"As the facts change, I change... what do you do, Sir?"
-John Maynard Keynes
To
be clear, I am no Keynesian. However, I think this may be one of the
best one-liners in the economic dialogue - it is a process.
I
have my investment process, and you have yours - together, we can learn
from one another and test, implement, and evolve. That's what the most
successful dynamic multi-factor systems on this planet have always
done. There is no reason to believe that macro economics will end up
any differently. When the Street or your boss tells you they "don't do
macro", I humbly suggest you challenge that received wisdom from the
heavens of non-transparency, and ask well "what is it that you do, Sir?"
Don't
forget that the 1st Nobel Prize in Economics wasn't awarded until 1969
- there are plenty a precedent waiting to be set in this profession;
plenty of processes to be tested and tried; and plenty of winning and
losing investment strategies that will emerge from the facts.
Of
course, this isn't a gender thing, so THE question could very well be
"what do you do, Madame?" In fact, neuroscience is starting to uncover
The New Reality that women are actually predisposed to make better
portfolio decisions than men, on balance, when under stress. Sorry guys!
One
of our sharpest female clients jumped right on my suggestion from
yesterday's Early Look ("Crisis In Credibility",
www.researchedgellc.com, 1/7/09) and effectively peppered me with
questions as to the implications. She, as usual, was all over the pin
with THE questions she was asking. Given the facts that have revealed
themselves over the course of the last 3 months, THE question remains:
why doesn't Wall Street understand that there is no longer a "Liquidity
Crisis" and that all we have left is a "Crisis in Credibility?"
Whether
it be Satyam Computer's Indian fraud announcement that continues to
rock Asian equity markets or Chinese computer giant Lenovo trading down
-26% last night on missing expectations, it's all one and the same - we
have ourselves a crisis in both the credibility of the financial
system's leadership and the research process embedded therein. If we
didn't, expectations from Madoff to the "Made-Up" wouldn't be creating
so much heartache in your 401k's.
"Expectations" are indeed
"the root of all heartache", and to be clear, I am not a Shakespearean
student in creative writing either, but his point lines up very
appropriately with the Keynesian one. When the facts change, you better
make moves in your portfolio, or your investors will soon be expressing
heartache of their own.
Why does this process gospel according
to Keith matter to the market this morning? Well, because it matters
every morning. When I started selling our position in Commodities and
Equities into the peaks of pessimism caught off sides, I was doing so
because the facts in my macro model were changing. I didn't do it to be
cute. I didn't do it to pander to a core constituency. I simply did it
because I thought I was going to be right.
There are 3 things
that have changed in the last 72 hours of global macro fact gathering:
1. Prices, 2. Expectations embedded in those prices, and 3. Timing of
macro catalysts.
Of those 3, price and expectations are
correlated functions of one another. As prices rose, so did
expectations - so I started selling into them. We sold all of our
"re-flated" Commodities, all of Brazil, and all of Hong Kong - prices
in the two latter equity markets had risen over +40% since we started
getting bullish, while the price of oil had raced +46% higher in less
than 9 trading days. As prices and expectations change, I change...
what do you do, Madame?
When it comes to understanding markets,
Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is not in the same league as my
aforementioned client. Yesterday, Pelosi, and Congress at large changed
the point #3 in what mattered most to my macro model on the margin -
TIMING. I sent out 2 separate intraday macro notes to our top tier
Macro clients yesterday titled "Beware of Congress" and "Obama Having a
Rougher Day" - so I won't rehash those notes in full, but I will say
that the facts were changing yesterday - real time - and markets wait
for no one.
The bottom line is that Congress is pushing out
the timing of the catalysts associated with Obama's inauguration. On
the margin, these pending catalysts are mostly positive... but their
duration was being pushed out, at least rhetorically. I actually think
this is great for the US stock market in general, because it creates a
longer dated tail of positive announcements - in the face of a dreadful
pending employment report tomorrow, and Q4 earnings season right around
the corner, God knows we need that.
I don't need to be bullish
or bearish. Neither do you. We have to be right. This is going to be a
dog fight in 2009 as to who has both the best investment processes and
returns. We will never, ever give up. We have your back. We appreciate
your business and feedback - without it, we wouldn't be aware of as
many facts changing in this globally interconnected market place as
there are.
My buy/cover range for the SP500 is now 885-900. I
proactively cut my asset allocation to US Equities in half over the
course of the last week. Now I am open to buy more, lower.
Best of luck out there today.
