Hugh Hendry June Returns Hurt By China Crash

As we predicted last month…. in an article titled Hugh Hendry Bet Big On Chinese Futures Ahead Of Crash

Below is Hugh Hendry’s larest letter to investors.

Hugh Hendry’s CF Eclectica Fund commentary for the period ended June 30, 2015.

Discretionary Global Macro

The investment objective of the Fund is to achieve capital appreciation, whilst limiting risk of loss, by investing globally long and short mainly in quoted securities, government bonds and currencies, but also in commodities and other derivative instruments.

Hugh Hendry’s CF Eclectica Fund – Performance Attribution Summary

• A late sell off in European and Chinese equity markets saw the Fund book a loss of -1.2% for June.
• Equities gave back -3.2% in aggregate with European stock holdings across pharma, property and telecoms accounting for the majority of losses.
• Italian index futures also suffered as the Euro Stoxx 50 dropped -4.1% towards the very end of the month as the Greek PM called for an impromptu referendum on the adoption of proposed bailout conditions.
• Chinese index exposure, reduced by half from the mid-April high following a tremendous run, cost the Fund a relatively modest -0.8% as a sharp sell off (the specific catalyst for which was less apparent) triggered the widespread liquidation of leveraged margin positions.
• Losses from the long equity book were partially offset by shorts on oil services companies as a further fall in the price of oil, prompted by the prospect of increasing crude shipments from Iran, added to the general negative sentiment.
• The overall loss for the month was significantly pared back by gains from fixed income positions which returned a combined +1.8%.
• Our short on Italian BTPs was particularly profitable as yields spiked on concern over the apparent deterioration of the situation in Greece and additional gains were to be had from our Mexican interest rate receivers, Eurodollar call spreads and European inflation swaps.

Hugh Hendry’s CF Eclectica Fund – Manager Commentary

Our enthusiasm for a shift to a global policy promoting higher wages has proven contentious. Nevertheless, the UK has become the latest advocate of such a demand boosting initiative with the newly re-elected government announcing plans to raise what it terms the “national living wage”. By 2020 British businesses will be mandated to pay at least $14 per hour for employees aged over 25, a rise of almost 40% which affects at least 20% of the distribution of wages in the country. Despite prominent businesses such as Ikea, the large Swedish retailer with 9,000 UK employees, announcing its intention to adopt the plan, the initiative set off the usual chorus of alarm bells that such policies run the risk of destroying jobs and investment in the UK.

Phrases such as “economically useless and intellectually empty…” tend to be the customary riposte to a controversial vision of the future and yet they say nothing to counter the Henry Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) notion that if workers have more money, businesses have more customers. And it conveniently sidesteps the evidence from America where the highest rate of job growth by small businesses is occurring in those states and cities with the highest public mandated minimum wages. As I write New York seems set to become the latest US city to enact a $15 per hour minimum wage for fast-food workers versus the current rate of $8.75. Henry’s insight, it seems, is spreading like a rash.

The recent experience of the UK economy is also insightful; the country has never employed more people than it does today with jobless claims at the same low level as they were pre-crisis in early 2008 and the unemployment rate is now only 0.8% higher than in 2005, when it was probably close to full employment. And yet despite such achievements, economists tend to fret over what is perceived as an enduringly low level of productivity and the menace that, with the tightening of the jobs market, the central bank will be forced to hike interest rates.

This perpetual phantom, the speculation that central banks will have to hike rates and produce a rout in stock prices (in Japan the fear stretches as far back as 25 years) reminds me of the sad case of Steve Feltham who gave up his job, house and girlfriend 24 years ago to live in a van and devote his life full-time to looking for the Loch Ness Monster. Reality dawned last week when he gave up his whimsical pursuit concluding that he had probably been duped all along by the rather more prosaic theory that the images most likely captured large catfish first introduced to the area by the Victorians for sport fishing.

The great mystery of the UK’s curse of low productivity, its likely debilitating effect on domestic corporate profitability and the perceived need for British rate hikes are all like the mystery of “Nessie” probably made obsolete by recourse to more humdrum explanations. To