Redemptions Continue to Plague the Asset Management Industry

I was actually taken aback when I read this. About 80% of managers trail the indexes. The last time the industry has failed this poorly was in the late 90s, during the epic dot com melt up.

Over the past five years, as the market has risen to new record highs, investors have taken $422b out of actively managed funds and have contributed $480b to passively managed ETFs and indexes.

“Most active managers focus on companies, not macroeconomics,” said Michael Rosen, chief investment officer at Angeles Investment Advisors in Los Angeles, where he helps oversee $30 billion. “There has not been a lot of reward for making distinctions among stocks.”

In the year ended June 30, 85 percent of large-cap stock funds, 88 percent of mid-cap funds and 89 percent of small-cap funds failed to match the major stock indexes they track: S&P 500 Index, the S&P Midcap 400 Index and the S&P Smallcap 600 Index. The numbers for five and 10 years were slightly worse.

“The numbers are pretty appalling,” said Aye Soe, senior director of global research at the S&P unit that compiled the report. “Given the choppiness in the markets we would have expected the active managers to come out looking better.”

Mutual funds with an international tilt fared somewhat better. Over the past year, 75 percent of global funds, 55 percent of international funds and 42 percent of emerging market funds failed to match indexes. Over 10 years roughly 80 percent of the funds trailed indexes.

Active managers may take comfort by looking at the past. The last time they trailed indexes this badly was in the late 1990s. In 1998 and 1999, according to Morningstar numbers, fewer than 8 percent of large-cap domestic stock funds beat the S&P 500 over the trailing five years. When the tech bubble burst in 2000, stock pickers began to do better. By 2003, roughly half were beating the index over five years.

I dismiss the glib notion that all asset managers are fucking morons. I’ve worked with these people my entire life and most of them are smart, entrepreneurial people. I do think, however, that the inflexibility to hedge and/or take another position in the markets, other than 100% long all the time, has taken a toll. If you’re managing money for clients and want to protect client assets, in let’s say a retirement account, your only option is to move to bonds and/or cash, or maybe write some calls. Back in 2008-2009, I was able to position clients in a sundry of inverse ETFs, to hedge for downside risk in a deleterious tape, and it saved me. You can read the archives. It’s all there,  to the last trade. While most of my colleagues lost 30-60% of their assets, I made upwards of 60%.

Since then, the horrible lawyers at FINRA banned inverse ETFs from the industry, just because some idiots didn’t know how to use them.

Also, and I can speak to with first hand knowledge on the matter, having worked at a large mutual fund company at one point in my early career, much of the decision making is based off research reports and models that only assume the best. Rarely are these people modeling in volatility or draw downs of an onerous nature.

Essentially, investors are leaving actively managed funds because they’re woefully unprepared to deal with this new paradigm that is fueled by central bank over planning. It’s confusing and hard to adjust to. Having said that, people who can actually run money, and do it without incurring large draw-downs during periods of duress, are extremely valuable and in demand now. Throughout my career, my biggest detriment was working through volatility. My upside was massive when markets behaved well; but I often endured heart shattering losses during periods of fuckery.

This is precisely what I am seeking to remedy this year with my new, lower beta, method of management. I am unsure if I will stick to this model or adjust it as time goes on. I’ll find out by the end of 2016 and will be making a decision then.

It was an enjoyable day for the free money feudalists, as poor economic data dropped the chances of a Fed rate hike from a scary 15% to 12%.

Markets raged higher, taking with it a cadre of orangutans who’ve been blessed to traverse this earth without a brain.

Specifically speaking, markets should continue smacking the shit out of overzealous traders. When you short into the hole or buy into a riptide, don’t be surprised when you are unceremoniously removed from your cash.

A great man once told me “it’s all fun and games until your bullshit account goes to zero.” He was a curmudgeon fellow who walked around the boardroom with an unlit cigar in his mouth, old, cranky and brilliant. He’d offer these quips to me whenever we met at the Bloomberg terminal. Back then, I thought he was a stupid asshole, as I was younger, stronger, and making a dickload of money.

