurance against a correction even while riding the rally higher.
This is a market setup for a flash crash.
Last May’s “flash crash” and the suspicious “late day rallies” on thin volume aren’t the only events causing individual investors to feel as though they’re being scammed. A recent essay by Charles Hugh Smith noted the consequences of driving “the little guy” out of the market:
Small investors (so-called retail investors) have been exiting the U.S. stock market for 34 straight weeks, pulling almost $100 billion out of the market. They are voting with their feet based on their situational awareness that the game is rigged, and that the rigging alone greatly increases the risks of another meltdown.
John Hussman of the Hussman Funds recently provided a technical analysis demonstrating that – at least for now – the risk/reward ratio is just not that favorable:
As of last week, the stock market remained characterized by an overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yields condition that has historically produced poor average market returns, and consistently so across historical time frames. However, this condition is also associated with what I’ve called “unpleasant skew” – the most probable market movement is actually a small advance to marginal new highs, but the right tail is truncated and the left tail is fat, meaning that there is a lower than normal likelihood of large gains, and a much larger than normal potential for sharp and abrupt market losses.
The notoriously bearish Doug Kass is actually restrained with his pessimism for 2011, expecting the market to go “sideways” or “flat” (meaning no significant rise or fall). Nevertheless, Kass saw fit to express his displeasure over the degree of cheerleading that can be seen in the mass media:
The recent market advance has spurred an accumulation of optimism. S&P price targets are being lifted by many whose memories are short and who had blinders on as the equity market and economy entered the last downturn. Bullish sentiment, coincident with rising share prices, is approaching an extreme, and the chorus of bullish talking heads grows ever louder on CNBC and elsewhere.
Speculation has entered the market. The Iomegans of the late 1990s tech bubble have been replaced by the Shen Zhous, who worship at the altar of rare earths.
Not only are trends in the market being too easily extrapolated, the same might be true for the health of the domestic economy.
On New Year’s Eve, Kelly Evans of The Wall Street Journal wrote a great little article, summing-up the year-end data, which has fueled the market bullishness. Beyond that, Ms. Evans provided a caveat that would never cross the minds of most commentators:
Still, Wall Street’s exuberance should send shudders down any contrarian’s spine. To the extent the stock market anticipates growth, the economy will have to fire on all cylinders next year and then some. At least one cylinder, the housing market, still is sputtering. Upward pressure on food and gas prices also threatens to keep a lid on consumer confidence and rob from spending power even as the labor market continues its gradual and choppy recovery.
The coming year could turn out to be the reverse of 2010: decent economic growth, but a disappointing showing by the stock market. That’s the last thing most people expect right now, precisely why investors should be worried about it happening.
The new year may be off to a great start . . . but the stock market bears have not yet left the building. Ignore their warnings at your own peril.
By now, you are probably more than familiar with the “backdoor bailouts” of the Wall Street Banks – the most infamous of which, Maiden Lane III, included a $13 billion gift to Goldman Sachs as a counterparty to AIG’s bad paper. Despite Goldman’s claims of having repaid the money it received from TARP, the $13 billion obtained via Maiden Lane III was never repaid. Goldman needed it for bonuses.
On August 21, my favorite reporter for The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson, discussed another “bank bailout”: a “secret tax” that diverts money to banks at a cost of approximately $350 billion per year to investors and savers. Here’s how it works:
Sharply cutting interest rates vastly increases banks’ profits by widening the spread between what they pay to depositors and what they receive from borrowers. As such, the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policy is yet another government bailout for the very industry that drove the economy to the brink.
Todd E. Petzel, chief investment officer at Offit Capital Advisors, a private wealth management concern, characterizes the Fed’s interest rate policy as an invisible tax that costs savers and investors roughly $350 billion a year. This tax is stifling consumption, Mr. Petzel argues, and is pushing investors to reach for yields in riskier securities that they wouldn’t otherwise go near.
* * *
“If we thought this zero-interest-rate policy was lowering people’s credit card bills it would be one thing but it doesn’t,” he said. Neither does it seem to be resulting in increased lending by the banks. “It’s a policy matter that people are not focusing on,” Mr. Petzel added.
One reason it’s not a priority is that savers and people living on fixed incomes have no voice in Washington. The banks, meanwhile, waltz around town with megaphones.
Savers aren’t the only losers in this situation; underfunded pensions and crippled endowments are as well.
Many commentators have pointed out that zero-interest-rate-policy (often referred to as “ZIRP”) was responsible for the stock market rally that began in the Spring of 2009. Bert Dohmen made this observation for Forbes back on October 30, 2009:
There is very little, if any, investment buying. In my view, we are seeing a mini-bubble in the stock market, fueled by ZIRP, the “zero interest rate policy” of the Fed.
At this point, retail investors (the “mom and pop” customers of discount brokerage firms) are no longer impressed. After the “flash crash” of May 6 and the revelations about stock market manipulation by high-frequency trading (HFT), retail investors are now avoiding mutual funds. Graham Bowley’s recent report for The New York Times has been quoted and re-published by a number of news outlets. Here is the ugly truth:
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.
The pretext of providing “liquidity” to the stock markets is no longer viable. The only remaining reasons for continuing ZIRP are to mitigate escalating deficits and stopping the spiral of deflation. Whether or not that strategy works, one thing is for certain: ZIRP is enriching the banks — at the public’s expense.
In the wake of the stock market’s “flash crash” on May 6, there have been an increasing number of reports that retail investors (“Ma and Pa”) are pulling their money out of stocks. Beyond that, some commentators have stepped forward to speak out and advise retail investors to steer clear of the stock market, due to the volatility caused by “high-frequency trading” or HFT. One recent example of this was Felix Salmon’s video message, which appeared at The Huffington Post.
HFT involves a practice wherein firms are paid a small “rebate” (approximately one-half cent per trade) by the exchanges themselves when the firms buy and sell stocks. The purpose of paying firms to make such trades (often selling a stock for the same price they paid for it) is to provide liquidity for the markets. As a result, retail investors would not have to worry about getting stuck in a “roach motel” – not being able to get out once they got in – after buying a stock. Many firms involved in high-frequency trading (Goldman Sachs, RGM Advisors, Tradebot Systems and others) have their computer servers “co-located” in the same building as the exchange, in order to get each of their orders processed a few nanoseconds faster than orders coming from further distances (albeit at the speed of light). The Zero Hedge website has been critical of HFT for quite a while. They recently published this informative piece on the subject, pointing out how HFT firms caused the catastrophe on May 6:
. . . when the selling in size commences they all just shut down. So much for providing liquidity when it is needed.
At The Market Ticker website, Karl Denninger explained how HFT platforms often use “predatory algorithms” to drive a stock’s price up to the full extent of a customer’s limit order (a practice called “frontrunning”):
Let’s say that there is a buyer willing to buy 100,000 shares of BRCM with a limit price of $26.40. That is, the buyer will accept any price up to $26.40.
But the market at this particular moment in time is at $26.10, or thirty cents lower.
So the computers, having detected via their “flash orders” (which ought to be illegal) that there is a desire for Broadcom shares, start to issue tiny (typically 100 share lots) “immediate or cancel” orders – IOCs – to sell at $26.20. If that order is “eaten” the computer then issues an order at $26.25, then $26.30, then $26.35, then $26.40. When it tries $26.45 it gets no bite and the order is immediately canceled.
Now the flush of supply comes at, big coincidence, $26.39, and the claim is made that the market has become “more efficient.”
Nonsense; there was no “real seller” at any of these prices! This pattern of offering was intended to do one and only one thing – manipulate the market by discovering what is supposed to be a hidden piece of information – the other side’s limit price!
