Category Archives: crash

5th Avenue blues

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Hat tip Evilspeculator

They counted 48 vacant properties (I presume mostly street-front) from 59th to 14th Streets on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I don’t have any stats to compare this to, but it is clear that times are not so good for landlords (and their banks) in NYC. I used to live on the same block as one very large storefront shown here, and I happen to know that that particular property has been vacant for over 18 months, ever since its former tenant, a nationwide retail chain, went bankrupt.

I have noticed that many of the “for rent” signs you see in Manhattan bear the name of Vornado or other such REITs. That sector is still doomed, though traders seem to have forgotten to ask, “where’s the equity?” I suspect that in most cases, an honest accounting would reveal that net of debt and marked to market, there is none at all.

The Global Dow needs to crash some more.

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Last fall, Dow Jones launched the Global Dow index, composed of 150 stocks from around the world. A quick glance at its 10-year chart shows that stock prices have only so far blown off the froth from 2006 and 2007:

Source: wsj.com

Stocks are driven by mood, and mood today seems to be highly coordinated around the globe, so rather than scrutinize the twists and turns in the Dow, DAX or Nikkei, perhaps this new index is the best reference.

What is most striking about this picture, as opposed to that of the S&P500, Eurostoxx 50, or Nikkei, is that stock prices are only 2/3 of the way back to the 2002 lows, as opposed to right upon them.

This says to me that even this first stage of the crash has further to run. Fundamentals are deteriorating with blazing speed, but market participants remain in secular bull market mode. Too many are still buying the dips, or at least ignoring their losses and hoping for a rebound. The stock market is still viewed by most Americans as the best way to save for retirement, and the myth persists that if only your time horizon is longer than a decade or so, stocks will always beat cash.

This wave off of the November lows is looking weaker and weaker. We had our chance for a strong bounce like the one after the crash of ’29 (the Dow was up about 45% from November ’29 to April ’30), and all we could muster was about 20%.

Today’s action is a pretty strong indication that panic has been lurking just below the surface. With the sell-off in bonds possibly having run its course, precious metals stalling out at resistance, and a very low put/call ratio indicating extreme trader optimism, the news of the Great Pork Package and latest bankers’ bailout may be just the catalyst we need for a sell-off. Hope is fading fast.

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Oh, and it is worth mentioning that John Mauldin reports that a contact at S&P told him that the latest quarter’s earnings are apparently coming in at a NEGATIVE $7 for the index. I have been saying all along, that if this is a depression (it is), PE’s should bottom out at well under 10 and even dividend yields should be in the double digits. Whatever figure you come up with as a final bottom target for the S&P, it should be a very low multiple of very low earnings.

Mish takes Peter Schiff to the cleaners

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Mish has composed a detailed post on the many ways in which the vociferous Peter Schiff has been dead wrong on just about everything in this crash (the two actually had a little debate in December 2007). Mish’s post is essential reading for anyone who is considering following Schiff’s investment advice. In his own way, the man is usually just as wrong as the Pollyannas that he challenges on bubblevision.

Here is an excerpt:

Schiff’s Investment Thesis

  • US Dollar Will Go To Zero (Hyperinflation).
  • Decoupling (The rest of the world would be immune to a US slowdown.
  • Buy foreign equities and commodities and hold them with no exit strategy.


12 Ways Schiff Was Wrong in 2008

  • Wrong about hyperinflation
  • Wrong about the dollar
  • Wrong about commodities except for gold
  • Wrong about foreign currencies except for the Yen
  • Wrong about foreign equities
  • Wrong in timing
  • Wrong in risk management
  • Wrong in buy and hold thesis
  • Wrong on decoupling
  • Wrong on China
  • Wrong on US treasuries
  • Wrong on interest rates, both foreign and domestic

That’s a lot of things to be wrong about, especially given all the “Peter Schiff Was Right” videos floating around everywhere. The one thing he was right about was the collapse of US equities and no part of his investment strategy sought to make a gain from that prediction.

I will admit that I was nearly taken in by Schiff’s thesis back in 2006 when I first became bearish on the economy and stock market. I even opened an account for someone with his firm, but the only thing I did with it was short the US market — I took none of his brokers’ advice on favored mining juniors.

I owe Mish and Robert Prechter a huge debt of gratitude for beating some sense into me with solid logic. Readers can easily check my archives to see my pre-crash stances on commodities, gold stocks, Treasuries, the dollar, the Swiss Franc and the Euro and the inflation/deflation debate. I can report that things have turned out very well for those who went against the crowd of contrarians, swallowed their fear of the dollar, and shorted not just US stocks but almost everything else in sight. All the world was a bubble.

