Tag: market crash

AMONG THE 7 WORST TIMES IN HISTORY TO BE INVESTED IN STOCKS

Today will go down in history as one of the worst times in history to be invested in the stock market. Virtually no one believes this statement. That is why it will prove to be true. Every valuation method known to mankind is flashing red. A crash is baked in the cake. Will the trigger be Greek default, a Chinese market crash, a Fed rate increase, a derivative bet going boom, a Middle East event, someone doing something stupid in the South China Sea, a Ukrainian eruption, or a butterfly flapping its wings? When greed turns to fear, for whatever reason, the house of cards will collapse for the 3rd time in 15 years. Thank the “brilliant” bankers at the Federal Reserve.

I’ve picked out the most important passages from Hussman’s weekly letter for your enjoyment.

The financial markets are establishing an extreme that we expect investors will remember for the remainder of history, joining other memorable peers that include 1906, 1929, 1937, 1966, 1972, 2000 and 2007. The failure to recognize this moment as historic is largely because investors have been urged to believe things that aren’t true, have never been true, and can be demonstrated to be untrue across a century of history. The broad market has been in an extended distribution process for nearly a year (during which the NYSE Composite has gone nowhere) yet every marginal high or brief market burst seems infinitely important from a short-sighted perspective. Like other major peaks throughout history, we expect that these minor details will be forgotten within the sheer scope of what follows. And like other historical extremes, the beliefs that enable them are widely embraced as common knowledge, though there is always, always, some wrinkle that makes “this time” seem different. That is why history only rhymes. But in its broad refrain, this time is not different.

More enlightened leaders at the Federal Reserve would never have allowed, much less intentionally encouraged, yet the third speculative episode in 15 years. Unfortunately, the idea that repeated cycles of malinvestment and yield-seeking speculation have actually been the cause of the nation’s economic malaise doesn’t seem to cross their minds.

Moreover, consumers spend based on their concept of “permanent income,” not off the value of volatile assets such as stocks. Economists have understood this since the 1950’s. While the Fed has been successful at intentionally promoting yield-seeking speculation since 2009, a century of evidence demonstrates that current valuation extremes also imply a market collapse that is now baked in the cake, and that Federal Reserve policy has much less ability to prevent than investors seem to believe.

Continue reading “AMONG THE 7 WORST TIMES IN HISTORY TO BE INVESTED IN STOCKS”

THE CRASH IS NOT CAUSED BY AN EVENT

Hussman analytically describing the process leading to a crash. It hasn’t happened yet, so it won’t happen. Right?

From an investment standpoint, market conditions remain characterized both by obscene valuations and still-negative market internals. It’s that combination that continues to suggest potentially vertical downside risks. When people think about crashes, they tend to think about an event – as if some massive, grotesque, red, scaly, fire-breathing, razor-toothed catalyst should be obvious beforehand. But we know from history that that’s not the way it works. Instead, the sequence goes like this: the conditions that create vulnerability to a crash emerge first (elevated valuations coupled with deterioration in market internals and/or widening in credit spreads), the crash emerges second, and catalysts are then identified – often just flashpoints that were consistent with speculative breakdown. Many investors think that “Lehman” caused the global financial crisis, but the mortgage crisis was already unfolding well before that. Lehman and Bear Stearns before it were only symptoms, not causes. The cause is always speculative distortion that was well-known for quite some time: elevated valuations, often accompanied by speculation and new issues of low-quality stocks representing some “new economy” theme, or yield-seeking speculation and heavy issuance of low quality debt. The main reason investors don’t believe that such speculation will end in a crash is simply that a crash hasn’t happened yet.

In shorter-term market action, we see a general tendency toward distribution, for example, declines on expanding volume coupled with low-volume recoveries on mixed breadth and narrowing leadership (which was also the pattern last week). We note that prior to Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had gone 40 trading sessions without setting a 20-day high or low. If we look across history for periods of extended range-bound activity in overvalued markets where: a) the DJIA had gone more than a month without setting a 20-day high or low; b) the DJIA was confined to a range of less than 6%; c) the DJIA was within 10% of a 2-year high; and d) the Shiller P/E was 18 or higher, there are only 7 clusters that fit the bill (1929, 1937, 1965, 1973, 1999-2000, 2007-2008, and today). While the full-cycle resolution was repeatedly brutal, I should note that the short-term resolution was not very informative at all, and didn’t depend on whether the initial break out of the range was higher or lower. What’s interesting about the general pattern is that range-bound action often coincides with distribution on price-volume measures. In October 2000, I mentioned similar measures of distribution, such as one that Peter Eliades called the “sign of the bear” based on range-bound market breadth. As I also observed then, neither elevated valuations, nor internals, nor distribution patterns ensure a market crash, but we don’t like the probabilities. Still, we aren’t terribly impatient about the near-term resolution of what we see as a likely topping process here.

