This note was originally published at 8am on May 05, 2011. INVESTOR and RISK MANAGER SUBSCRIBERS have access to the EARLY LOOK (published by 8am every trading day) and PORTFOLIO IDEAS in real-time.
“Forget about style; worry about results.”
-Bobby Orr
Last night, after the Boston Bruins scored 2 goals in the 1st minute of the 1st period against the Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, I found myself high fiving friends in the Boston Garden amongst 18,000 of the most Ragingly Bullish Bears I have seen in my life.
Bears wearing black and gold jerseys have been pounding Boston’s pavement since the Bruins were born in 1924. While I’m not a long-time Bruins fan, I can assure you that the best risk managed position I could assume last night was to be one for the night.
Bears, Bud Lights, and belting heavy metal music with the Bruins about to go up 3-0 in a playoff series in May is as bullish a 3-factor model as a hockey fan can recognize. It’s been a long time. They haven’t won The Cup since Bobby Orr (1972). These bears are hungry.
How Ragingly Bullish are you?
While sentiment is one of the more difficult risk management factors to quantify, we do have some qualitative data that we overlay with our models. In mid-February, one of the key sentiment signals we called out in calling for a US stock market correction was the Institutional Investor (II) Bullish-to-Bearish survey.
Like most surveys, this one is far from perfect – but if measured relative to itself, you can at least consider little mathematical critters that matter like mean reversion and spread risk.
So let’s forget about the style of this survey for a second and consider the results:
- Bulls up 100 basis points week-over-week to 55%
- Bears down 200 basis week-over-week to 16.5%
- The Spread (Bulls minus Bears) widened by 150 basis points week-over-week to +38.2% for the Bulls
Again, relative to itself, there are a few critical risk management callouts in this long-dated survey to consider:
- Bulls are not ragingly bullish
- Bears are not allowed to be bearish
- The Spread between Bulls and Bears is only 200-300 basis points from its all-time wides (all-time is a long time)
All-time “wides” is risk management locker-room speak at Hedgeye for something you don’t want to mess with – kind of like being a man dressed in orange last night drinking a smoothie with your i-pod on in the bowl of the Boston Garden – it’s just a bad position to be long of.
Of course, with Correlation Risk to the US Currency Crashing running at all-time highs (see yesterday’s EL note to see how we quantify that), that definitely doesn’t mean you couldn’t try riding that Silver bull to the bitter end. But remember, the last 8-seconds of that ride is where all your risk really lives.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, all it took to rock the raging inflation bulls’ world for a few days was some deflation.
How do you Deflate The Inflation (one of our Q2 Global Macro Themes)?
You stop the Currency Crash in the US Dollar.
For the week-to-date, after closing down for 14 of the prior 18 weeks, all it took to Deflate The Inflation was an arrest of the US Dollar’s decline. For the week, with the US Dollar Index trading flat, pull up a some of the following charts and you tell me how Ragingly Bullish you are on being long The Correlation Risk:
- Gold
- Silver
- Oil
- Cotton
- Copper
- Energy stocks
I can tell you that I for one am not enthused about being long Gold and Oil this week. When this gargantuan global carry trade of Gaming Policy unwinds, we can all forget about debating risk management styles and see who is left standing. Mr. Market owes the fans nothing.
My immediate-term support and resistance lines for Gold are now 1488 and 1526, respectively. Immediate-term support and resistance lines for oil are now $107.11 and $109.54 and my immediate-term lines of support and resistance for the SP500 are now 1332 and 1371, respectively.
Best of luck out there today,
KM
Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer
