Goldman: Hedge Fund Concentration at Highest Levels on Record

They’re delivering Alpha, you scoundrels.

Post largest redemptions since the financial crisis, the gurus in our beloved hedge fund industry are doubling down on their moronic strategy, by concentrating their assets into very few stocks. At the present, current concentration amongst the top 10 holdings for hedge funders stands at a record 68%.

“We’re moving out of a macro-focused environment and into one where stock fundamentals matter,” Ben Snider, an equity strategist at Goldman, said by phone. “It’s been an exceptionally poor 2016 and that comes on the heels of many years of underperformance for hedge funds and mutual funds, so this is definitely something the industry needs.”

As volatility crept into the stock market over the last year, some of the biggest losses were in stocks beloved by hedge funds. The 300 companies in the Russell 3000 Index that they owned the most shares in plunged an average 25 percent in the year through Feb. 11, compared with an 11 percent drop in the S&P 500, Bloomberg data show.

The culprit was a breakdown in the momentum style of stock-picking, a strategy that exploded in popularity last year in which investors simply buy companies that went up the fastest in the recent past. The result: a group of investors that pride themselves on independent research and stock-selection all ended up owning the same shares.

“When you’re playing catch-up to zero you really have to focus on the names that are going to get you there,” said Dunn. “Concentration works, it’s the way you should manage your portfolio. Hedge funds are an absolute return strategy and the way to optimize your potential outcomes is having your biggest positions in your highest conviction names.”

“Hedge fund portfolio concentration stands at the highest level on record,” the team, led by chief equity strategist David Kostin, wrote in the May 27 report. “The elevated stock return dispersion will help skilled fund managers generate alpha during the remainder of 2016.”

Or, maybe this strategy can backfire, causing another disastrous year for the 2 and 20 players? One thing is for certain, the results aren’t going to be milquetoast. It’s do or die for many funds out there now.

Maybe Barington didn’t get the memo, which said ‘the mall is dead.’ In an absurd action by a 1.5% stakeholder, Barington Capital nominated a few people for Chico’s board, as well as stating that the company could do a better job (duh) and that the stock could trade up to $27, if they’d only follow their plan.

“Chico’s could more than double its earnings per share in three years, which we estimate could translate to a stock price of approximately $25 to $27 per share,” Barington’s founder, James Mitarotonda, wrote to Chico’s board chairman, David Walker, in a letter attached to a public filing.

Shares of Chico’s, which caters to older women, have fallen 33 percent over the last 12 months while the S&P 500 apparel retail index has dropped 0.2 percent in the same period. The stock closed at $11 on Wednesday.

Barington nominated Mitarotonda, who started his career at Bloomingdale’s and has made successful retail investments before, plus former Macy’s executive Janet Grove as directors. Chico’s nominated retail executives Bonnie Brooks, vice chairman of Hudson’s Bay Company, and Bill Simon.

Chico’s is a donut, in my humble opinion. Clothes that target 55 yr old women is a business model doomed for failure.

Some PE firmed dubbed Thoma Bravo bought out software company QLIK today, in an all cash transaction, that didn’t even eclipse the recent highs for the stock. What sort of nonsense is this?

According to terms of the agreement announced Thursday, Qlik shareholders will get $30.50 in cash for each share of Qlik common stock they hold. The price is a 40 percent premium to the company’s unaffected 10-day average stock price prior to March 3.

Qlik shares rose 4.3 percent to $30.23 in early trading in New York. They are down 8.5 percent this year through Wednesday.

Bad deal.

Surprise, surprise. Crude is up 80% since the last time OPEC lied about capping production. Since then, the slave owners have produced crude in a belligerent manner, unfettered even.

After today’s highly anticipated meeting, nothing had been accomplished. They just sat around, in their Gucci sandals, eating olives and unleavened bread, agreeing on nothing.

As such, crude is slumping and so are markets.

The SPY is down a whole 5 points right now.

In spite of the fact the last man who ‘allegedly’ landed on the moon, with calculator technology, was in 1972, Elon Musk said he was going to send ‘human cargo’ to Mars by 2024.