The extent to which frontrunning takes place was the subject of a recent conversation between Larry Tabb of Tabb Group and Erin Burnett on CNBC. The Zero Hedge website provided this analysis of the video clip:
The funniest bit of the exchange occurs at 3:35 into the clip, when Tabb publicly discloses that front-running is not only legal but occurs all the time on open exchanges. When Erin Burnett, who unfortunately still thinks that the Deutsche Mark is used in Germany, asks who is doing the front running, Tabb says “It could be anyone.”
A recent piece by Josh Lipton at the Minyanville website focused on the activity of retail investors since the recent “flash crash”:
Specifically, during the past week through May 12, your friends and neighbors pulled $2.8 billion out of US stock funds, according to the latest data from the professional number crunchers at Lipper FMI.
To put that stat in context, we called up Robert Adler, the head of Lipper FMI Americas, for a chat this morning. He tells us that’s the most investors have pulled out, in fact, since March 11, 2009.
At the same time, says Adler, investors plowed $16.6 billion into money-market funds. “That’s the first inflows money market funds have seen in the last 16 weeks,” he says.
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“There was an about-face this past week by investors,” Adler says, noting that such outflows from both equity and bond funds, and a sharp reversal in money market funds, demonstrate a clear and dramatic shift in sentiment.
The analyst is quick to emphasize, however, that one week doesn’t make a trend. “We have to wait another week to see whether this was simply event driven or if this is the beginning of a new trend,” he says.
The current risk-aversion experienced by retail investors is compounded by the ugly truth that stocks are currently overvalued. Shawn Tully of Fortune made this very clear in a May 17 commentary, wherein he provided us with a sage bit of prognostication:
Here’s how I see the odds. The chances are about one in three that we suffer a huge, wrenching correction in the next year or two similar to the one in 1987. That possibility is so high because stocks are so startlingly expensive. Another high probability event is that markets go on a long sideways grind, with smaller drops along the way. What’s extremely unlikely is that the market rises substantially from current levels and stays there for any extended period.
Whatever happens in the next couple of years, the odds are overwhelming that investors who buy stocks today will reap puny returns for 10 years. For example, if you’d purchased shares at today’s PE of 22 in early 2003, you would have gotten a return of around 3% a year, barely enough to compensate for inflation, let alone buy the blood pressure medication you’d need to survive the scary ride of stock ownership.
Now let’s look out a decade or two. The evidence is extremely strong that price matters, and matters a lot: except in rare cases, buying stocks when they are pricey — when the Shiller PE exceeds 20 — leads to puny returns ten years later.
Not that you’d ever know that from the happy talk from Wall Street. So screen the noise out, and follow the numbers. They’ll eventually get better for investors. But to get back there, we may revisit October of 1987.
Considering the unlimited number of awful news events unfolding in America and around the world right now, we could be headed for a market crash much worse that that of October, 1987. Cheers!
Have you become sick of hearing about the “green shoots”? Back on March 15, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared on 60 Minutes and made the self-serving, self-congratulatory claim that “green shoots” could be found in the economy. I guess we’re supposed to thank him for all the extra money printing he had mandated, to facilitate this claimed result. While we normal people continued to cope with ongoing job losses, an almost nonexistent job market, unavailable mortgages, a constipated real estate market and fear about the future . . . Chairman Bernanke was trying to sell us on some good news. Since that time, the expression “green shoots” has been the mantra for those pundits who, for whatever reason, want the naive public to believe in the emperor’s new clothes. The usual motive for chatting up the “green shoots” is to encourage a widespread popular return to investing in the stock market and by so doing, make life more rewarding for those at brokerage firms.
This week brings us a “reality check” that will come in the form of earnings reports from the second quarter of 2009, required for disclosure by publicly-held corporations, traded on our nation’s stock exchanges. Recent news reports have focused on the fact that despite the “bear market rally” that began in May, last week’s drop in stock prices revealed widespread investor concern that the truth will not support all the hype they have been reading since the spring. Here’s what E.S. Browning had to say in the July 8 edition of The Wall Street Journal:
Expectations for the current earnings season are very low, and investors are worried companies will give weak outlooks for the second half of the year.
