The News is....Do the Opposite of What the News Says

I was pleasantly surprised to see the US markets up substantially today -- "the biggest one day gain of 2007" the media report.

To what do we owe this great day? Well, if you follow the daily financial media reports, then you'll see a few reasons put forward for the price jump -- declining bond yields, increasing retail sales, and diminishing concerns about inflation.

But that's today. Yesterday, per the financial media, investors were frightened when the 10-year bond yield symbolically breached 5%. According to the AP Business Wire today: "Rising bond yields amid inflation concerns had been pummeling stocks since last week."

Too often, the media is unhelpful for investors. Explaining events after the fact means little for future prices. In fact, future prices tend to do the opposite of what the news implies.

When the media is negative is actually the best time to buy. The chart to the left demonstrates how negativity in the media, this time around 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, was inversely correlated with market returns. I quantified negativity by counting negative words (fear-related) in the Nightly Business Report online transcripts. A simple regression analysis found a significant inverse correlation between the prevalence of negative words in a transcript and the market's performance over the next week. No offense Paul Kangas and Susie Gharib, but your broadcast is useless for the average investor.

By the way, the above chart appears in my upcoming book, "Inside the Investor's Brain" (available from Wiley on July 9th).

When amateur investors hear the media experts predict a slowing economy after a sharp drop in the market, they get scared. When scared, they are more likely to sell. The financial news is better avoided by sensitive investors - those who might get scared at exactly the wrong times.

The media has numerous rationalizations, on a day-to-day basis, for the market's volatility. Beware. Paying attention to this information can be detrimental to your wealth.

Richard

Like the Kids Say... OMG,TMI!

There's and old expression; "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing".

I'd like to add a corollary; "and so is a lot".

I was curious to see what the Market would do on Monday (June 4, 2007), because of the two events that occured on the weekend: 1) The Shanghai Composite dropped 8.3% and, 2) A terrorist plot to blow up JFK airport (and much of Queens) was nipped in the bud.

Truth be told, I was hoping for a nice big drop so I could go bargain hunting. But it was not to be. Perhaps because enough people shared my reactions; 1) The Shanghai Composite is a small and not terribly significant market that is nearly 70% comprised of small Chinese citizen investors - it shouldn't matter that much to us; 2) Oh, terrorists are hatching plans to blow up New York? Really? Tell me something I don't know.

And The Market shrugged. (Damnit)

So it didn't create the buying opportunity, I'd hope for. What it did do was call to mind our strange and paradoxical relationship with financial information; that we want more of it... and that getting it usually hurts our financial decisions.

Knowing too much hurts a lot of our decisions. In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell details how Cook County Hospital simplified their ER triage. Their model eliminated all but four pieces of data to determine whether to admit a patient for a heart attack (electrocardiographic evidence, presence of unstable angina, fluid in the lungs, and a cutoff point for systolic blood pressure). Any additional data - even data that look relevant such as weight, age, etc. -- and the decisions got worse. To borrow an expression from teen-speak, it's "TMI" (Too Much Information.)

No one has understood or exploited the human mind's unhealthy relationship with TMI better than the Gambling Industry.

Ever been a horse track? The helpful track owners provide information on lap times, finishes in previous races, breeding, performance in mud, or rain, on grass, on dirt, the record of the jockeys... they give you literally 100s of different variables to factor into your decision. Does it help? No! It's TMI. Many data points are simply red herrings. But the relationships between the variables are too complex, and the sample sizes usually too small, to make any meaningful conclusions anyway.

The gambling industry knows that most gambling information is specious; it looks important, but is useless for prediction. Sometimes they even know that we know. At a roulette table, the board above the wheel posts the last 20 or so numbers that came up. Nothing could be more irrelevant, and only the most naive player doesn't understand this. But people actually pay attention to what happened before! They love it! "Oh, look. It hasn't hit # 23 in a while!", or "It's been black 4 times in a row now!" Seeking TMI isn't just a human inclination, it's fun!

So what of investing? With Blackberries, Real Time Market Quotes... Jim Cramer, we have more information than we know what to do with. And it's available any time. How do we sift through the haystack of data to find the needles or relevancy?