I know, doubting the fact that we ever landed on the moon, or that Stanley Kubrick created and directed the lunar landing hoax, is just nonsensical rabble. Plus anyway, so many other nations have travelled through the Van Allen radiation belt since then.

Oh, that’s right, no one has actually ever done that, since 1972.

SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk will send a mission to Mars — on the Flying Dragon version 2 rocket —starting in 2018 and launch a rocket headed there at every open opportunity — every 26 months.

“It is intended to carry astronauts to the International Space Station,” said Musk at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. on Wednesday night. “But we are going to send one to Mars in 2018.”

But that’s not the biggest ambition. If everything goes according to plan, the first rocket carrying human cargo will launch in 2024, he said.

The Flying Dragon 2 has the interior size of an SUV and is capable of carrying up to seven people and will take 18 months to get there.

Musk sees multi-planetary future as ‘exciting and inspiring’
“I would not recommend traveling to Mars in that,” he said. “It would be a long time to spend on an SUV.”

More importantly, perhaps: “It also does not have the capability to get back to earth, we put that in the fine print,” he said.

“If you’re going to choose a place to die, then Mars is not a bad choice,” he said.

Musk would not reveal too much about his Mars colonization plans, but plans to present his architecture for Mars colonization at the International Astronautical Congress conference in September, he said.

Where do I sign up? I’d like to die on Mars.

Just because everything appears to alright, I figured it was time to douse you with a little reality–if I might be so bold. Let’s have a look at the perversion of finance as we know it, the negative yielding government bond. Due to the massive and unsustainable levels of debt, western governments, and the mad scientists in Japan, figured out a way to monetize their own debt. To do this, they started to print money, for the explicit purposes of buying their own debt. The result has been a dramatic one. Central banks now own their own debt, derisking the possibility of a foreign entity fucking with yields by selling their bonds. And, to boot, they’ve managed to buy so much of the shit, yields have not only gone to zero, but in many cases negative.

In other words, governments are now making money by borrowing money. The more they borrow, the more they make.

What can go wrong?

Let’s have a look around the globe, children, to see what those bonds are up to.

Austria- negative yields up to 7 yr duration
Belgium- negative yields up to 7 yr duration
Bulgaria- negative yields on 1 mo duration, in fucking gypsy land.
Denmark- negative yields up to 5 yr duration
Finland- negative yields up to 6 yr duration
France- negative yields up to 6 yr duration
Germany- negative yields up to 8 yr duration
Ireland- negative yields up to 5 yr duration
Italy- negative yields up to 3 yr duration
Japan- negative yields up to 10 yr duration
Netherlands- negative yields up to 7 yr duration
Slovakia- negative yields up to 4 yr duration (not a typo)
Spain- negative yields up to 2 yr duration
Sweden- negative yields up to 5 yr duration
Switzerland- negative yields up to 15 yr duration

Negative yielding sovereign debt now tops $7 trillion, or 30% of all debt, globally.

No one will ever know for sure if this woman is telling the truth. Is she legit or simply disgruntled for getting shit-canned? Either way, the SEC is too busy chasing down penny stock operators, aka ‘fish in a barrel’, than to fuck with Larry Ellison and his $1,000 per hour attorneys at Oracle.

In a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the former executive, Svetlana Blackburn, accused upper management of trying to push her to “fit square data into round holes” to make Oracle Cloud Services’ results look better.

“We don’t agree with the allegations and intend to vigorously defend the matter,” said Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger.

Blackburn said her bosses instructed her to add millions of dollars of accruals for expected business “with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers,” and that executives above her added accruals on their own.

Blackburn said Oracle terminated her employment last Oct. 15, just one month after the alleged wrongdoing began, and two months after she received a positive performance review.

The stock is lower by 2.5% in the after-hours. But this is probably the last time you’ll ever hear or read about this story. My advice to Ms. Blackburn is to steer clear of black helicopters.

I’ll demonstrate one of the many things the Exodus Market Intelligence Platform does right now. At the moment, the triple lindy downside semi ETF is flagging oversold. Exploring this further, you can see the backtest history to be of the sublime varietal.

