Category: Equity

History of stock market crashes

October 28-29, 1929: Marked the beginning of the great depression – although the worst of it was only a couple years later, this was a very powerful signal that something wasn’t right in the US economy. This was characterized mainly by a lot of margin debt purchasing and rampant speculation on equities.

1973 to 1974: Marked the beginning of the rise of OPEC, and concerns about the world supply of crude oil in general. Also marked the beginning of the modern currency exchange systems we see today. This was in the middle of a recession and a period of high inflation (these two together are referred to as “stagflation”) and is the worst possible combination for equity markets.

October 19, 1987 (aka “Black Monday”): Probably the only “true” random market crash, potentially caused with inexperience with complexity through computer program trading, and also the Treasury Secretary mumbling about having to devalue US currency. Federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was also new on the job at this time. The US recovered despite having lost 22.7% of its market value for the day. Hong Kong got killed by 45.8%; in all cases buying this crash would have been fruitful. Easy to say when looking at past charts!

October 13, 1989: A small random market crash (6.1% loss on the S&P 500) for no particular reason at all.

October 27, 1997: The S&P lost 6.9% due to the Asian currency crisis and panic selling. This was at the time of the beginning of the run-up in technology issues. Although this was somewhat interrupted by the Long Term Capital Management fiasco in 1998, equities never looked back until February 2000, where they peaked.

September 11, 2001: The largest terrorist attack on US soil, and the biggest death count since the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941. Equities dropped when markets re-opened a week later, mainly due to insurance and financial firms that had to perform some massive re-balancing after liquidating assets. This would prove to be a local bottom, but not a true bottom until in 2002 when markets finally reached their lows for the decade (up until the 2008 financial crisis).

October 2007 to March 2009: Fresh in everybody’s memory, the financial crisis caused wholesale liquidations in major financial firms, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, etc. From peak to trough, the S&P 500 lost 56% of its value.

… and after this history lesson, will January 25, 2010 be on the books?

Trading against a computer

Most transactions on the stock market are done with computers and not with people behind the screens. A good example is when I did a minor order to do some tweaking of my portfolio, and got the following execution on something that only trades 1000 shares a day:

01/19/2010 14:28:28 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:27:23 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:26:16 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:25:10 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX

See the pattern? The computer probably had an algorithm that said “sell 100 shares, space each order at the bid 66 seconds apart until you’ve cleared your order”.

Algorithms that trade against each other fundamentally are playing rock-scissors-paper against each other in order to scalp profits against those who have the weakest or easiest to predict algorithms.

Enterra Energy Trust – Rising for no reason at all

Enterra Energy is a typical small-scale energy trust that has miscellaneous properties in Alberta and Oklahoma. They are not too remarkable other than the fact that they have been very diligent at reducing their balance sheet leverage over the past couple years – their unitholders received their last distribution in August 2007.

Today they announced that they will be converting to a corporation and changing their name. One would think this is typical considering that income trusts that do not give distributions to should change to corporations before the end of 2012 deadline. Income trusts that give out distributions in 2010 still have their tax shield for one more year – although the majority of them after 2010 should convert to corporations in either 2011 or 2012.

For whatever reason, the market decided that the announcement to convert to a corporation from a trust was worth a 25% mark-up in their unit price, as of the moment of this writing.

There is fundamentally no reason for this announcement to cause such a price spike. Either something else is going on, or the market is behaving very, very irrationally. Spikes like this make the market feel very bubbly.

Disclosure – I do own debentures in Enterra Energy Trust (the ones maturing in December 2011). They have been inching up closer to par over the past month and hopefully will continuing bubbling up above par, where I will proceed to dump them. If not, I keep collecting 8% coupons, which is a good reward to wait for a good price.

Don’t invest in corporate largesse

Putting a long story short, the board of directors of Cheasapeake Energy, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was worth $12.1 million of its corporate assets to purchase antique maps from its CEO.

The only thing you can do when you see such a waste of corporate resources is selling your shares if you own them, and not buying them if you don’t.

I should take this opportunity to point out it was exactly the same company and its CEO that in November 2008 faced a margin call on his own stock, forcing him to liquidate 5.4% of the company in a very rapid transaction.

I said the following back in November 2008:

Some might think this would represent the best buying opportunity – cashing in on the misfortune of somebody’s financial errors. Unfortunately in the case of Chesapeake, the last company I would want to invest in would have a CEO that got caught by a massive forced liquidation like this one – first of all, his incentive to perform well has just disappeared (having no more equity stake in the company) and secondly, one would wonder whether he’d make a similar miscalculation with the company’s finances.

It appears that the CEO is just as reckless with the company’s finances as he is with his own – any prudent investor should blackball the entire Board of Directors of Chesapeake Energy – if any of them serve on a corporate board (or heaven forbid, management) of a company you are invested in, it would be a yellow flag.

This is why the iceberg theory of bad news is applicable – if there is a small piece of bad news, chances are there is a lot more to go with it. In the case of Chesapeake, this is the last energy company I would want my dollars invested in.

Ability to remain irrational longer than ability to remain solvent

John Hempton at Bronte Capital writes another high-quality piece about how having superior information doesn’t necessarily translate into stock market returns. It is just like people that shorted the stock market in 1999 because of insanely high valuations (or shorting Amazon in 2009 at $100/share!) – even though they might be correct, the market can remain irrational longer than your ability to remain solvent.

It is always frustrating in markets to be right, but to get the timing incorrect. This is why option markets are always so brutal to those don’t get the element of market timing to be correct. It is also an indication that even when betting against the majority, you will only be able to win if some of that majority decides to see the world your own way – this process can take years, just like it did for the former Dow Jones Industrial stock Eastman Kodak, or for the poor fellow (Alfred Wegener) that developed most of the geological theory on plate tectonics – he was completely correct, but ridiculed in his own scientific community and died before he was proven correct about 40 years after he proposed the theory.

You can also see other stocks that are on their death throes, such as nearly anything involved in newspaper or paper-based publishing. It also makes you wonder what industries today that aren’t visibly dead will be on their deathbed in the next 20 years – look around you and see what you use today, and wonder if it will be replaced with some substantial technology innovation that is just in its infancy today. Maybe this is why Amazon is trading so highly – maybe they will be exterminating conventional retail shopping?

I remember back in the late 90’s, back in the days when I started investing and didn’t know too much other than technology companies, that I did a lot of research on flat panel displays. Back then, 17″ CRT monitors were still about $500, but it was imminently clear to me that flat panel displays would be the way of the future – if anybody tried lifting up a 21″ CRT monitor you would end up breaking your back trying to move the thing. It lead me to two companies, Genesis Microchip, which did semiconductors in FPDs, and Photon Dynamics, which made diagnostic and factory equipment for the manufacturing of FPDs.

Both of these companies didn’t skyrocket like I anticipated them to and I never even invested in them, but it was worth noting that despite the fact that flat panel displays became the future of computer displays, I never was able to financially capitalize on it in the marketplace.