It starts with an understanding that much of the information we encounter is like that on the roulette board - interesting, but irrelevant. It also means recognizing that, even with quality information, you can have too much of a good thing. Lastly, we can recognize that information that is Frequent, Emotional Evocative in content, and Recent are most likely to be overly influencial in The Market's short term decision-making. (I would say that the terrorist plot meets the last two criteria and the Shanghai drop meets all three). It's a great way to spot short term buying and selling opportunities.

Simplify. Avoid TMI.

A Bull in the China Shop: The Fundamentals of the Worldwide Share Rally

We're in the midst of the biggest bull market in history. Virtually every asset class has been yielding double-digit percentage gains annually. Here in the United States, the boom is less obvious. In Asia, it is unmistakable and profound. Since this is a blog post, not a book on economic history, I'll try to keep my commentary on this world-changing transformation brief. In particular, we'll go back to the subject of China, which I think will be the defining story of the next century.

Pundits cite numerous reasons for the boom, the foremost of which is a liquidity glut. One explanation for the "easy money" says that as Asian and Middle Eastern nations receive US dollar payments for their trade with the United States, and they have enormous trade surpluses ($1 trillion in China's reserves so far), they are inclined to re-invest that money in dollar-denominated assets to avoid driving up the value of their own currencies. This buying pressure on T-bonds and T-bills leads to decreased interest rates and easier credit for business expansion worldwide.

The general idea is that lower interest rates make borrowing cheap. And who wouldn't borrow at 6% in order to invest in a business with a cashflow over 16%? That's a low-risk return of over 10% annually. Now multiply it times 4 using leverage (40% return), and you have a high-risk hedge fund or private equity fund at your finger-tips.

China alone is growing 10% per year. Many of its businesses are growing earnings 20-30% annually for the past 5 years, as evidenced in the China Stock Directory. Yet the Yuan is pretty stable versus the US dollar, so currency risk is low. Private equity funds can make a killing by arbitraging this type of interest rates to earnings differential. Makes sense that the Chinese government is a pre-IPO investor in Blackstone -- Blackstone gets preferred access to fast-growing Chinese companies, and China gets the know-how to set up a domestic private equity industry.

So there is a fundamental logic to the boom - that's my point anyway. But since this is an investor psychology blog, how can we know when bubbles form on top of booms? In particular, is China in a bubble? Some say that a PE of 42 for China Communications Bank is high, especially when HSBC has a PE of 13. Does a high PE alone mark the top of a bubble? Greenspan used the high PE = bubble logic when he insinuated the US market was irrationally exuberant in December 1996. His timing was way off, but it does have a historical logic.

In my studies of sentiment, tops are usually marked by high optimism. But so are the rallies on the way to the top. If you shorted every period of 2 standard deviations above average optimism over the last 20 years, you'd have zero returns. No matter how pessimistic you are, you have to admit that shorting optimism does not work without other objective criteria to go by.

In April, 5 million new stock brokerage accounts were opened in China. That is 2/3 more than were opened in all of 2006 (per the Economist magazine). That sounds like an investor frenzy. But guess what - they shoud be excited. China has been booming for 20 years, and the tipping point has finally been reached where domestic Chinese investors can chase hot stocks. It's healthy that people are getting involved. Does that mean they will emerge unscathed? No.

When will the psychology of the Chinese bubble become a problem? As I mentioned in a previous blog post, probably not until next year. So far the share prices have been rallying less than two years. While PE's are high in big name stocks, there are still some bargains in China(granted, many with murky accounting).

Even after last year's rally in the US (modest as it was), my stock screens found more cheap small-cap stocks this December than at any time in the past 3 years. And they are up 30+% since then. A rally does not prove a bubble, but it is necessary to one.

So the Asian economic boom is finally being followed by a real stock market boom (China and Vietnam in particular). This is good news, as it means their financial systems are globalizing. The selloff of May 2006 indicated that while some investors were skittish about the huge recent gains, the general trend remains extremely positive. This year is no different from 2006 in terms of economic growth in Asia, except that investors are finally catching on and assets are at or exceeding their fair values worldwide. Yet, they can certainly go further. There will be scary selloffs along the way (probably very steep), but they will be clearing the air for the next rally. Those are my thoughts at the moment. They may change at any time, as flexibility is the paramount virtue in the markets.

Next post we'll look at some recent neurofinance studies.

Richard

What's Your Ben & Jerry's Investing Moment?

