Takes nerves of steel

In the short term, the market is designed to confuse everybody, but understanding the nature of the confusion is paramount.

Apparently in the past couple days, people have been worried “things will last longer than expected”. I have seen a bunch of stocks get dumped indiscriminately, sort of like a second wave of COVID-19 hitting the financial markets. I’m sure some of you have “felt” this mini-tremor as well. Nervous individuals that have bought shares a week ago are underwater, and are reading these headlines and are starting to panic.

This creates volatility and another round of panicked people want to reach for cash.

The problem is that any time you see a trade on the market, the cash gets exchanged from the person willing to buy the stock to the person that wants to dump the stock. The amount of cash remains the same, just that the valuation of the asset (a residual economic slice of the company in question) changes.

Maybe these people reaching for cash are satisfied with it staying around, effectively taking the cash out of circulation of the economy.

But central banks can wave a magical wand, and exchange bonds for more cash. This cash increases the pressure for demands on assets, which mostly makes its way to the stock market since this is the only game in town where you can get an income. Other routes include real estate (which doesn’t make as much income any more since rents are collapsing as we speak), or commodities (which should retain their value, and in some cases even increase in value depending on their demand). Relatively speaking, the cash becomes less significant with increased liquidity in the marketplace.

So in the medium term, this liquidity getting injected into the financial system will dampen volatility. In the short term there are going to be gyrations in accordance to the changes of participants’ psychologies, which is very rapid as the market tries to price in exactly what will be happening as a result of the COVID-19 reaction.

The cliche is that you need to sell when most participants are too bullish (there’s no incremental demand to convert cash to assets at a price higher than the assets), while the converse is true when more people are too bearish. When everybody wants cash at the same time (like during the third week in March) the result is a crash in asset prices and a huge rise in volatility. The difficult part of timing the bottom is that you have no idea when the last person (institution, pension fund, hedge fund, or a brokerage executing a margin liquidation on a poor client) that absolutely wants to convert the last of their asset into cash at any price he/she can get. You just don’t know, which is why you average when things get a little silly.

I wrote earlier sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, but yesterday evening I placed some volatility orders and they were reasonably well timed to correspond with the peak of this mini-earthquake we’ve had over the past few days (which was also instigated by the upcoming Friday being an options expiration Friday, which tends to increase volatility).

The risk-reward dynamic of the market is that if a trade feels good, it probably is a sentiment shared with others in the marketplace, and hence it is less likely to succeed than if you were very worried going into a position. And believe me, shorting VIX looks easy in retrospect but it takes nerves when you see the stock chart rocket up.

Keep shorting volatility

Perhaps the biggest no-brainer trade of this COVID-19 economic crisis (which is going to come to an end pretty soon) is shorting volatility on spikes. Today was the first real spike up since April 7th (which wasn’t much of one). I’ve attached the spike – and note just before Easter it was at around 33-34%:

Long-time readers of the site knows that I’m generally into fundamental analysis but once in awhile, there are trades out there that are so seemingly skewed to risk/reward that I just have to take them. The even better news is that unlike scammy marijuana companies, in the futures market your only price of admission is the initial margin and you don’t have to worry about borrowing, or carrying costs or anything like that, only a US$2.38 commission to get short a contract of US$1,000 times the index of notional value (i.e. every point the VIX goes up or down, your equity goes up or down US$1k per contract).

Of course, there are always risks. Who knows, Supreme Leader Kim might decide to launch the nuclear missiles, or there might be a 9.0 Richter scale earthquake in San Fran or some other catastrophic event, so this is why you never, ever go all-in on a trade (VIX would skyrocket). However, on the skewed balance of probabilities, by the time May comes rolling around, I’m pretty sure VIX is lower. Every quant fund out there on this planet that didn’t get wiped out on March 23rd is now applying the same rubric in our ultra-loose monetary policy situation and is making coin with volatility suppression – the S&P 500 doesn’t even have to rise to make this trade work. In fact, if it meanders, the trade works even better.

One of the biggest winners of all of this volatility has been the HFT firms, including Virtu (VIRT), but I would not invest in their stock. It is interesting to note, however, that they averaged about US$9.5 million in net trading income a day in Q1-2020! Holy moly!

The new norm is going to be increased volatility

There are a lot of gyrations going on right now with central banks jockeying for position and a certain amount of dysfunctionality out there. The new normal is increased volatility than the relatively calm times in the middle of 2014:

vix

Other than the direct purchase of VIX futures (or the VIX ETF, the most liquid of which is VXX), one must think about companies out there that can take advantage of volatility.

Highest volitility of the year

The VIX index (S&P 500 options implied volatility) has officially reached the highest of the year, at 40.96%:

This is still lower than the 48.2% seen during the depths of the early 2010 crisis involving Greek soverign debt. If this issue is worse than the one last year then my 40-45 VIX prediction should be elevated.

(Subsequent Update: 46.80… this can only be described as a slow-velocity market crash.)

Back to normal volatility

Curiously, the VIX, after spiking in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, and the onset of the military action in Libya, went to a peak of about 30, has slid back down to about 20:

Most people make the mistake of thinking that the VIX is predictive – it is not. It does anti-correlate with the S&P 500, however.

The real question that investors should be asking themselves is that was this just a single ripple in the market pond, or is this a good time to be loading up on index put options while the volatility is still cheap?

Notably, the April VIX futures closed at 21.50 today; going further out, July closed at 23.10. These products are not easy to trade profitably unless if you have a sharp computer model working in your favour.