Category Archives: Asset management

Asset management, Commodity price, Market trends, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

How we knew yields would collapse?

While most market experts completely failed to predict this year’s collapse in interest rates (see the chart below), we traded the event profitably. In this article I summarize the the hows and the whys of our performance.

AgeOfQE_CTAsVsS&P500vsExperts

How did we know to short US T-Notes starting in Q4 2017, then reverse and go long in November of 2018? Did we know interest rates would first rise, then collapse at the fastest rate in 50 years? Are we so brilliant as forecasters? Did we have insider information? The answer is, none of the above.

We did not know what would happen – but profited from the events anyway. Here’s how: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Commodity price, Economics, Hedging, Market research, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Failure of price forecasting: the unit of account conundrum

In addition to the better understood challenges of market analysis, like access to timely and accurate data, there is another – rather massive, but usually completely ignored – problem that renders forecasting largely an exercise in futility.

Over the years I’ve written quite a bit on the unreliable nature of price forecasts based on the analysis of market supply and demand . Most recently, in “Market fundamentals, forecasting and the groupthink effect,” I discussed the problem of data quality as well as the very real problem of groupthink among leading analysts, providing an example of a staggeringly wrong oil price forecast they produced. Some of the very same experts later produced this gem: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Market psychology, Market research, Market trends, Trading, Trend following

Trend following might save your tail

In the age of central bank quantitative easing, trend following has become an unpopular investment strategy, even earning tiself a bad name as trend following funds performed miserably compared to bonds, equities, and passive index funds. Below is a chart put together by AutumnGold showing a growing gap between Managed Futures funds the S&P 500 and Barclay’s Aggregate Bond index. Managed futures funds are a good proxy for trend following performance as most of them apply systematic trend following strategies in one way or another.

20190604_AutumnGoldChart

Continue reading →

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Asset management, Central banking, Economics, Inflation, Market research, Market trends, Policy

US jobs: everything is awesome! Is it? Let’s take another look.

A few years back in an interview with Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” program , Elliott Management’s Paul Singer said that his greatest worry was the rise of inflation that could appear suddenly. He suggested that this could come about with small changes in perception of inflation risk. Specifically, “The first whiffs of either commodity inflation or wage inflation,” said Singer, “may cause a self-reinforcing set of market events … which may include a sharp fall in bond prices, … fall in stock prices, rapid increase in commodities…”

Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Hedging, Market psychology, Market research, Market trends, Risk management, Stock market, Trading, Trend following

Lessons Of Japan’s 1980s Bull Market

Afer popping, Japan’s 1980s bull market gave way to an 82% drop over the following 20 years.

Three decades later, Japanes equities are still more than 40% below peak valuations.

One of the most effective methods of navigating the boom/bust cycles has been the systematic trend following.

Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific

Roger Babson, 5 Sep. 1929

If everybody indexed, the only word you could use is chaos, catastrophe. The markets would fail

Jack Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group

As of December 2018, passive index funds controlled 17.2% of the stock of all U.S. publicly traded companies, up from only 3.5% in 2000. The 5-fold increase was in part the consequence of the ongoing stock market growth, which now has the distinction of being the longest running bull market ever recorded. Buoyed in large part by central banks’ unprecedented quantitative easing (QE) programs, the rising stocks have lulled many investors into complacency.

Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Economics, Hedging, Market trends, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

How trend following can help industry hedgers: the Palladium edition

Palladium price has more than doubled since the early 2016 making the white metal more valuable than gold for the first time since 2002. Its impressive performance attracted much attention from the financial press, which published numerous articles and analyses about the palladium market. If you diligently read the analyses, you may learn that automotive industry accounts for some 75% of demand for palladium, that its global production is as little as about 200 metric tons per year (vs. about 3,000 tons for gold), that only two countries (Russia and South Africa) produce more than three quarters of its global supply, and that the demand for palladium is expected to continue to grow. Presumably that implies that palladium price should remain high and possibly continue to rise. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

On model risk in quantitative trading

  • Quantitative strategies have become increasingly popular in trading and investing
  • The experience with using them has been mixed, largely as a result of three categories of problems
  • Still, quantitative approach is well worth exploring and offers important advantages to their users

Over the past few years, the use of quantitative strategies has become increasingly popular in trading and investment management. According to JPMorgan, passive and quantitative investors now account for 60% of equity assets under management (vs. 30% ten years ago) and only about 10% of trading volumes originate from fundamental discretionary traders.[1] Appealing new buzzwords like, robo-advising, artificial intelligence and machine learning stoked the imagination of many investors and boosted the quantitative trading gold rush. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following, Uncategorized

How we navigated the oil price roller coaster

Extreme price events are far and away the greatest source of external risk facing oil and gas producers and other energy-dependent companies. Frequency and severity of such events has been increasing dramatically since about 2005/2006 causing ocasionally severe pain for many industry participants.

Case in point was the 70% oil price collapse through 2014 and 2015, from over $100 to below $30 per barrel. In the aftermath of this decline, U.S. mining industry – which includes oil and gas producers – reported losses of $227 billion, wiping out eight previous years’ worth of profits as the following chart shows: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market trends, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Trading COMEX Copper with I-System technology

The price of Copper has been trending significantly higher since the start of 2016. However, this trend has not been easy to trade using traditional trend following strategies.

HG_PriceCurveFm2015_2018_Framed

This last event (D) was quite painful for most – if not all – trend followers, as the following chart illustrates:  Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Economics, Inflation, Market trends, Risk management

Labor tightness adds fuel to rising inflation in the U.S. economy

Toward the end of 2012, Elliott Management’s Paul Singer made a speech at the Archstone Partnership annual meeting. He stated that, “The thing that scares me the most is significant inflation, which could destroy our society.” About a year later in an interview with Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” program he explained that this could come about with small changes in perception of inflation risk: “The first whiffs of either commodity inflation or wage inflation … may cause a self-reinforcing set of market events … which may include a sharp fall in bond prices, … fall in stock prices, rapid increase in commodities…” Continue reading →

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