Posts Tagged
‘boom and bust cycles’
by ilene - March 28th, 2010 3:58 pm
Tim presents a good argument in favor of not restricting short-selling in an effort to prop up overvalued markets. - Ilene
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
Short Selling Scapegoats
Whenever there’s some kind of major market crash and people start looking for handy scapegoats the usual line-up of suspects will include a preponderance of short-sellers, accused of unpatriotically selling stocks they don’t own in order to make windfall profits. It’s as though making a profit when everyone else is losing money suddenly becomes wrong. When times are tough it seems everyone’s a bleeding heart socialist.
Instead of banning short-selling regulators ought to be focusing on what measures they could take to make it more popular. If you want markets to be roughly efficient and not to fly off on some behaviourally induced flight of fancy then you need intelligent investors to be able to short-sell over-valued stocks. Waiting until everything goes wrong and then artificially distorting the markets in order to apply a tiny band-aid to a market holed below the waterline by a bloody great iceberg of behavioural bias is to invert cause and effect. Short-selling doesn’t cause market crashes, people do.
Shorting’s Scary
Shorting a stock is roughly the opposite to buying it. Technically you’re selling a security you don’t own and then waiting for it to fall so you can buy it back at a lower price, pocketing the difference. Although there are different ways of shorting there are ultimately only a couple of basic variations – covered shorting where you either own or, more likely, borrow the stock for a fee or naked shorting where you actually don’t have any of the stock you’re selling.
Shorting shares is not, generally, a widespread activity amongst investors. There are multiple reasons for this. Many institutional investors aren’t allowed to short stocks due to their remit, most individual investors don’t short due to behavioural issues and fears of unlimited losses. These individual concerns are linked – as we saw in discussing behavioural portfolios investors don’t like their losses from their upside potential layer eating into their downside protection layer, but as losses from shorting are potentially unlimited, this is a real risk for short-side investors.
Unlimited Liability
When we buy stocks the maximum we risk is the capital we put down up front, but when…
Tags: banning short-selling, boom and bust cycles, Bubbles, market crash, overpriced markets, regulation, short-selling, smart money, unlimited liability
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by ilene - March 24th, 2010 1:17 pm
Pragcap shares a tool he uses to answer the question,
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
I’ve long argued that most valuation metrics are fraught with pitfalls that the average investor too often falls for. What is often described as “value” is too often a bloated price divided by some analyst’s guesstimate. The myth of “value” and the dream of becoming the next Warren Buffett (see the many myths of Warren Buffett here) has resulted in untold stock market losses over the decades and/or misconceptions of adding “value” to a portfolio that most likely doesn’t outperform a correlating index fund after taxes and fees. Nonetheless, the PE ratio and other faulty valuation metrics remain one of the primary sources of investment strategists, stock pickers and market researchers.
While I am no fan of valuation metrics, I do happen to be a student and believer of mean reversion. In an effort to attach a “value” to this market I’ve used an old Jeremy Grantham tool to see where we are today. Grantham is a big believer in the cycle of corporate profits and specifically profit margins. As regular readers know, one of the primary reasons why we have been bullish ahead of the past 5 earnings seasons was due to the expansion in corporate margins and very low analyst expectations. Analysts became extremely negative in Q4 2008 and severely underestimated the pace at which companies were able to cut costs and support the bottom line. This stabilization in corporate margins set the table for the massive rally in stocks as profits continued to expand at a far faster pace than anyone expected.
Corporate margins are extremely cyclical. As companies expand their businesses and revenues grow they are able to better manage their costs, hire personnel, etc. But if the economy weakens for any number of reasons revenues will contract, costs will remain high and margins will ultimately contract. Businesses are then forced to cut costs in order to salvage profits. In other words, margins are constantly expanding and contracting with the business cycle around the mean.
