Opportunity thinking

Most of the financial news outlets are posing the question:  keep stocks or sell?

The opportunities transcend the binary choice of liquidating your portfolio or simply holding on for dear life.  No doubt about it, the next twelve to eighteen months are going to be volatile.  I think the general trend will be weakness but there will be flashes to the upside as well.  A few months ago the Dow had a +9.0% day which was huge.  I was impressed, only to find out that it was merely the sixth largest in history.  The other five times occurred in the period 1929 – 1933, in the wake of the Great Depression.**  So expect big down days and big up days occasionally.  Volatility.

In Do-it-Yourself Hedge Funds I discuss opportunity thinking.  In other words it is a way to take today’s news and  turn it into actionable market opportunities.  It is not a secret sauce but provides a starting point for your strategy objectives and implementation.

There are infinite possibilities that could yield desired results for the current year, but they will all likely derive from high volatility, and declining fundamentals, both economic and company-specific.  For example, if you have a portfolio of blue chip stocks, selling volatility premiums against it is not a bad idea.  The VIX has been hovering between 40 and 80 which allows the average investor to sell “volatility premiums” to the market.   Yes, it could limit the upside, but if you look at the equity markets since October 2008, they have been trading a fairly tight range.  Selling premia is a way to capture that vol as cash until there is a breakout either way.

You should also think of pairs trades, especially for individual securities versus their peers individually or the sector at large.  For example one thing I noticed, going into the fourth quarter of last year, is that McDonald’s (MCD) and Walmart (WMT) performed relatively well for then year-to-date, despite the prevailing predictions of gloom and doom.  Part of the reason is that these companies, while categorized as Consumer Discretionary companies, really trade like Consumer Staples in tough times.  When dollars are tight, people go to McDonald’s and Walmart to stretch their dollars.  Sad that MCD behaves as a Consumer Staples company.  But true.

Rather than take a naked buy on these companies (even they are laying off and experiencing declining performance), a relative-value trade would have provided significantly more return and arguably less risk.  A “pairs trade” of buying MCD and WMT while shorting the broad retail sector (such as XRT, the S&P Retail Sector ETF) generated a relatively stable return (>40%) in 4Q 2008. That may seem like 20/20 hindsight but, believe me, there were many hedge strategists in that trade and others that reduced full market exposure while taking advantage of relative performance.  The narrative for this trade was derived from simple daily news.

I said in an earlier post that these markets require extraordinary measures.  Yes, it would seem right now that the only thing better than money is cash.  But also keep an eye out for the opportunities that manifest themselves by very virtue of the toxic mess into which we have gotten.

-Wayne Weddington

**  I recalled these market stats from memory.. they may be approximate.

Resolutions 2009: Survive

By now, we have all made our New Year’s resolutions.  This, despite the fact that the correlation between that which we promise ourselves — “This year I will be more [giving], [healthy], [sober], [straight], [creative], [adventurous]…..” — and the downstream reality is usually low.  I suspect this year, for millions of ordinary people, the resolutions are going to be far simpler.  “This year I resolve to survive.”

Standing here in January, you must wonder which asset classes look good for the year.

Not many.  There is always cash of course but with treasuries paying 2.5% on the 30-year the prospect is not so enticing.  (It is better than a negative return, of course.)

Let us consider some very sobering facts.  First, that bailouts are even necessary is a stark signal that things are desperately bleak in the economy.  The Fed has largely shot its load with its aggressive reduction in interest rates in order to stem (delay?) the pain, on top of enormous “stimuli” to the economy in the trillions.  These are tactics that have not worked well historically in stimulating stable growth.  In fact, they intensified the problems.

Easy money has been the life blood of America’s economy since the eighties.  The growth was great and now the spigot is dry.  Like the carnivorous extra-terrestrial plant in The Little Shop of Horrors, the same stimulus to our growth is now sucking blood from our fingertips.  “Must be blood… must be fresh…”

So in terms of themes or asset classes this year, unfortunately there is not much to like.  But I do like strategies that benefit from volatility such as intra-day equity futures trading, inter-day covered calls and covered puts, each for as long as the VIX remains high (and it will).  I like distressed debt (yielding 10% or more), and I like healthy dominant companies with substantial dividend payouts.  Some investors are buying Asian currencies, knowing that they must continue to rise relative to the debtor-USDollar.  I have not… yet.  I do not like consumer cyclicals, industrials, mining and drilling, or financials…. (sounds like everything, doesn’t it?).  Be wary that short selling is going to be volatile.

2009 will be a year for alternate measures.