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John Hussman's Rant: "Someone Is Going To Have To Hold Stocks At These Prices"
Excerpted from John Hussman's Weekly Market Comment,
I’m sometimes viewed as an evil quant, sitting in a dimly lit room, stroking a hairless cat ironically named Mr. Whiskers, and hoping for the worst. That’s undoubtedly because of my view that all of the market’s gains since roughly April 2010 are likely to be wiped out in a rather ordinary completion to the present market cycle, coupled with my broader criticisms of Fed-induced speculation and other ill-conceived policies. If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that I take no joy in market plunges, and my adamant concern about severe losses this time around reflects an extreme discomfort with having been right about the other two 50% losses in recent memory (not to mention becoming constructive in-between, though my fiduciary stress-testing inclinations in 2009 clearly did us no good in the face of QE – see Setting the Record Straight for the full narrative). Some also have the impression that our objective is to talk the markets down, in a way that interferes with their bullish outlook.
The reality is this. While we certainly hope to provide evidence and data sufficient for disciplined investors to maintain their confidence in our full-cycle approach, we have no particular desire to convert disciplined buy-and-hold investors or reckless speculators to our views (though I do think “buy-and-hold” investors with horizons shorter than 7-10 years have poorly matched their strategy with their objectives). Meanwhile, given that the majority of my income is directed to charity, I have a rather vested interest in doing good for others over time (undoubtedly, my particular focus on finance and autism research demands unusual patience, long horizons, a deep respect for evidence, and no expectation that progress evolves smoothly).
Yet as much as we focus on the long-term good, equilibrium creates an unfortunate constraint: by encouraging one investor to defend their financial security by selling overvalued stocks, the result is that someone else must end up buying the stock at these same levels. That poor soul, we expect, is likely to be worse off for the trade. That may explain my philosophical aversion to speculating in steeply overvalued markets, and my ethical objection to policies like quantitative easing that encourage it. In order to profitably exit that speculation, someone else must be guaranteed misery.
In a financial market where price signals encourage savings to be allocated toward productive uses, what helps an individual investor often helps the entire economy. But in a severely distorted and speculative market, any effort to help one investor is really quite a zero-sum game that requires someone else to be injured. This is just an unhappy result that years of quantitative easing have now foisted upon us.
Accordingly, I am changing my guidance. For those investors who trust our analysis and discipline, no change of course is encouraged. But for those who find our work to be a constant source of irritation to be regarded with open disdain, I am retracting all of it herewith – for you alone mind you – and I leave you free to buy with both hands to whatever extent you are inclined. Not that I encourage it really – that would be bad Karma – but someone is going to have to hold equities at these prices. It would best be those who are fully aware of our concerns and prefer to reject them. So the more you dislike my work, and particularly if you are nasty about it, I have no objection to you accumulating – perhaps on margin – as much stock from other investors as possible.
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John is, of course, completely right... and here he is presenting his vision of the meanness of reversion:
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Is he always a good timer
I'll hold stocks at this price.
Atlas
"Judge me by my looks, do you? No. As well you should not. For my ally is the Fed, and a powerful ally it is indeed."
- Yoda (working the sell-side desk)
When I hit the line, "finance and autism research," suddenly Wall St. made sense.
The reuseability of the Dow 15K hats and shirts is timeless.
touche.
Atlas is shrugging
"Atlas, I'll hold you."
-Turtle
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Exactly. No call is ever wrong, just poorly-timed.
"other investors"? there are no "other investors" there is only old yeller.
Citi or BofA?
Do not worry the proud republic of Belgium will assist
Selling their waffle irons, chocolate factories and breweries to BTFD.
John Hussman is a class act.
Wish there were more like him in the world.
And unlike the typical Wall Street investment broker/hedge fund manager, he gives huge amounts to charity.
One of the few voices of reason amidst the current onslaught of bloviating sell-side 'analysts.'
GS and others donate huge amounts to charity... but that doesn't make them nice guys!!!
They also employ shysters like (until recently) stolpher, and call their smaller 'mom and pop' type investors muppets, and deliberately set them up to be fleeced. Haven't heard anyone accuse hussman of doing that. Also, you won't here such an honest, open prediction from them, only trades you know they are going to be on the other side of. He may be wrong about his predictions, at least in the short term, as stocks could very well shoot up another 10-15%, despite everything that says they are already overvalued, but on a 7-10 years timeline that he mentions, I think he will be proven correct.
The only buyer is the "greater fool"...
Like the Canadian RE market?
Or Australian RE market?
Plot oil against the human population growth and you can only come to the conclusion that there will be a reversion to the mean of the human species.
Either that or we hit one hellvu gusher!
