Gold stocks oversold and underloved

Sentiment and price action are extreme. Combined, they make a very strong case for a rebound.

gdx march 5

Gold stocks are also very cheap relative to the broad indices, as well as gold itself (which is also the most under-loved since it was $300 per ounce).

gdx to spx march5

gdx to gold march5

Images from stockcharts.com

Gold itself is still very expensive relative to other hard assets and financial assets on an historical basis, but trader sentiment is bleak, a contrary indicator. From 2001 to the top in 2011, we never had such a long down streak on such bearishness, which may indicate, despite its short-term bullish implications, that the bull market may have topped at $1920 per- in August 2011. We had parabolic moves on extreme bullishness in gold (peaking 8.11), silver (5.11) and platinum (3.08), and moves like that tend to burn up all reserves of excitement and mark tops for years to come.

Extreme risk in equities

We now have a syndrome that has rarely been followed by significant market gains, and almost always followed by a decline:

  1. Overvalued: Shiller PE above 18 (it’s 23)
  2. Overbullish: High “bullishness” and low “bearishness” readings in DSI, NAAIM, Investors Intelligence, VIX, etc
  3. Overbought: SPX near upper Bollinger bands (daily, weekly & monthly), over 50% above 4-year low, over 7% above 52-week running ave.
  4. Rising yields: Treasury bonds have recently declined, 10-year yields above level of 6 months ago.
  5. Developing choppiness: A smooth rise of less than 1% per day for several weeks, followed by several days of increased market volatility and sideways price action.
  6. Declining RSI: Indicates momentum is lost.

http://grabilla.com/03206-b41abbf3-34cb-423a-921b-9e550f272c8b.png

The first four of these points are the work of John Hussman* (though I may cite here different sentiment indicators or signs of an overbought market than he does). The last two are my own, and serve to identify a top with greater precision, as Hussman’s syndrome, while an excellent intermediate-term indicator, can be sustained for several weeks as the market continues to rise. When the last two are present, stocks rarely make further headway before declining, though they may churn sideways for weeks.

* Here is Hussman’s uber-bearish syndrome in his own words, with his own chart showing points in history when this has occurred:

  1. S&P 500 Index overvalued, with the Shiller P/E (S&P 500 divided by the 10-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings) greater than 18. The present multiple is actually 22.6.
  2. S&P 500 Index overbought, with the index more than 7% above its 52-week smoothing, at least 50% above its 4-year low, and within 3% of its upper Bollinger bands (2 standard deviations above the 20-period moving average) at daily, weekly, and monthly resolutions. Presently, the S&P 500 is either at or slightly through each of those bands.
  3. Investor sentiment overbullish (Investors Intelligence), with the 2-week average of advisory bulls greater than 52% and bearishness below 28%. The most recent weekly figures were 54.3% vs. 22.3%. The sentiment figures we use for 1929 are imputed using the extent and volatility of prior market movements, which explains a significant amount of variation in investor sentiment over time.
  4. Yields rising, with the 10-year Treasury yield higher than 6 months earlier.

The blue bars in the chart below identify historical points since 1970 corresponding to these conditions.

Active investment managers more bullish than ever

The average active manager is now leveraged long, according to NAAIM’s weekly survey:

Sustained bullishness is bearish, especially once the market starts to trend sideways. We don’t yet have that choppy sideways action on declining RSI that has been a death knell for rallies, but sooner or later it will emerge. If the market starts sidedays, this would complete the most bearish syndrome possible, though we already have a market that is overbought and overvalued, with overbullish sentiment and rising bond yields (John Hussman’s bearish syndrome that has nailed most major tops for decades).

In economic news, Q4′s negative GDP print supports the thesis that we entered a recession in the 2nd half of 2012, as leading indicators had been suggesting for months. It also comes right as the Citi Economic Surprise Index is again on the downward slope of its regular cycle, meaning surprises are more likely to be to the downside.

Hussman’s extreme risk syndrome present again

John Hussman does the best long-term statistical analysis of the broad equity market, bar none. He has identified a set of four conditions that has appeared at or just before significant tops in the stock market:

Overbought: S&P 500 within 3% of its upper Bollinger bands, at least 7% above its 52-week smoothing, and over 50% above its 4-year low

Overbullish: Investors Intelligence sentiment survey shows bulls above 52% and bears below 27%

Overvalued: Shiller P/E above 18 (it’s currently 23)

Rising yields: 10-year Treasury yields above their level of 6-months earlier.

This condition also appeared in 1929 (followed by a crash and 20 year bear market in real terms) and 1964 (stocks peaked in ’66 before going down 80% in real terms over the next 16 years). When stocks are overbought and overvalued, treasuries have fallen, and most investors are bullish, it is to your great advantage to eliminate market risk (sell your stocks or hedge them).

