Category: Missives

A series of important factors in the U.S. stock market are in play which beg the question, “Are we at a beginning of a risk cycle or at an ending?” The answers will have a bearing on what to own and where to be positioned going forward. These thoughts won’t be exhaustive, but we hope to get you thinking on a few important subjects.

As we watched this year’s Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, one thing struck us. There was sheer enthusiasm around the annual shareholder meeting for anything tech-oriented. Yes, it was disclosed that Berkshire had taken a position in Amazon that Friday, but it goes deeper.

Many are wondering why the market for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) has performed so poorly, even though the flood of hot new ones came to market recently. It took three years to choke demand for money-losing dot-com IPO companies back in 1997, even though Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called the mania for tech stocks in late 1996 an “irrational exuberance.” What has killed the goose which traditionally laid the golden eggs on Wall Street?

We have written a good deal about the parallels of today’s market with the tech and telecom bubble of the late 1990’s. While no two time periods are ever the same, today’s rhymes are eerily similar in some respects, with the latest development in initial public offerings (IPOs) as the latest example. Like past market peaks that ultimately corrected due to excessive valuation levels, markets are now working to suck in fresh capital as they sell the sizzle before anyone has tasted the steak (vegetable based or not). Today’s reverence for disruption and innovation have created such myopia that we might be beyond meat altogether.

We believe the U.S. stock market will come down to a clash between one very positive forward-looking set of facts and a very negative set over the next ten years. Demographics argue for a much stronger economy, higher interest rates and a change in dynamics associated with stock market popularity. The parabolic move the last five years in e-commerce and other tech-related securities has unknowingly cursed forward-index performance and turned a whole generation of investors into growth stock aficionados.

My career started in 1994, which was a stealth bear market for stocks and an outright bear market for bonds. Fed Chair Alan Greenspan hiked rates seven times as he played catch up in response to a percolating economy that rediscovered its sea legs coming off the 1991 recession. The Federal Funds Rate doubled from 3.00% to 6.00%, and the 30-year bond yield jumped 150 basis points to 7.75%. You lost roughly 25% by owning the long bond, and although the S&P 500 grew operating earnings 18% that year, its price declined around 1.5% while your average stock did far worse. This Fed era was quite opaque, often surprising the market and offering very little read-through. At times it seemed Greenspan reveled in non-transparency, as the opening quote reminds us.

We consider ourselves excellent spectators of competition and look forward to March Madness this month. We are reminded that these very competitive games can’t take place unless there are rules and referees to officiate. Our long-time readers are aware that we have warned of the danger surrounding the aggregation of power by the monopolistic tech behemoths. In the last week, March 11-17, 2019, everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to The Wall Street Journal editorialist, Andy Kessler, to Arizona State Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, have weighed in on the subject of the rules surrounding competition in business and who should be officiating. We would like to reexplain our position on this subject, because we believe it is a most critical question in U.S. long-term economic success, in economic inequality and in where to invest in the U.S. stock market.

Financial euphoria episodes are a common occurrence in investment markets and the U.S. stock market. When a new one comes along, market participants accelerate their enthusiasm toward the end, which makes the shares of companies involved dead to us. The new mania becomes comparable to prior episodes and prepares to destroy the capital of those who extrapolate the existing trends and enthusiasm.

The market hates ambiguity. That’s what we’re told, and on any short-term basis, we can see the market vote accordingly. In a world where investing has morphed towards algorithmic trading systems influencing daily volatility, many have come to accept this as a reasonable truth and participate by selling when things lose clarity or piling in when visibility is perceived.

We are revisiting our discussion of what the real world is like versus what academics claim in papers and debates. A good way of putting this is “Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.” In 1984, this is exactly what Michael Jensen did in his talk at Columbia University in a debate with Warren Buffett. We know that reciting more and more of your colleagues’ papers is the best way to win in academia. We seek to finish this discussion on what works in the real world.