The dot com bubble was good to me. The bust caught me flat footed and left me in ruins for two years.

Right now, I’m the older guy chewing on a disgusting cigar, telling you that a storm is coming and the ebb tide is much closer than you know.

In effort to fight back against Trump and media criticism over Ford’s decision to move their small car manufacturing to Mexico, Ford issued a press release–reminding people that they’ve been in America for more than 100 years and still employ a great number of people here.

“Ford has been in the United States for more than 100 years. Our home is here. We will be here forever,” said spokeswoman Christine Baker.The company has 85,000 U.S. employees, up 28,000, or nearly 50%, in just the last five years. It has 8,800 employees at Mexican plants, and will add 2,800 jobs there when the new $1.6 billion plant opens there in 2018.

The numbers Ford is citing is a little disingenuous, considering the auto industry was in fucking shambles five years ago. While it’s true, Ford employs a great number of Americans and aren’t firing a bunch of people and replacing them with low waged Mexicans, it’s the trend that’s important to keep note of. Through attrition and lack of investment, Ford will be shifting jobs to Mexico at a much greater pace than inside the US, thanks to NAFTA.

The new factory in Mexico will add 500k units of capacity, more than double the current production.

Although the chart above is 4 years old, clearly you can see the statement out of Ford Motor are wantonly misleading with regard to the overall health of the auto industry in the United States. If we’re slave to trends, I think it’s fair to say Mexico is heading up and America lower.

Trump is in NYC today giving a speech on economic policy, vehemently opposed to the globalism that has been choking out America since the 90s. His plan is based around one simple concept: does the policy improve wages or create jobs for Americans? If not, he’s not interested.

This gets boring and monotonous. Some of you might think ‘how could making money get boring?’ I’ve done this my entire life, for as long as I could remember. When my stupid friends were outside hanging off trees, I was playing ‘stock market games’ with paper and pencil, sort of like Dungeon and Dragons, but for stocks. I’m not a guru or the best trader/investor you’ll ever meet. I like to consider myself a highly functional, competent, person, who is able to cut through the bullshit and see things clearly.

Look, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the recent struggles in the market were a fiction. Okay?  They were concocted by crazy people with small account balances. Now that we’ve received yet another flurry of worse than expected economic data and a subsequent decline in Fed rate hike chances, shorts are scrambling to cover.

September chances are now 12%

Remember, the Fed has NEVER hiked without the market already giving a 100% chance of it happening. Okay?

Even the December rate hike scare mongers are backing off that bet.

So what is the best way to play this?

Stocks? Absolutely not.

Look, if you’re a great trader and can navigate the ups and downs, go for it. But most advisors I know are bumbling fools and do not have the flexibility with their books to trade too often. Most advisors take positions and rebalance once per quarter or once per month. For those of you running money, just reflect upon what has worked best in 2016.

Stocks are up 5-6%. Bonds are up 15%. Gold is up triple digits, at least the miners. Utilities and REITs are up anywhere from 15-35%, for the year.

An easy Fed and crazy BOJ and ECB means yields will continue to drop, especially with the backdrop of a weak economy. Growth is non-existent in most areas of the economy. From my vantage point, the highest growth opportunities lie in the uncertain nature of the economy and political landscape. If QE is the best central banks can do to give GDP a jolt, then you have no choice than to own the one asset that is the alternative and hedge against volatile FX markets.

Gold.

It’s like she’s surrounded by fucking morons who have this warped sense of the world, unable to properly communicate amongst normal living human beings.

Check this out, Hillary Clinton just tweeted that ‘amongst other things’, Trump should release detailed medical records.

Wait a second. She just fucking collapsed at the 9/11 memorial after months of coughing and dodging rumors that she’s heading towards her fucking deathbed and she thought it was a good idea to call Trump out to release detailed medical records? Really?

Also, and let’s be clear about this, a person who deleted 33,000 emails to avoid prosecution for crimes against the state should not even be broaching the subject of transparency, period.

It’s as if these life time politicians think we’re living through the 80s, before the internet could archive and check shit out.