Gold:Platinum ratio dips under 1.0 for first time in 8 months.

Platinum has had a sharp rally in recent sessions, while gold has been only slightly higher, bringing the two heavier precious metals (specific gravity of 19.30 for Au and 21.45 for Pt) to parity for the first time since April. The ratio remains high, and has been elevated since gold left the more-industrial platinum in the dust in the summer of 2011:

This has been one of the longer periods of inversion in recent history. Selling gold and buying platinum in equal weights when the ratio is well over 1.0 has been a dependable money-maker for patient traders, as the ratio tends to revert to well under 1.0.

VIX plunges under 14. Mr. Market banishes all thoughts of bear.

This has been an extremely dramatic decline, from 22 to 13.9 in one trading week.

Previous drops under 14 in recent years have been followed by limited upside in stocks and an increased incidence of significant declines.

This week’s action seems to be based on relief that Congress has come to terms on the budget. Never mind that taxes are going up for everyone (payroll tax “holiday” ends), and that no progress was made on spending, not even so-called “cuts” to the rate of growth.

Side note on the budget:

High inflation remains baked into the cake for the coming years, just as it appeared in the later years of the secular bear markets of the 1910s, 1930s-40s, and 1966-1982. This is not just because the government is running trillion+ deficits without end, because the Fed has tripled its balance sheet and the monetary base in just four years.

When enough bad debt has been written off for lending to start back up in earnest, the upswing of the multi-generational interest rate cycle will have severe repurcussions for the budget. The effects will be greater because the US Treasury is not taking advantage of low long-term rates, but issuing mostly shorter-term notes.

Note that I was a rare bull on Treasuries going into the last debt crisis. That is no longer the case, but I’m not necessarily bearish on them just yet.

Stock jitters, Gold and JPY still compressed

Gold and the yen each worked still lower this week on highly depressed sentiment readings. Each of these has had a negative relationship with the “risk trade” lately, falling as stocks have rebounded from their oversold and overbearish condition of mid-November. Now, stock sentiment has recovered to neutral territory, and traders are afraid of these sometime “safety trades.”

Trader opinion gold has been very low since late October, a full eight weeks ago. Every similar instance in the past several years has been followed by a substantial multi-week rally. That said, if the bull markets in precious metals and the yen are indeed over, we should expect downtrends to become more protracted, with sentiment remaining low for longer.

Here’s a 1-year daily chart of gold:

1-year daily JPYUSD:

I’m holding to a thesis that the risk trade is topping out here as the US slides into a recession that remains largely unrecognised. Tops are rarely sharp peaks, but consist of several months of choppy sideways action during which sentiment deteriorates from giddy to nervous and the VIX picks up even before prices have fallen substantially. I view the rebound since mid-November with that context, akin to the action of April-July 2011 or pretty much all of 2007.  Last nights mini flash crash in stock futures fits into that context of a increasingly jittery market.

We’re three months from the 4-year birthday of the (presumably) cyclical bull market. It is now older than most cyclical bulls within secular bears, though the last bull phase lasted from March 2003 to October 2007, 4.5 years.

Another cyclical bear and a recession and drop in corporate earnings may finally compress multiples to the investable levels required to build a solid base for another bear market. I don’t expect this to happen quickly, though, since prices have a long way to go before we see anything that can be called historically cheap. I wouldn’t be surprised to see stocks hold at or beneath current levels for the rest of this decade as inflation creeps in towards the end and boosts earnings, as happened during the latter stages of the last three secular bear markets (roughly the 1910s, ’30s, ’70s).

US already in recession? Hussman makes the case.

For those unfamiliar with John Hussman, I cannot offer high enough praise of this mutual fund manager for his prudent, long-term style of equity investing, and his actionable financial market and economic research. The man uses statistics better than anyone else I’m aware of in finance.

Lately, he has been making a strong case that the US entered recession in 2012, as shown by those indicators that, when viewed as a group, have a strong record of appearing at the start of recessions, and only at such times.

From his weekly market commentary:

While we continue to observe some noise and dispersion in various month-to-month economic reports, the growth courses of production, consumption, sales, income and new order activity remain relatively indistinguishable from what we observed at the start of the past two recessions. The chart below presents the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (3 month average), the CFNAI Diffusion Index (the percentage of respondents reporting improvement in conditions, less those reporting deterioration, plus half of those reporting unchanged conditions), and the year-over-year growth rates of new orders for capital goods excluding aircraft, real personal consumption, real retail and food service sales, and real personal income. All values are scaled in order to compare them on a single axis.

 

12.12. Fred recession data Hussman

Readers are strongly encouraged to read this week’s commentary in full and to browse Hussman’s archive here.