You’ve been warned.

Read Hussman’s Weekly Letter


SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Initial jobless claims are near record lows. The last time they were this low was in early 2000, just before the market meltdown/recession. They were almost this low in 2007, just prior to the last market meltdown/recession. They were almost this low in 1989 before a market sell-off/recession. A critical thinking person might ask how we could have so few jobless claims when GDP is negative.

A critical thinking person might ask how reported layoffs by major corporations could be at a four year high, but jobless claims are at record lows. Someone must be lying or the dramatically higher layoffs in the first four months of 2015 versus the first four months of 2014 haven’t filtered through to the made up government reports. Here are the facts from Challenger & Gray:

Falling oil prices contributed to a 68 percent surge in job cuts last month, as US-based employers announced workforce reductions totaling 61,582 in April, up from 36,594 in March, according to the latest report on monthly layoffs released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. The April total was 53 percent higher than the same month a year ago, when 40,298 planned job cuts were recorded. It represents the highest monthly total since May 2012 (61,887) and the highest April total since 2009 (132,590). Year to date, employers have announced 201,796 planned job cuts, which marks a 25 percent increase from the 161,639 layoffs tracked in the first four months of 2014. This is the largest four-month total since 2010.

Continue reading “SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES”

THREE HURRICANES HEADED OUR WAY – NO WHERE TO HIDE

There are three financial hurricanes hurtling towards our country and most people are oblivious to the coming catastrophe. The time to prepare is now, not when the hurricane warnings are issued.

Hussman makes his usual solid case that stocks and bonds are as overvalued as they have ever been in the history of investing. People are under the false impression that bonds are always a safe investment. The fact that you are already getting a negative real return on bonds doesn’t seem to compute with math challenged Americans. Over the next ten years you will absolutely lose money in bonds.

Liquidity in both the stock and bond markets is thinning considerably. In bonds, quantitative easing by global central banks has resulted in a scarcity of available collateral, a collapse in repo liquidity, and increasing frequency of delivery failures, all of which is shorthand for a bond market that is becoming less liquid and more fragile to any credit event. Meanwhile, risk premiums are minuscule. Avoiding a negative total return on 10-year bonds now requires that interest rates must not rise by even one percentage point over the next three years. Bond yields have historically covered investors against a meaningful change in yields before resulting in negative total returns. On a one-year return horizon, bond yields presently cover investors for a yield change amounting to only about 0.25 standard deviations – matching mid-2012 as the lowest level of yield coverage in history.

The fragility of the economic, financial, and social systems of the U.S. is at extreme levels. The median American household has less real income than they had in 1989. The social fabric of the country is tearing as we speak, with Baltimore and Ferguson as the warning shots of coming chaos and civil strife. The ruling elite control the monetary system, so the rigged financial markets continue to rise and have reached bubble proportions. An unexpected pin will be along shortly to pop the bubble. The next crash will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. It may be decades until markets reach these levels again.

Market crashes always reflect two features: extremely thin risk premiums in an environment where investors have shifted toward greater risk-aversion, and lopsided selling into an illiquid market. Under present conditions, we observe the precursors for both. That doesn’t force or ensure a crash, but it creates the underlying fragility that allows one.

Last week, the Nasdaq Composite finally clawed its way to breakeven, 15 years after its spectacular bubble peak in 2000. It’s a testament to the overvaluation of technology stocks in 2000 that it has required the third equity bubble in 15 years to reclaim that 2000 high, at least briefly. As you may remember, the Nasdaq Composite reached its intra-day high of 5132.52 in March 2000, plunging to 795.25 (down -78%) by October 2002. The Nasdaq 100, representing the most glamourous of the group, peaked at 4816.25 in March 2000, plunging to 795.25 (down 83%) by October 2002. Even a decade later, in 2010, both indices were still 60-65% below their 2000 highs. The 2000-2002 decline also took the S&P 500 down by half, wiping out the entire total return of the S&P 500 – in excess of Treasury bill returns – all the way back to May 1996.

