Strong wage growth in January ignited inflation concerns and sent equity markets tumbling Talk of tariffs and trade barriers in March further dented already fragile investor sentiment The
2017 was a good year for markets, almost too good in fact. For the first time in history, the S&P 500 Index had no negative months during the calendar year.
Equity-market volatility hit an all-time low in Q3 Low volatility and strong equity markets were likely the result of improved economic fundamentals during the period On the other hand, policy
Trump’s agenda of regulatory rollback, infrastructure spending and tax cuts is all but stuck in Washington’s ideologically fractured environment. Strong earnings made up for stalled policy and a lack of
The so-called “Trump Trade” began to lose steam toward the end of Q1 as it became clear that single-party control in Washington wouldn’t necessarily translate into quick results Events abroad
Markets had a hard reset in Q4 with the election of Donald Trump on November 8th. Initially global equity markets plunged, but within hours began to recover and rallied strongly throughout the quarter, mostly on speculation that the new president would usher in tax cuts, deregulation and a sweeping fiscal spending program.
In the wake of “Brexit,” central banks reasserted themselves over markets in a big way in Q3, sending bond yields to historic lows. The recent wave of populism in the developed world is targeting institutions that have been supportive of capital markets for the better part of 70 years. To the extent these political movements prevail, they would likely carry negative economic consequences.
Events in Q1 took the Fed off message and “Brexit” further complicated its story Given the limited set of policy tools, the Fed seems to want to play it safe and is reluctant to raise rates until it has strong evidence of inflationary pressures
The smooth December lift-off in rates was derailed in January by a rolling set of concerns that culminated in markets pricing in (at least for now) a more gradual pace of interest rate tightening than previously expected.
The Central Bank divergence story – the idea that instability in capital markets would be driven by diverging monetary policy among the world’s largest economies - is alive and well but evolving, with more pain in store for interest-rate sensitive investments
As of this writing, the S&P 500 has gone 1,302 days without a correction of 10% or greater, the second longest run since World War II. As far as the untrained eye can see, risk appears to have disappeared from markets.
Larry Cao, of the CFA Institute, writes that risk factor diversification - like that used at Rain Capital - is one of the most important advances in portfolio construction techniques in recent decades and is increasingly used by sophisticated institutional investors.
The inflation conundrum dogging the US economy right now has a lot of observers scratching their heads. The economy clocked 5% real GDP growth in Q3:2014 and an estimated 2.6% in Q4. Unemployment at 5.6% is at levels that have historically begun to generate wage inflation, but there is little to speak of. Explanations range from labor market slack to deflationary pressures from abroad, but economists at the Fed are pointing markets to a simpler answer: zero interest rate policy.
Regulators are (correctly in our opinion) focusing a great deal of attention on the very different legal and ethical standards that brokers and Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) are held to. The SEC’s concern stems from the fact that investors generally aren’t aware of the meaningful differences and their legal implications. Barry Ritholtz does a nice job summarizing these differences in a recent Washington Post column.
The market isn’t hearing the Fed’s increasingly hawkish message, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The take away? The authors reiterate Chairwoman Yellen’s words from earlier this year “. . .investors may underappreciate the potential for losses and volatility going forward.”
A flurry of communication has come out of the Fed in recent days – from hawks and doves alike - all focused on the need to change forward guidance on interest rates.
Federal Reserve officials have very nearly written our letter for us this quarter. Earlier this year we worried economic data were increasingly at odds with the Fed’s policy stance, a conflict that would eventually result in a sharp change in tone from the central bank.
A new interest rate cycle is upon us. The Fed has said – and the market is largely in agreement - that within a year short-term interest rates are likely to rise. We have already spent considerable effort purging interest rate risk from portfolios.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen joked in her speech today at the Economic Club of New York, “if the economy obediently followed our forecasts, the job of central bankers would be a lot easier and their speeches would be a lot shorter.”
One perplexed Fed watcher recently observed that “Fed policy. . .is maddeningly disconnected from their [sic] forecasts.” After all, how can the Fed legitimately be concerned about unemployment and low inflation while simultaneously winding down bond purchases?
We have expressed concern for some time that markets have been too sanguine about the eventual ‘lift off’ from zero rates, ignoring a recurring Fed narrative that has attempted to guide toward an earlier exit should economic progress (as narrowly defined by the unemployment rate and inflation) justify it.
Unemployment and inflation generally work against each other. The Fed was counting on that relationship holding up when it established a dual threshold based on those indicators in late 2012. The idea was that as the two converged (or diverged), markets would better understand the future direction of monetary policy and adjust accordingly.
At Rain we talk a lot about what we call ‘information days,’ brief periods of time that are extremely rich with information. We find that evaluating narrow time periods of isolated stress (or euphoria) can be just as informative about manager positioning and underlying risks as longer-term statistics, if not more.
From a diversification standpoint, understanding how a hypothetical pair walking down the middle of a street together might be related (or integrated) is enormous; is it a man and his dog tethered by a leash, a husband and wife, two neighbors going to the same yard sale around the corner, or complete strangers?
After evaluating a great deal of data, a statistician finds that as ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply. Based on this strong correlation, the scientist concludes ice cream consumption causes drowning.
The first half of 2013 was a startling reminder of how poorly traditional asset allocation diversifies actual investment risk. For most, it proved to be an extremely difficult period to make money using the traditional approach because a single risk factor – interest rates – largely drove returns across asset classes.
A quick look at the July employment report seems to reinforce the importance of participation rates in the path to the 6.5% unemployment threshold Fed Chairman Bernanke laid out last December. As we’ve speculated, meager gains in employment can have a material impact on the unemployment rate because so many people are leaving the workforce due to demographic changes.