On the need to stay nimble

Yes, the deflationists were right and hopefully all made some money or at least avoided terrible losses, but nobody can afford to get cocky. The markets do not trade on fundamentals on anything but the longest time-frames, so the ability to read the prevailing mood and adjust accordingly is a critical part of asset management. So is the willingness to contradict yourself and change your mind.

I see now that this deflation can last even longer than I had suspected, and that there may be even ways to avoid hyperinflation, such as negotiated Treasury debt forgiveness, but there is no need to try to guess about outcomes that are years away when you know how to read the signs as they come and remain humble and liquid enough to change your stance as needed.

By the way, Mish manages client accounts

Mish is an investment advisor representative with Sitka Pacific (not Euro Pacific!), a firm that manages private accounts on a percent of assets fee basis. I am not a client, but I would not hesitate to suggest giving them a call. I am working on setting up my own firm of this type, which offers many advantages over hedge or mutual funds, especially when set up with the protections that Sitka Pacific has included. My own style of trading is somewhat different from any of the strategies Mish uses (for example, I am willing to go net short or to a majority cash position), and of course I am not always in agreement with Mish on every aspect of the markets.

Still bearish on the yellow metal

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As many readers know, I have been bearish on gold lately. I have been buying puts on GLD and GDX and bought more yesterday, though I do have a big chunk of assets in bullion (20x more than in puts). My bullion is not for sale, but I suspect that the reality of deflation and its likely duration has yet to fully sink in, and that we are due for a demoralizing event in the gold market.

Gold is not fully treated as money at the moment, though fiat currencies don’t satisfy all of the criteria for money either. Only precious metals can fully satisfy them, when governments allow.

So gold is not really money now, since its liquidity is limited, but it is a long-term store of value that outlasts currencies and governments. This is the key point: from the perspective of a large player who can afford warehouse costs, other metals or commodities can also serve as a store of value and hedge against fiscal calamity. Copper and cotton and rice will never go to zero either.

Almost all other commodities are down by huge percentages, though gold hangs on. It makes sense for gold to outperform the others, since it is more liquid and portable and people naturally prefer it during a crisis, but the premium seems way too high.

Once this panic phase of the depression is over, and a general funk and low-velocity environment settles in, with the dollar and other currencies having survived to the surprise of so many gold owners, the metal could be again seen as dead weight and fall as people still need plain old folding money to pay their bills, debts and taxes.

That is how I see things. Only time will tell if I am right.

Among financial planners, the equity culture lives on.

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Bloomberg columnist Jane Bryant Quinn reports that most financial planners still view stocks as the cornerstone of a retirement plan. An informal survey of planners showed overwhelming support for an equity allocation of 50-60%, although many have a new found respect for cash.

It still sounds as if most financial advisers are pretty worthless, just dishing up the same bad advice you could get from the New York Times:

Most of the planners are advising their clients to rebalance their portfolios, which effectively means putting money into stocks at current prices. They’re buying slowly, dollar-averaging into the market month by month. For taxable accounts, they’re also harvesting tax losses, to use against the capital gains that some mutual funds will be reporting, based on gains taken earlier this year. They also love municipal bonds.

Any adviser who had clients in more than a token amount of stocks by 2007 should be fired for incompetence. Same goes for those who still advise 50% or who like municipal bonds, which are an accident waiting to happen.

A good adviser doesn’t just deploy static formulas for asset allocation, but has the historical (100+ year) perspective required to identify periods of relative over- and under-valuation in various asset classes. Stocks were a time-bomb after about 1995. Commodities should have been avoided by early 2007. Real estate was on a crash course post-2004. Munis and corporates were also all risk an no reward after 2004.

This is pretty simple stuff, really. Just look at the relationships of various assets to one-another and to consumer prices, and don’t forget that metrics like PEs and yields can reflect overvaluations for so long that up begins to look like down.

As asset classes get way out of whack with historical averages, they should be sold or bought accordingly. People often forget that cash is an asset class, perhaps the most important one, and should be bought in spades when it is cheap and held until it is dear. It is still cheap.

What a close. Down 473 points in 15 minutes.