Continue reading “THREE HURRICANES HEADED OUR WAY – NO WHERE TO HIDE”

EXIT NOW

The facts speak for themselves. Your choice is to believe in the almighty ability of academic bankers to keep their confidence game going, or exit now before the apocalypse hits. I got no dog in this hunt. I ain’t selling newsletters, gold, or investment ideas. I strictly look at the facts. And they tell me to stay as far away from the financial markets as humanly possible. It isn’t a matter of if, only a matter of when. Here are the pertinent snippets from Hussman’s Weekly Letter:

Unless we observe a rather swift improvement in market internals and a further, material easing in credit spreads – neither which would relieve the present overvaluation of the market, but both which would defer our immediate concerns about downside risk – the present moment likely represents the best opportunity to reduce exposure to stock market risk that investors are likely to encounter in the coming 8 years.

Last week, the cyclically-adjusted P/E of the S&P 500 Index surpassed 27, versus a historical norm of just 15 prior to the late-1990’s market bubble. The S&P 500 price/revenue ratio surpassed 1.8, versus a pre-bubble norm of just 0.8. On a wide range of historically reliable measures (having a nearly 90% correlation with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns), we estimate current valuations to be fully 118% above levels associated with historically normal subsequent returns in stocks. Advisory bullishness (Investors Intelligence) shot to 59.5%, compared with only 14.1% bears – one of the most lopsided sentiment extremes on record. The S&P 500 registered a record high after an advancing half-cycle since 2009 that is historically long-in-the-tooth and already exceeds the valuation peaks set at every cyclical extreme in history but 2000 on the S&P 500 (across all stocks, current median price/earnings, price/revenue and enterprise value/EBITDA multiples already exceed the 2000 extreme). Equally important, our measures of market internals and credit spreads, despite moderate improvement in recent weeks, continue to suggest a shift toward risk-aversion among investors. An environment of compressed risk premiums coupled with increasing risk-aversion is without question the most hostile set of features one can identify in the historical record.

Short term interest rates remain near zero, 10-year bond yields have declined below 2%, and our estimate of 10-year S&P 500 total returns has declined to just 1.4% (see Ockham’s Razor and the Market Cycle for the arithmetic behind these historically-reliable estimates). Recent weeks mark the first time in history that our estimates of prospective 10-year returns on all conventional asset classes have simultaneously declined below 2% annually. We don’t expect a portfolio mix of stocks, bonds and cash to achieve any meaningful return over the coming 8-year period. The fact that the financial markets feel wonderful right now is precisely because yield-seeking speculation and monetary distortions have raised security prices today to levels where they are likely to stand years from today – with steep roller-coaster rides in the interim.

Continue reading “EXIT NOW”

OPEN CAN OF GASOLINE NEXT TO YOUR FIREPLACE

John Hussman’s latest article references his actual warnings in 2000, 2007, and 2014. Today’s article is as close to a warning of an imminent stock market collapse as you are going to get. The market is now so overvalued that it doesn’t even need a negative shock to fall. It will collapse under its own weight.

Here is the first part of his weekly letter, detailing his previous prescient warnings. They were unheeded in 2000 and 2007 by the momentum crowd. He was ridiculed then and he is ridiculed today. He was right then and he’s right now.

“The information contained in earnings, balance sheets and economic releases is only a fraction of what is known by others. The action of prices and trading volume reveals other important information that traders are willing to back with real money. This is why trend uniformity is so crucial to our Market Climate approach. Historically, when trend uniformity has been positive, stocks have generally ignored overvaluation, no matter how extreme. When the market loses that uniformity, valuations often matter suddenly and with a vengeance. This is a lesson best learned before a crash rather than after one. Valuations, trend uniformity, and yield pressures are now uniformly unfavorable, and the market faces extreme risk in this environment.”

Hussman Investment Research and Insight, October 3, 2000

“One of the best indications of the speculative willingness of investors is the ‘uniformity’ of positive market action across a broad range of internals. Probably the most important aspect of last week’s decline was the decisive negative shift in these measures. Since early October of last year, I have at least generally been able to say in these weekly comments that ‘market action is favorable on the basis of price trends and other market internals.’ Now, it also happens that once the market reaches overvalued, overbought and overbullish conditions, stocks have historically lagged Treasury bills, on average, even when those internals have been positive (a fact which kept us hedged). Still, the favorable market internals did tell us that investors were still willing to speculate, however abruptly that willingness might end. Evidently, it just ended, and the reversal is broad-based.”