Over the last 50 years corporate profit margins (corporate profits/GDP) have averaged 9.5%. If we multiply GDP by the average margin growth we can create a long-term trend of what corporate profits should look like. We can then compare actual corporate profits to this result in an effort to see whether…
Tags: boom and bust cycles, Corporate margins, Jeremy Grantham, P/E Ratio, Stock Market, valuation
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by ilene - August 24th, 2009 4:54 pm
Barry: Andy Xie is a former Morgan Stanley economist now living in China; The following is from the South China Morning Post:
By Andy Xie, in South China Morning Post
Posted by Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture
The A-share market is collapsing again, like many times before. It takes numerous government policies and "expert" opinions to entice ignorant retail investors into the market but just a few days to send them packing. As greed has the upper hand in Chinese society, the same story repeats itself time and again.
A stock market bubble is a negative-sum game. It leads to distortion in resource allocation and, hence, net losses. The redistribution of the remainder, moreover, isn’t entirely random. The government, of course, always wins. It pockets stamp duty revenue and the proceeds of initial public offerings of state-owned enterprises in cash. And, the listed companies seldom pay dividends.
The truly random part for the redistribution among speculators is probably 50 cents on the dollar. The odds are quite similar to that from playing the lottery. Every stock market cycle makes Chinese people poorer. The system takes advantage of their opportunism and credulity to collect money for the government and to enrich the few.
I am not sure this bubble that began six months ago is truly over…
This bubble will truly burst in the fourth quarter when the economy shows signs of slowing again. Land prices will start to decline, which is of more concern than the collapse of the stock market, as local governments depend on land sales for revenue. The present economic “recovery” began in February as inventories were restocked and was pushed up by the spillover from the asset market revival. These two factors cannot be sustained beyond the third quarter. When the market sees the second dip looming, panic will be more intense and thorough.
The US will enter this second dip in the first quarter of next year. Its economic recovery in the second half of this year is being driven by inventory restocking and fiscal stimulus.
However, US households have lost their love for borrow-and-spend for good.…
Tags: Asia, boom and burst, boom and bust cycles, Economy, Greenspan bubble, Housing Market, US
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by ilene - August 12th, 2009 3:33 am
Throw out the economic models and prepare for the next panic. And welcome to Tim at Psy-Fi Blog!
Courtesy of Tim at Psy-Fi Blog
Economic Stability Is Not The Norm
The exceptional market conditions of the last couple of years are a reminder that we should regard stable markets as a pleasant interlude rather than the normal state of affairs. In general, of course, people tend to expect tomorrow to be much the same as yesterday and to behave as such. It’s little wonder, then, that when everything goes wrong people start to panic, assuming the world is coming to an end.
Of course, so far, the world hasn’t come to an end – although a lot of people have lost lots of money in the meantime. What we can see from history is not that market panics are exceptional but that they’re the norm.
Kindleberger on Economic History
Every investor should read and re-read Charles Kindleberger’s seminal “Manias, Panics and Crashes’ which details the course of market disasters over a near three hundred year period. Kindleberger was an economist of a different hue to many we’ve met before: an economic historian who relied not on mathematical models – about which he was enjoyably and pointedly vague – but on historical incident and anecdote. At the very least, he argued, the various competing economic schools have to explain the happenings of the markets rather than either ignoring them, or simply claiming that they shouldn’t happen so they’re going to stick their fingers in their ears and go “tra-la-la” until they go away.
Underpinning the concept is a simple idea – people are irrational, they do the irrational things which it suits them to do and the consequences are often very nasty. What he set out to show was that the mental behaviour of market participants that we’ve recently witnessed is a perfectly normal state of affairs. Indeed, based on the historical records one ends up wondering how anything ever works at all in the markets. Everything going wrong is what happens, all the time, it seems.
The Fallacy Of Composition
However, it’s not simple irrationality that drives the market. Underlying this is a sneaky human behavioural failing known as the fallacy of composition – a trait that sees every individual acting in their own self interests yet, at the same time, acting in a
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Tags: boom and bust cycles, Crashes, economic stability, Economy, Hyman Minsky, mania, market disasters, Minsky Moment, panic
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site