Author: shyam

Are Stop-Losses Worth It?

StockViz introduced Themes back in August 2013. We went live with two strategies: Momentum, rebalanced once a month, and Quality to Price, rebalanced once a quarter. The Modi bull market was just getting started and returns were spectacular in the beginning. Here is Momentum, from Jan-2014 through Dec-2015:
Momentum Jan-2014 through Dec-2015

And then, in Jan-2016, the Chinese market crash rippled through world financial markets (WaPo). Momentum collapsed. This is the previous chart extended to June-2016:
Momentum Jan-2014 through June-2016

Momentum investors clamored for a safety net. Enter stop-losses. We created a new set of Themes, called Momos, that had a 5% trailing stop loss at the position level. Positions hitting the stop loss were substituted with stocks that had favorable momentum and trend. The logic was that if the entire market crashed, the strategy would be in cash until stocks gained momentum. We introduced these Themes in June and they worked as advertised on the subsequent market correction in November that year. Idea validated? Here is a chart comparing the returns of Momentum (vanilla) vs. Momo (Relative) v1.1:
Momentum (vanilla) vs. Momo

Momo trails its plain-vanilla counterpart over a ~3 year period. There has been plenty of volatility during that time – November 2016, August 2017 and January 2018 through now. And Momo traded a lot more than its plain-vanilla counterpart (the turnover charts are on the Theme pages linked above) through these bouts of volatility. And what was saved through stop-losses was paid for in taxes and transaction costs. Here is a chart that shows the Momo strategy with and without transaction costs:

So, are stop-losses worth it? Probably not. It is very difficult to de-risk a high-risk strategy intrinsically. It is better for investors to focus on asset allocation to bring down overall portfolio volatility to a level that they can bear. Think of it like trying to tame a tiger. You may very well succeed. But a tame tiger is a cat.

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Indian vs. US Mid-caps

There used to be a time when getting your kids through college was the final act before kicking them out of the house. But kids these days want their parents to fund their US education as well. And how about a gap year to travel through Europe? You can roll your eyes all that you want but 15-20 years from now, this will be the new normal for middle-class Indians. What can we do? We have always been an aspirational lot and it is bound to rub off on our kids. As much as we like our kids to be financially independent when they grow up, we also don’t want them to start their lives with a ton of student loans. However, given the potentially large dollar liabilities in the future, most Indian investors continue to keep all their eggs in the Indian rupee basket. If you think your Indian mid-cap mutual fund alone is going to fund your kid’s grad school, think again.

Not only have Indian Mid-caps trailed US Mid-caps over the last 25 years, they have done so with steeper and longer drawdowns.

Over the last 25 years or so, US mid-caps have out-performed Indian mid-caps. Indian asset managers would have you believe that “east or west, India is the best” but that is not what the numbers say. Here are the cumulative and annual returns of the MSCI India MC and MSCI USA MC indices:
MSCI India vs. US mid-cap indices
MSCI India vs. US mid-cap indices

Living in India, it is easy to get carried away with stories about how Indian equities present big opportunities. However, historical returns show that investors were not compensated for the additional risk that they took by investing in India. Also, the US equity market cap is 50% of the total world equity market cap. So even if you have bonds, gold etc in your portfolio, being 100% invested in India is not true diversification. Besides, the Indian rupee keeps depreciating, making your future dollar liabilities that much larger when priced in local assets.

We ran through different allocations between Indian and US mid-caps to get an idea of what the potential returns could look like:
Allocating between MSCI India vs. US mid-cap indices

Assuming a monthly rebalance, the 50/50 portfolio beats the “all in” 100/0 and 0/100 portfolios. And it does so with shallower drawdowns. So both from a diversification and returns point of view, it makes sense to allocate towards US mid-caps.

It is time to have a chat about your portfolio. Get in touch with us now!

Further reading: Funding Your Dollar Dreams

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Food: A problem of plenty?

fertilizer and food price chart

fertilizer, cereal, rice and wheat indices

Legend
PFERT: Primary Commodity Prices, Fertilizer
PCERE: Primary Commodity Prices, Cereal index
PRICENPQ: Primary Commodity Prices, Rice, Thailand
PWHEAMT: Primary Commodity Prices, Wheat
PFOOD: Primary Commodity Prices, Food index

If I am reading this chart right, when prices of food commodities (cereals, rice, wheat) go up, fertilizer prices go up. But when food prices come down, fertilizer’s stay up? Wheat prices are more-or-less where they were back in the 90’s. The rest have barely budged. No wonder I’ve spent most of my adult life hearing about farm distress.

Code and charts are on github.

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Book Review: The Myth of Capitalism

In the book The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (Amazon,) authors Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn lay out the case that capitalism is dead in America and that over regulation and under-enforcement of anti-trust is to blame.

Key points:

  • Regulation suppresses startups and cements the lead of incumbents who can afford the added compliance costs.
  • Current anti-trust only focuses on “consumer welfare.” And the welfare of the consumer is really only measured by low prices. But what about keeping markets open to all new entrants, dispersing economic and political power, preventing collusion, and protecting small suppliers from predatory pricing?
  • What is good for the CEO to do for his company is not necessarily good for the whole economy. In the economy, it is logical for big companies to try to seek efficiencies, acquire competitors, pay lower wages, and increase their own income, but when all companies try to do this at the same time, everyone is worse off.
  • Investing in a portfolio of companies that spend the most on lobbying and influencing regulators would consistently beat the market. Over the past 10 years, the Strategas Lobbying Portfolio beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 by five percentage points every year.
  • Government is not a passive bystander in the increase in inequality. It is an active participant, granting favors to the wealthy and powerful, looking after the interests of the well connected.

I thought I had a personal philosophy about competition but according to the book, I am an “Ordoliberal.” Ordoliberalism argues that capitalism requires a strong government to create a framework of rules that provide the order (ordo in Latin) that free markets need to function properly. And I completely agree with the label.

A lot of supporting evidence is provided in the book to further the point. And the policy prescription is fairly straightforward. But here are some exceptions that do not really fit the narrative:

  1. Amazon routinely steals ideas from successful marketplace products. Does this mean we need marketplace regulation? Probably not because without Amazon, those businesses probably wouldn’t exist in the first place. And there are other market place competitors, like Etsy, Instagram, Pinterest, etc who act as a counterweight.
  2. Facebook is effectively a payola scam where you have to pay up if you want your own fans to see your content. Does this mean it should be regulated as a media company? The last company that had a walled garden of content was AOL. The world wide web is just a click away.
  3. Kraft Heinz took a huge markdown on its brands because consumer tastes changed and they hadn’t invested enough in R&D to be on top of it. Moats are only apparent when they are under attack.

Do I agree with the authors that capitalism needs fixing? Yes. But do I think the situation is as alarming as it is made out to be in the book? No.

Recommendation: Must read!

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Chart: Number of stocks going up

We often hear market commentators croaking about the number of stocks going up vs. those going down. There is even an advance/decline line filed under technical “analysis.” However, have a look at the statistical distribution of stocks going up in any given month and see for yourself if it makes any sense paying attention to it:
NIFTY100.gainers

It is, at best, a historical artifact… something that is nice to lookup when someone says that they had a great/crappy month. When a lot of stocks have gone up, it presents a target rich environment for long-only traders. So a random selection of stocks would out-perform the index in that scenario. But good luck using it for market timing.

Code and chart are on github.

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