Market Internals Go Negative, Hussman Weekly Market Comment, July 30, 2007

“The worst market return/risk profiles we estimate are associated with an early deterioration in market internals following severely overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions. This is what we observe at present. In contrast, the strongest market return/risk profiles we estimate are associated with a material retreat in valuations coupled with early improvement in market internals. I have every expectation that we will observe this combination over the completion of the present market cycle. So I expect that, perhaps to the surprise of many who don’t understand this approach, we will be quite bullish and aggressively invested as market conditions shift over the completion of the present market cycle. But now is emphatically not that time.”

A Hint of Advance Warning, Hussman Weekly Market Comment, August 4, 2014

The most hostile subset of market conditions we identify couples overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes with a breakdown in market action: deterioration of breadth, leadership and other market internals, along with a shift toward greater dispersion and weakening price cointegration across individual stocks, sectors and security types (what we sometimes call “trend uniformity”). The outcomes are particularly negative, on average, when that shift is joined by a widening of credit spreads. That’s a shift we observed in October 2000. It’s a shift we observed in July 2007. It’s a shift that we observe today.

Remember that severe market losses are not by their nature broadly announced by obvious catalysts. As I noted approaching the 2007 peak: “Once certain extremes are clear in the data, the main cause of a market plunge is usually the inevitability of a market plunge. That’s the reason we sometimes have to maintain defensive positions in the face of seemingly good short-term market behavior.” Asking what particular news event will trigger a market loss “is like having an open can of gasoline next to your fireplace and blaming the particular spark that sets it off. We need not investigate the personality, life history or future career path of that particular spark.”

Present market conditions comprise an environment where risk-premiums are thin and are being pressed higher. See Low and Expanding Risk Premiums are the Root of Abrupt Market Losses for more on why this matters. The current shift does not ensure that the market will decline over the short-term, nor that it will crash in this instance. It’s also worth noting that we don’t rely on a crash, and that we can certainly allow for the possibility that valuations and market internals will improve in a way that reduces or relieves our concerns without severe market losses.

Still, what we are concerned about here and now is the steeply negative average behavior of the market in historical periods that match present conditions, as well as the decided skew of that probability distribution, which features extreme negative observations far more often than would be expected under a “normal” bell-shaped distribution. Interestingly, the 3-day average implied skew embedded in S&P 500 index option prices surged last week to the highest level on record. The potential for a “fat-tail” event should be taken seriously here.

The arrogant Wall Street pricks who think they have it all figured out will eventually get what they deserve. They are all following the same strategy – buy the dips because grandma Yellen has their back. They don’t invest in stocks based on valuations, growth, or value. They use the same HFT supercomputers programmed by the same Ivy League douchebag MBAs with the same lemming strategies. They all think they can exit before the other douchebags. They are all wrong. The time to panic is before everyone else panics. The attempted exit should be extremely entertaining. The bankers and their politicians will again demand a bailout or they will take down the financial system. Will the American people fall for it again?

Our concerns at present mirror those that we expressed at the 2000 and 2007 peaks, as we again observe an overvalued, overbought, overbullish extreme that is now coupled with a clear deterioration in market internals, a widening of credit spreads, and a breakdown in our measures of trend uniformity. These negative conditions survive every restriction that we’ve implemented in recent years that might have reduced our defensiveness at various points in this cycle.

My sense is that a great many speculators are simultaneously imagining some clear exit signal, or the ability to act on some “tight stop” now that the primary psychological driver of speculation – Federal Reserve expansion of quantitative easing – is coming to a close. Recall 1929, 1937, 1973, 1987, 2001, and 2008. History teaches that the market doesn’t offer executable opportunities for an entire speculative crowd to exit with paper profits intact. Hence what we call the Exit Rule for Bubbles: you only get out if you panic before everyone else does.

Market crash dead ahead. You’ve been warned.

I should be clear that market peaks often go through several months of top formation, so the near-term remains uncertain. Still, it has become urgent for investors to carefully examine all risk exposures. When extreme valuations on historically reliable measures, lopsided bullishness, and compressed risk premiums are joined by deteriorating market internals, widening credit spreads, and a breakdown in trend uniformity, it’s advisable to make certain that the long position you have is the long position you want over the remainder of the market cycle. As conditions stand, we currently observe the ingredients of a market crash.

See the rest of John Hussman’s Weekly Letter