Frankly, I find the whole thing disheartening, as it shows an acute ignorance and naivety that resembles stupidity to me.

Lo and behold, Trump is +6 in the latest LA Time poll.

Far be it from me to ignore the disastrous action in fixed income. There are three schools of thought at play here, the first and most ridiculous stems from Fed rate hikes. Chalk that up as improbable. The other theory has more to do with systemic problems, more to do with sovereign balance sheets, the end of European QE, and a resumption of the Chinese capital flight that scared the shit out of everyone earlier this year. The last and most favored amongst bulls has to do with the economy doing so good, so fucking good, that fixed income investors are selling bonds to buy stocks. The only problem with that theory is that stocks have been trading down too.

This feels like a squall, a temporary scare that is deepening as the trade unwinds. In other words, there wasn’t a lot of people buying treasuries when I was buying them, right? Most people chased it and got in late and are now unwinding, or selling, their positions. It’s like a giant fucking margin call amongst idiot hedge funds who thought it was a good idea to leverage up into negative yielding bunds because the price was ripping higher. Or, domestically, they were buying zero coupons and hoping for bad news. Well, here is the other side of that trade.

Every bond in europe is getting sold down, none more than the German 10yr.

Here in the states, bonds are getting hit, but nothing like in QE rigged Europe.

Bottom line: the optics of a bond correction are good for stocks, as long as it’s contained. If the route becomes pervasive and yields ‘blow out’, then that’ll be another negative headline that will scare idiots into selling. Like I said the other day, the acute and sudden sell off in markets is typically a trap for bears. The only thing that could derail a bounce is a continuation of the decline in crude.

Yesterday Ford announced they were moving all small car production to Mexico, in order to take advantage of their slaver wages down there. Plus, unions are a hassle to deal with here.

Naturally, with Mexico being directly in the cross hairs of Trump, he took this opportunity to menace Ford and tell people that this sort of shit wouldn’t be happening under a Trump administration.

“We shouldn’t allow it to happen,” Trump said during a speech in Michigan, the center of U.S. car production.

“They’ll make their cars, they’ll employ thousands and thousands of people not from this country and they’ll sell the cars right through our border. No tax, no nothing, and we’ll have nothing but more unemployment in Flint and in Michigan,” he said in the speech in Flint.

“It used to be cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” he said. “Now the cars are made in Mexico, and you can’t drink the water in Flint. That’s not good.”

For the uninitiated, the Bohemian Grove is a gathering of the most powerful men (women are NOT permitted) in the world, who convene to decide the fate of the world. It is widely believed that this, and the Bilderberg meetings, are what make up the shadow governments that control global governance.

Here is a first hand encounter with the fuckers who attended the grove.

At any rate, in yet another scornful email released from Colin Powell’s gmail account, the good general informs his good buddy pal, Peter Gordon MacKay, a former Canadian Member of Parliament, who also served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Minister of National Defense, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, that the olde guard at the Grove will not be voting for Mr. Trump.

————————————————-

Peter, I am back from the Bohemian Grove. Surprise, surprise, I sat next
to Stephen Harper a couple of times and had a nice discussion. Grove
attendees know that Trump is a disaster. Most will vote against, but quite
a few will not vote for Hillary and will vote for a third party candidate.
Strange doings down here. Otherwise all is well with the Powells. We’ll
sneak away for a few days in August. Of course I’d love to see you. Let me
know your dates. I told Stephen that you seemed quite content in your new
place in life.

All the best, Colin

Good God.

Good evening, I am your host for the evening, Count Fly, and I’m here to inform you that a great doom, an pox, is coming for you now.

The NIKKEI 225 is plunging tonight, lower by 1.4%. There isn’t any notable news, other than the fact that there seem to be more sellers than buyers.

Following suit are both European and American futures, encumbered by losses. The DAX is indicating lower by 0.7% and NASDAQ futures, which were gliding into the evening a short while ago, are being menaced by sellers, off by 25.

Crude is flat and the yen is rising v the dollar by 0.35%. Oh, bonds are rising as well, effectively topping off a very scary and a deleterious evening of trade.