Those of you who have followed our thoughts about evolving Federal Reserve policy here and here and here will appreciate a forthcoming paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago which concludes that changing demographics have dramatically lowered the number of jobs it will take to impact the unemployment rate in the future.
There may be more to unemployment numbers than meets the eye. Conventional wisdom has it that as the economy rebounds and jobs are created, people begin to reenter the labor force, making the unemployment rate a particularly stubborn number on the way down.
The job of the Federal Reserve is ‘to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going’ as one Fed Chairman once said. Typically the process has started with a hike in short-term interest rates, a step toward the exit with the punch bowl in hand indicating the economic party was getting raucous.
As part of what one of our managers described as “a bull market in fear,” 2012 was a year in which central banks around the world ganged up against savers and forced them to choose between monetary debasement and navigating a minefield trying to escape it.
We believe many of the uncertainties that clouded the horizon in 2012 are slowly being resolved or constructively contained. In fact, we also see domestic economic strength that would indicate an earlier hike in interest rates than is currently priced into the market.
Investors can often mistake the asset diversity in their portfolios for adequate risk diversification. Author Jason Hsu, of Research Affiliates, argues many investors who are diversified around investment products may be poorly diversified by risks.
It’s been said physics explains 99% of the world with three laws, while economics explains 3% of the world with 99 laws. We found the data in the table interesting for a number of reasons, but namely for the fact that it would be nearly impossible for a trained economist to make sense of the past five or so years given these snapshots in time.
The professional investor who is benchmark agnostic, who doesn’t seek to eke out every penny of return at the expense of risk, who focuses on downside protection, and who is not handcuffed by a certain business model – be it active, passive or otherwise – has better odds of controlling for volatility.
Of all the experts that we would expect to undermine the basis of passive (index) investing, Standard and Poor’s, the creator of the widely-followed S&P 500 Index, was not high on our list. However, in a recent piece The Low-Volatility Effect: A Comprehensive Look, the company inadvertently does just that.
Indexing has always been peddled as a cheap, tax-efficient and safe way to get market returns. While it is unquestionably the cheapest and among the most tax-efficient ways to invest, safe it is not, the research shows.
Because of their formulaic nature, many indexes are prone to distortions over time (as we saw in the late 90’s, valuations on tech stocks drove up their market capitalizations and caused the tech weighting of the Russell 1000 Growth Index to hit 50% by 2000. Again in 2007, high flying financials rose to 36% of the Russell 1000 Value Index the year before delivering crushing losses).
We seem to live in a world where the markets believe bad news is good news. The worse things get, the more excited markets become about yet another round of stimulus by the Federal Reserve. Whether it’s uncertainty around Greek elections or weak economic data, markets have supreme confidence in the willingness of the Fed to support financial markets during economic weakness.
During market turmoil, traditional portfolios often decline more than investors expect, due to different, seemingly unrelated, asset classes moving in unison. As Ben Levisohn and Joe Light of the Wall Street Journal write, traditional asset allocation fails to achieve stable and robust diversification.
Today, the Fed has engineered a situation in which the really unattractive asset classes are the ones we have always thought of as low risk: government bonds and cash. And unlike the internet and housing bubbles, this time it isn’t a quasi-inadvertent side effect of Fed policies, but a basic aim of them.
Our goal is to grow your wealth with the most robust and stable diversification possible. Risk limits, stress testing and so on may be very useful tools, but can’t overcome fundamentally flawed portfolio construction any more than a seatbelt can solve the problems inherent in reckless driving.
Overall, we’re cautiously optimistic about the recovery domestically, with an eye toward the various external macro forces that could disrupt it. As you know, we believe true diversification is a proactive process that requires looking under the surface of stated asset class objectives to identify underlying performance drivers and risks that could pervade multiple asset classes.
In financial markets, equilibrium is a constantly moving target; the textbook “steady state” or “balance” doesn’t exist in an open and global economy. Some external shock is introduced and markets adjust to find the new balance between supply and demand for different assets.
The renewed strength that the US economy began to show late last year has translated into a number of opportunities in credit and equities domestically. On the credit side, our managers are tilting away from richer high yield and treasury bonds in favor of mortgage-backed securities and high quality corporate bonds.
It is not enough to take a narrow look at “Greece” or “Europe” exposure without exploring the various risk factors and knock-on effects associated with it – it’s impact on liquidity, volatility, growth and so on. One of the more likely secondary effects the European crisis will be on certain emerging markets investments.
At Rain, we decompose strategies by risk factors. We deliberately select strategies on the defensive end of portfolios that are diversified by those risk factors. We use tools on the bond side that allow for far greater flexibility to manage exposure to interest rate and credit spread risk as well as non-fixed-income-centric strategies whose returns are largely independent of interest rate risk and safe-haven volatility. This allows us to build more dependable and truly diversified qualities into the defensive side of client portfolios.
There is always a trade-off between the return sacrifice and diversification benefit a strategy brings to a portfolio. Long-dated bonds and treasuries in particular, have demonstrated strong diversification benefits in portfolio construction because of their negative correlation to other asset classes, like equities.
Widely accepted ways of measuring risk simply do a poor job of showing it. Risk encompasses the multitude of scenarios an investment could deliver, not the single path that ends up being measured afterward. In other words, volatility, standard deviation (and the many ways they are sliced and diced in risk management models) tells us what has happened, not what might have happened or could happen in the future.
Bonds are the parachutes of the investment world; they have offered safe, stable income and their prices generally go up when everything else goes down, giving them a nice defensive quality in portfolios. Falling interest rates are the wind that keeps the parachute open and the greater the duration (interest rate sensitivity), the softer the landing.