I suspect the mantle of the earth is composed entirely of hydrocarbons. I am just saying it would not surprise me.
I was waiting for the abiotic oil post.
Alright. Oil is not a fossil fuel. Happy now?
Ah, yes, it's unicorn jizz, perpetually burbling up from the magical realms at the Center of the Earth! Never ending! Totally safe, too.
Explain all the hydrocarbon on the moons of saturn and jupiter. There must have been alot of dinosaurs on those planets
Probably not even as good as "the mean". Somewhere just this side of zero is about all I'm comfortable betting on.
Hussman is compelling. The very best advice that hasn't worked for me (since 2006).
poor hussman, seems he wasnt as smart as bass and sprott to actually invest against the doom he has been preaching the past 6 years......
Of course he's making losing trades.. His analysis assumes that fundamentals still matter. Even a first year economics undergrad with a marginal notion of what QE is, should understand that when ZIRP/QE happens, fundamentals are useless.
(NB: Fundamentals do still matter, but in this papered over economy people are too busy chasing electronic numbers in a mutual fund.)
He'll be proven right, eventually. Right thinking, wrong timing. But hey, someone IS gonna hold the bag when SHTF and things fall apart... He at least won't be member of that club. Operation bagholder is well on it's way. To all the paper-pushers, have fun and good luck beating the machines when heading for the exit door when push comes to shove, i.e. hope there is an exit (think currency collapse).
yeah yeah, its always on its way. sometime in the future i bet.
Kito- People with your mentality ended up leaving the table in a body bag at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Better to be out or out early than be at the back of the mob pushing for the door because you didn't think the messenger was telling the truth. You might miss part of the show, but you'll be alive for the next one.
my mentality? since i have been a fairly regular commenter on here for many years, with my thoughts well established, what exactly is my mentality?
I suggest price controls. Never let the S&P go over a certain price.
like a Venezuelan supermarket...
Minor quibble: the Great Levitation began in April of 2009. I watched it without being able to jump on, since we small retail investors get raped with fees that take away any gains over 3%.
And the main question then is the main question now: when will they step on the air hose? If you don't belong to the club, you will guess wrong.
Is it fees that take away gains over 3% or is it that the retail investor doesn't stay in long enough to get anything over 3%? History has shown that most retail tend to chase returns and that is why they lose.
The nadir was in 2008 and the Fed's QE-ish actions began around 2009, but I totally miss your argument about retail investors. Bernanke pronounced that everyone should buy stocks and he meant it, I found myself in a situation where I pretty much had to buy some and did so very nervously, and later only wished I'd bought much earlier and more aggressively, and I'm as retail as they come.
Unfortunately, it is not about being right, it is about making money. Whether its a rigged market with artificial stimulus disrputing the natural cycle of things, it doesn't matter - its still about PnL at the end of the day. Often times the best trades are the ones you fundamentally think are wrong. Not that I disagree with his arguments, on a macro level I most certainly do, but it doesn't mean this 'market' can't rip higher for longer than anticipated.
The more I learn about how prices are determined in a derivative driven market, the less I feel I can predict anything.
Dr. Hussman did this before, during the late Nineties when he was publishing a newsletter.
When the dividend yield dropped below 3.0% in 1995, he declared a market peak. Then came 1996 ... 1997 ... 1998 ... 1999 ... early 2000. He fought Bubble I all the way up, kicking, screaming and shaking his fist at it.
Now the same horrid movie is replaying, and it's deja vu all over again.
Were I in his position, I'd have to kick my own ass.
Yes, and everyone who bought in 1997, and in 1998, and 1999 - were they all clever enough to sell before things turned south, or did they end up with losses?
IF the fed is buying its own treasuries using subsidiaries and proxies in other central banks in europe. whose to say it's not outright buying stocks?
i mean, what the fuck does too big too fail mean if it doesn't mean they won't buy their own stocks with your money. ?
They are OBVIOUSLY putting huge money into the equity markets but they may not be "holding stocks" except for short periods and through proxies.
The Fed don't need to buy equities. As is well documented, if you make cheap credit available to corporations, they will buy their own stock, valuations be damned.
I'd bet money the FED is not buying any stock in miners. Ask me how I know.
He misses a large point which is that all of this QE has diluted the currency and much of the current price of equities is unacknowledged inflation. Even when QE stops past inflation does not go away so the current prices are largely valid, or at least a lot closer than he admits in this screed.
And it's likely that A LOT MORE printing is going to be required to exit the current environment so you'd better be holding some real or privileged assets when it happens.
++ on that. At the end of this, the decimal simply gets moved over a digit.