The market has been setting a new record everyday now it seems. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on Friday at 13,264.62, a new all time high. And the broader Standard & Poor 500 Index also closed at 1505.62, also a new all time high.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day who is an active investor, and I mentioned that I'm 20% cash. He was surprised.

"You don't need to be 20% in cash!", he explained. "You're not going to need that money for 30 years. You should be more aggressive!"

And he's totally right.

Sort of.

I could certainly stand to me more fully invested. After all, we're talking about a long term investing horizon. And as one who drank the Kool-Aid long ago on the long term safety of equities, I should be able to do so with confidence.

But here's the problem.

One's investing strategy does not exist in a vacuum. It is dependent upon one's Investing Personality. Modern Portfolio Theory does a great job of determining what asset allocation strategy will maximize your returns. But if that investing strategy is not consistent with one's risk preferences, emotional resilience - even attention span, it will succeed in theory, but fail in practice.

Think of it this way: Investing plans are a lot like eating plans. If you want to lose weight, there are any number of diets that will do the job. Barnes and Noble bookshelves are full of them. But what makes a diet right for you, is not whether it "would work" (heck, they pretty much all work). What makes the diet right for you is that it is the plan that you can stick to.

And like proper eating, we're not talking about a short-term, "look good for a wedding" type of situation with our investments. We're talking about following a lifetime plan of prudence and self-discipline. So any long term investment plan doesn't have a built in mechanism for those Ben & Jerry's moments is ultimately doomed to fail. That's why the right plan for me is a sub-optimal investing strategy.

They say that truth lies in paradox. Well here's one for you; I can't be aggressive without a more conservative asset allocation.

When I explained that (emotionally) I needed a decent chunk in cash, my friend assumed it was because I needed to know that at least a part of my portfolio was "risk free". Actually, that doesn't quite hit it.

It's not that the money is "risk free" (i.e., I can't lose it). In fact, the cash position for me gets mentally classified as a loss; I feel like I'm losing money by not having it participate in the rally. No. The reason I need that money in cash is entirely different.

I don't mind risk. In fact, I like being aggressive. But in order to be aggressive (e.g., take some more speculative positions), I need a sense of control. I need to know that if the market gets whacked, I have cash ready to take advantage of it. That way I can cognitively reframe a "bad day" (lost money) into a "good day" (got some bargains). If I couldn't do that, the bad days would overwhelm my portfolio and knock me off course.

For me, losing money only becomes emotionally intolerable when I'm unable to take action, when I can't reclaim some sense of control.

That's my wings/pizza/cheesecake moment. That's when I screw up my plan.

What's your weakness? What are the temptations that push you off your plan? We invite you to check out some of Marketpsych.com's investor self-assessment tools to determine where you (or your client's) potential vulnerabilities may lie.

In the meantime, eat healthy and enjoy the bull market.

Investor Fear and Liquidity

“The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.”
~Peter Lynch

The market volatility the last few weeks has led to media speculation about possible causes: China's late February market plunge, the precarious financial straights of subprime mortgage lenders, and the biggest baddest reason of all .... Recession. In a different market climate, such events would have had little impact. But the market price action is now driven by emotional investors. By understanding how investors' fear generally plays out during such times, one can act proactively (rather than reacting) to such emotional markets.

Markets worldwide have been booming. In fact, on February 21st during a trip to India last month, I met the head of Asian investments for one of the largest New York-based hedge funds. He confided to me that "nothing in the world is cheap right now." And that was true for every broad asset class. In fact, the conclusion of our conversation was, "Only volatility is cheap." And that's a frightening position to be in. Within 2 days of our conversation the Bombay Sensex index began its latest correction, to be followed shortly by the Chinese and worldwide sell-off.

Many pundits have identified the "global liquidity glut" as the force behind stock market and commodity booms worldwide. But what is liquidity, really? Liquidity represents confidence -- the sense that one can borrow and make a greater return on their investments than the risk-free rate of return. And what is confidence but the lack of fear?

Today's sell-off is an opportunity. Many people who recently acquired risky assets are heading for the exits. But like last May, soon there will be a great time to load up on emerging market bargains.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been committed to private equity, venture capital, and stock market investments in emerging markets. These outlays will be made over several years and will support emerging markets generally.

However, as with every opportunity, it's usually when it feels the hardest to buy, that the best price is available.

Richard