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I have built up a position in DIA Nov. 08 puts on rallies over the past couple of weeks, and with the Dow up 300 at 3:30 today, I couldn’t resist adding a few more than I would ordinarily be comfortable with. I intended to part with the extra contracts maybe tomorrow or the next day in the inevitable correction after such an awesome rally (1,208 points, 14.8%). As it turned out, the Dow proceeded to drop 473 points in about 15 minutes, and I unloaded the contracts at the close for the fastest money I’ve ever made (as regular readers know, I’m more fond of buying LEAPs to capture the big, multi-month moves).

From Bigcharts.com, here’s the 1-day chart (1 minute):

Click image for sharper view.

As I count the Elliott Waves, this pattern has the A-B-C shape characteristic of a countertrend move, so it doesn’t change my expectation for new index lows in the coming days or couple of weeks. The mini-crash at the close looks like waves 1, 2, 3 and 4 of an impulse wave, which would resolve with another drop below the wave 4 low near the open tomorrow. Impulse waves move in the direction of the one-larger degree trend, as opposed to A-B-C moves.

Today’s chart also illustrates another textbook pattern: the contracting zig-zag from 2:40 to 3:15 resolved in the direction of the previous trend — up, way up. The 1-month pattern is still a very large contracting zig-zag, which, should it stay true to form, would resolve downwards, perhaps to Dow 7000, though a push above the October 14th high first is also possible:

Click for sharper view.

All of this near-term wave counting and trading is really just a hobby for me. I don’t use big money in it, but just enough to keep my attention so that I learn something. My real money is in T-bills, gold and still a boatload of 2010 puts that I accumulated over the last 15 months (see disclaimer), though I have been paring that position in the crash. If I hadn’t been selling, it would be about 85% of my portfolio by now.

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Sorry for the paucity of posts lately. I’m in the middle of a trans-oceanic move, ditching a ridiculous Latin American country for a central European one known for staying sane while the rest of the world goes nuts.

The perfect storm for shorts and gold bugs

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This is setting up to be a great scenario for shorts (knock on wood): equities crash, but the dollar rallies and gold falls. Profits from shorting are taken in dollars, so they don’t mean much unless the paper still has value. Fortunately, deflation is very dollar positive now because so much debt is dollar-denominated.

That means we can take our dollar profits and exchange them for real money at a great rate. That real money will continue to go up in value for years, no matter what happens to our fiat debt money.

Gold is the bridge across the looming gap of currency failure. You don’t know what is on the other side, but it is a good bet that gold will be exchangeable (via a new worthless script?) for things like equities and real estate at great prices.

If this is ’29…

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History is supposed to rhyme, not repeat, but market action Friday was eerily similar to Black Thursday, ’29, the first day of full-on panic.

If the whole thing plays out like ’29, we close up 3% tomorrow (exactly where futures are), then crash Tuesday and Wednesday by 10%+ each day, then rally 19% Thursday and Friday and crash to new lows by the end of the month.

Whatever happens, it won’t be boring.

Can’t get no relief

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Though this chart doesn’t show it, the TED spread has made a new all-time high, 412 basis points:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click image for sharper view. Source: Bloomberg

Bloomberg reports that interbank lending rates around the world in all different currencies are at or near their highs of the year. This fact, along with the lack of oomph in any of the equity markets’ attempts at bounces, suggests that even this stage of the Panic of ’08 may not be over.

Central banks are being humbled because this is not a liquidity problem, but a solvency problem on a scale much greater than their combined, newly-expanded balance sheets. Not only that, but the market knows that solvency is the issue and is unwilling to resume borrowing and lending as though nothing has happened.

The only cure is time and lower prices. The banks have been propped up, but the real economy cannot be.

Short-term trades: Don’t buy gold. Prepare to go long stocks.

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When everyone has run to one side of the boat, stroll over to the other.

GLD in blue, S&P 500 in green, Nikkei red. 2-year chart:

Source: Yahoo! Finance. Click image for sharper view.

I’m not calling a bottom in stocks (I think the Dow is going below 3500), but nothing moves in a straight line, and it looks like the market is setting up for a bit of a clearing rally, although it might take a plunge below 9000 to really capitulate first. It actually feels relatively calm to me today, despite the panic conditions, so another deep plunge to finish things off wouldn’t surprise me from here.

Along the same vein, look above at the inverse correlation that gold has had with stocks during this bear market. Markets are all about mood, and lately when fear is high, stocks are down and gold is up. We are nearing the point at which everyone is already on board the panic express. From there, you can expect temporary relief. When the relief comes, gold will resume its own unfinished business of working off the manic top from 2005-2008:

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Note: I’m not going long stocks. I’m still massively short with long-term puts, so short-term rally or not, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m also long gold, but holding a few puts on GLD right now.