Here is the track record of this algo over the past 6 months. Note the percentage gain over 10 trading days, upwards of 20%.

Here is the data for the past 12 months, nearly flawless.

Here is the last time this ETF was flagged OS, right before the January meltdown.

And here is a look at one of the semi sectors, broadline. That chart represents the composite scores of all index members, using our algorithms that rank both technicals and fundamental factors.

I’ll need to toss in a few caveats, naturally. Past performance isn’t indicative of future results. However, the data looks fairly alluring. Since I have an aversion to 3x ETFs, I’ll pass on this call…just because. Couple this with yesterday’s warning shot across the bow of the internet, and a strong narrative is being formed for catastrophically lower share prices in the short term.

Just kidding. A small correction (extra Delbert Grady) is in order.

Apparently, this is unique to white Americans only. White people from other parts of the world are enjoying, long, fruitful, lives. But for some reason, here in America, white people are poisoning themselves with opiods, committing suidice and dying from cirrosis of the liver–due to alcohol abuse. If you do not view this as a societal failure, you’re living in a fucking dinosaur cave.

Here is the link to the full study.

Fig. 1 shows a cessation and reversal of the decline in midlife mortality for US white non-Hispanics after 1998. From 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for US whites aged 45–54 fell by 2% per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2% a year. In contrast, US white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; Hispanic Americans had mortality declines indistinguishable from the British (1.8% per year), and black non-Hispanic mortality for ages 45–54 declined by 2.6% per year over the period.

For deaths before 1989, information on Hispanic origin is not available, but we can calculate lives lost among all whites. For those aged 45–54, if the white mortality rate had held at its 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999 to 2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to fall at its previous (1979?1998) rate of decline of 1.8% per year, 488,500 deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999?2013, 54,000 in 2013. (Supporting Information provides details on calculations.)

This turnaround, as of 2014, is specific to midlife. All-cause mortality rates for white non-Hispanics aged 65–74 continued to fall at 2% per year from 1999 to 2013; there were similar declines in all other racial and ethnic groups aged 65–74. However, the mortality decline for white non-Hispanics aged 55–59 also slowed, declining only 0.5% per year over this period.

There was a pause in midlife mortality decline in the 1960s, largely explicable by historical patterns of smoking (13). Otherwise, the post-1999 episode in midlife mortality in the United States is both historically and geographically unique, at least since 1950. The turnaround is not a simple cohort effect; Americans born between 1945 and 1965 did not have particularly high mortality rates before midlife.

Fig. 2 presents the three causes of death that account for the mortality reversal among white non-Hispanics, namely suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning (accidental and intent undetermined), and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. All three increased year-on-year after 1998. Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted (14?–16). However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. For context, Fig. 2 also presents mortality from lung cancer and diabetes. The obesity epidemic has (rightly) made diabetes a major concern for midlife Americans; yet, in recent history, death from diabetes has not been an increasing threat. Poisonings overtook lung cancer as a cause of death in 2011 in this age group; suicide appears poised to do so.

Because I have a twisted mind, after reading this lovely piece of research, this song came to mind. Congrats to the government for swapping out the non-taxable crack-cocaine drug crisis for the taxed opiate pill varietal. At least we’re now collecting revenues off of the American drug addict.

I am sure there are activists organizing right now against the most peaceful man on earth, to castigate him a racist for suggesting that Germany should be populated by Germans.

Over the past year or so, Germany has been a prime destination for Syrian and Afghan refugees, amongst other war stricken areas. The numbers are likely in the millions, in spite of the German government’s insistence they’ve merely taken in a million or so.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said that “we feel the misery” of each individual refugee and that humans have a “responsibility to help” — but that there are “too many” who have been accepted in Europe.

“Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany,” he laughed in an interview published Tuesday with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “There are so many.”

The Dalai Lama said that “from a moral standpoint” he thinks refugees should “only be accommodated temporarily” — with the goal of them returning home to rebuild their countries.

Upwards of 80% of the ‘refugees’ streaming in are males of military age. Officially, Germany expects close to 4 million fresh refugees by 2020, costing the Germany people upwards of 400 billion euros in subsidies to accommodate the new ‘citizens.’

As you were.