“We kind of think the market got ahead of itself. It ran too fast, too hard, and we are soon going to be staring at second-quarter earnings reports that are not going to be pretty,” said Janna Sampson, who helps oversee $1.3 billion as co-chief investment officer of OakBrook Investments in Lisle, Ill.
After the market bottomed March 9, investors increasingly embraced risky assets, bidding up stocks, especially those of smaller companies with little or no profit.
Those unfortunate investors were hit by two “sucker punches”. The first was the often-repeated claim that “stocks are now a bargain . . . we’ve hit the bottom so now is the time to BUY!” The second sucker punch involved the use of high-speed trading programs (such as the one recently stolen from Goldman Sachs) to run up the prices on stocks and exploit “retail investors” such as you and me. An astute explanation of this process was recently published by Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi of Themis Trading. You can read that report here. What’s even more interesting about the computer program used by (and stolen from) Goldman Sachs, is the statement made by Assistant U.S.Attorney Joseph Facciponti, as quoted in the July 6 article by David Glovin and Christine Harper for Bloomberg News:
“The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways,” Facciponti said, according to a recording of the hearing made public today.
So Goldman Sachs has a computer program that allows the user to “manipulate the markets in unfair ways”? That’s quite a revelation! If that weren’t bad enough . . . according to a recent report by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge, Goldman Sachs is not the only kid on the block with a high-frequency trading program.
Alexendra Twin of CNN (in addition to providing us with a schedule of earnings reports and other important economic data to be released over this week and next) pointed out another important reason for last spring’s stock market rally, which is not likely to be a factor this month:
Last quarter, analysts and corporations alike ratcheted down forecasts, setting up a period in which a greater percentage of companies than usual beat forecasts. But this quarter could be different. Fewer companies have been cutting forecasts and analysts haven’t budged as much either, giving corporations less of an opportunity to defy expectations.
“The question is whether we’ll see a similar surprise factor this time,” said John Butters, senior research analyst at Thomson Reuters. “If companies haven’t cut and analysts haven’t cut, can results beat forecasts?”
My take on this process is a bit more cynical: the system is being “gamed” by companies’ providing artificially low estimates for future earnings, in order to win at what commentator Bill Fleckenstein calls “beat the number”.
Once we have read about all these reports — will we finally stop hearing about “green shoots”? I have my money on bad economic news, as I continue to maintain my position in the SRS exchange-traded fund. Nevertheless, I’m keeping one hand on the ripcord, ready to bail out at any minute.
Would you be willing to wager your life savings on pro-wrestling matches? That is basically what you are doing when you invest in the stock market these days. The game is being rigged. If you are just a “retail investor” or “little guy”, you run the risk of having your investment in this “bear market rally” significantly diminish in the blink of an eye. Regular readers of this blog (all four of them) know that this is one of my favorite subjects. In my posting on May 21, I recalled feeling a little paranoid last December when I wrote this:
Do you care to hazard a guess as to what the next Wall Street scandal might be? I have a pet theory concerning the almost-daily spate of “late-day rallies” in the equities markets. I’ve discussed it with some knowledgeable investors. I suspect that some of the bailout money squandered by Treasury Secretary Paulson has found its way into the hands of some miscreants who are using this money to manipulate the stock markets. I have a hunch that their plan is to run up stock prices at the end of the day before those numbers have a chance to settle back down to the level where the market would normally have them. The inflated “closing price” for the day is then perceived as the market value of the stock. This plan would be an effort to con investors into believing that the market has pulled out of its slump. Eventually the victims would find themselves hosed once again at the next “market correction”. I don’t believe that SEC Chairman Christopher Cox would likely uncover such a scam, given his track record.