Ah yes, Mugabe economics!
correct. the hyper-inflation that 'everyone' fears is here. and it went into stocks, because of the change in economic systems, largely due to the ability of computing and not having to actually 'print' physical dollars, euros, yen, etc.
but even that i suspect, will deflate when the bubble pops, because at some point, the first somebody that actually says 'hey - you have to PAY me. no credit. no margin. i want you to give me physical dollars now'. they can't come up with the dollars because they don't actually have any, and they don't actually exist. that's ponzi.
So, anyone own any of his funds?
Hussman Strategic Growth. Got in 2005-6 w/div. reinvest. Exited Feb 2012. -5.6%. I admire Hussman but " I's gots to b making the mo nee".
Like that saying "The beatings will continue until morale improves", "the printing will continue until the economy improves", neither make sense
Hmm its interesting that the comments on ZH have evolved over the last year or so (i haven't been reading it as religiously as i used to) ... from "yeah get short, its going to hell" to "i am long and staying long." And where guys like Hussman or Faber were welcomed commentators, they are now vilified. This is not a criticism of people... merely interesting that this in itself might be an indicator that we are probably somewhere near the top (.....he says as stocks go green again!!).
It's so desperate they can't dare let da stawks stay red for even a few hours, it might panic the herd and cause sell orders which no doubt cause a shitalanche no computer program could handle.
Must.....always show.....green....
Shitalanche lol. Good thing I wasnt drinking a coke.
I chalk it up to capitulation to the "New Normal."
Prices don't mean so much when measured against a seemingly endless supply of fiat.
Let's all invite Hugh Hendry out for a beer, and we can try to cheer each other up.
Agreed, Huggy. Just like the deer photo has become an indicator of time to BTFD.
This was a really awesome presentation. I'll check out what else he has on youtube.
This crap is just surreal....the best they've got is saying someone's got to eat this shit sandwich? Well not me, no thanks.
If anyone is feeling a sense of comfort that over the last 14 years we've seen two dramatic crashes of better than 40% and a breakout to new highs means we're in a new secular bull - think again.
I suggest a look at 1966 to 1973, imagine how investors felt in 1975 when the market crashed a 3rd time to a lower low of 50% from the new high of '73.
I'm not saying this is 1973, I'm saying charts don't tell everything.
BTFATH!
Interestingly, by combining this statement by Hussman with the article from ZH yesterday:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-27/here-mystery-and-completely-ind...
I arrive at the conclusion that the companies buying back their own shares are going to end up being the bagholders, at least if it all goes south tomorrow. Of course, we know that the failure of these companies would not be allowed, so... we're back at the beginning again, which is that the government would bail them out.
Add to this the article a few weeks ago:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-17/bernanke-shocker-no-rate-normal...
it sure looks like TPTB are going to print for as far forward as they can see. They have no other ideas. One thing seems sure. They will not stop until forced to. And given the pressures they already face and consider not enough to change course, the chain of events that moves them from this path is going to have to be catastrophic in the extreme. Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Ukraine... these are building up to quite a bloodletting, and I fear they have not really even gotten started yet. :(
I wondered the same thing, but what happens if a company buys back it's own shares, at all-time-high prices, and the stock later tanks? Does the company show a loss? No, it doesn't hold buyback shares on it's books, it retires them, right? So no direct losses accrue.
Now, the company will have to pay back the loans, but since it allowed the execs and directors to cash out their options at top dollar, I doubt that anyone is going to make a fuss about it.
When you sell the stock someone must buy it - but that someone is increasingly the company itself. Companies are borrowing long term at rock bottom interest rates to buy back their own stock. The stock price they pay doesn't matter all that much since they are merely changing their capital structure and shoveling cash to insiders at the same time. If interest rates head back down, this activity should increase even more.
Therefore, the market will peak when Greenspan declares that all publicly-traded shares will be bought back, so the NYSE will have to close its doors.
Somebody was talking about negative interest rates to come, how does that work, do companies get paid to buy their own stock?
MDB he's talking to you
I have never made any real money listening to anyone's advice, even my own.
My advice has generally been the worst lol.
"My advice has generally been the worst lol"
That's very good advice.
"stroking a hairless cat"...hahahaha...now that was funny
freshly shaved pussy is the best
"freshly shaved pussy"......................give me a couple minutes here, seems I was distracted!
A google search to look for funny sites of freshly shaved pussies revealed a lot more than cat pics!! I am shocked, I had no idea, this may take some time to investigate where I went wrong, back in a week or two..
Ok, yes its lame, but somebody had to make the pussy joke
Just when I was going to call him an asshole he pulled the autism charity card.
So now he's an OK Joe with a heart of gold and a 403(b).
I didn't understand all that other gobble-de-goop.