After my last posting about this subject on May 21, I have continued to read quite a number of opinions by authoritative sources, echoing my belief that the stock market is being manipulated. Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge has been quite diligent about exposing incidents of “tape painting”. Some examples appear here and here. In case you don’t know what is meant by “painting the tape”, here is a definition:
An illegal action by a group of market manipulators buying and/or selling a security among themselves to create artificial trading activity, which, when reported on the ticker tape, lures in unsuspecting investors as they perceive an unusual volume.
After causing a movement in the security, the manipulators hope to sell at a profit.
As one might expect, this activity is more easily accomplished on days when trading volume is low. On June 11, Craig Brown had this to say about the subject on the Seeking Alpha website:
I have read some posts about some suspicions on perhaps some entities painting the tape. Volume has been light so it is something that could happen. We will see if these conspiracy theories play out.
Regular readers of Zero Hedge (it’s on my blogroll, at the right) had the opportunity to see some televised interviews during the past few days, when professionals have complained about “tape painting” in the equities markets. On Monday, June 29, we saw on (of all places) CNBC, a discussion with Larry Levin, a futures trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I would consider CNBC the last place to criticize “pumping” of stock prices, since their commentary often seems designed to do just that. Nevertheless, watch and listen to what Larry Levin had to say at 2:22 into this video clip. He explains that “this market continues to be propped up by government intervention and manipulation” and he unequivocally accuses the Obama administration of acting to “prop this market up on a daily basis”. Again, on Wednesday, July 1, visitors to the Zero Hedge website had the opportunity to see this June 30 clip from Bloomberg TV, wherein Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading noted that “you’ve got government forecasts that are intentionally misleading us, constantly”. He went on to emphasize that the trading volume we see every day is “fictitious — it’s not real”. He explained the potential hazards to retail investors caused by trading programs that “artificially inflate the prices” of stocks, although a “news event” could cause that program trading to abruptly reverse, erasing a valuable portion of the retail investors’ assets.
On June 24, Bret Rosenthal posted an article on the HedgeCo.net website, entitled: “Coping With Government-Sponsored Market Manipulation”. Here’s some of what he had to say:
We must not allow the government manipulations to cloud our judgement and sucker us into investments that have no hope of success over time. Example: the government-sponsored rally in the financials over the last 3+ months was clearly created to help the banking sector raise capital. Again, if you wish to argue this point I suggest you go down to the water’s edge and scream at the tide. Massive amounts of capital were raised through the secondary markets for financial companies in the last 30 days. This is a simple fact. Now that this manipulation is complete and private capital has been sucked in where will the equity markets go?
The best advice for the retail investor, attempting to navigate through the current “bear market rally” was provided by Graham Summers, Senior Market Strategist at OmniSans Investment Research, in this July 1 posting at the Seeking Alpha website:
This rally has sucker punched the shorts countless times now, particularly when it comes to late-day market manipulation. In a nutshell, every time stocks begin showing signs of breaking down, someone steps in, usually during the final 30 minutes of trading, to push the market back into positive territory. So while economic fundamentals indicate we’ve come much too far too fast, it’s hard to make money trading based on this information.
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To rephrase the above thoughts, stocks are currently trading where they should be a full year from now assuming that the economy turns around this fall. This hardly makes a strong case for greater gains or more upward momentum. But it’s hard to go short with the historic rig that is currently taking place in the market.
So my advice to anyone right now is to stay put. This week is a wash anyhow due to it being short and due to performance gaming: portfolio managers and institutional investors pushing stocks higher so they can close out the quarter with gains on their positions. Indeed, yesterday’s market volume on the NYSE was the lowest we’ve seen since January 5, 2009.
So don’t open any new positions for now. This week will be exceedingly choppy. And with volume drying up to a trickle, there is potential for some violent swings as the big boys play around with their end of the quarter shenanigans. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of one of those swings.
Meanwhile, I’ve been watching my investment in the SRS exchange-traded fund (which inversely tracks the IYR real estate index, at twice the magnitude) unwind during the past few days, erasing the nice profit I made just after getting into it. Will I bail? Nawww! I’m waiting for that “news event” to turn things around.
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.