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No More Greater Fools: Retail Traders Are "Pretty Fully Invested" In Stocks, TD CEO Says
"Margin loans at high levels, client cash at low levels and account holders at the firm logging in frequently."
If you didn't know any better, you might think the above is yet another example of someone describing one of the dynamics driving China's self-feeding equity mania. After all, the country's "world-beating" rally has everyone from housewives to banana vendors opening stock trading accounts by the millions while piling on margin debt and trading so often that the computers tracking volume literally give up and shut themselves down.
Alas, the quote featured above is actually from TD Ameritrade CEO Fred Tomczyk and he's describing America's own legion of day-trading BTFDers who are apparently all-in at just the wrong time:
A broad look at the 6.5 million customer accounts at TD Ameritrade indicates that retail investors are "pretty fully invested" in stocks, the online brokerage's CEO said Thursday.
Fred Tomczyk cited several signs of this: margin loans at high levels, client cash at low levels and account holders at the firm logging in frequently. "It's usually a good indication that people are very engaged in the markets and watching their investments closely," he said on CNBC's " Squawk Box ."
But Tomczyk acknowledged the potential pitfalls of these trends and what they may portend for stocks. "I wouldn't be surprised if we have a correction here. We've had six [or] 6½ years of up markets here."
Ultimately then, the greater fool theory of investing whereby it doesn't matter how much you pay as long as the next guy is willing to pay more — the same greater fool theory of investing that China's regulators have warned has taken hold in Chinese stocks — may have just run out of fools, but we suspect that's fine as long as price-insensitive corporate management teams can issue new debt and plow the proceeds back into their own stock.
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Now if you were a baby boomer and you owned stocks, would you want to risk another 15 years to crawl back to break even? Didn't think so.
This market is way overdue for a correction, the question is whether or not the fed will keep pumping money in to prop it up. QE4 soooooon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEhFvN4BuJM
Do you really need QE when money is free (zero interest rate policy)? I don't think so. Massive printing going on, period. Think about it, creating money has no cost and requires no collateral. Let's all start printing!
Curious
If TD Ameritrade alone has 6.5 million accounts, why is it shocking if China has 14 million accounts?
I think the 14mil were new accounts for the month?
BINGO
Let's see...let's used levered rehypothecated debt to buy stock.....(thank you FED)
...in companies
...which are buried in debt (thank you FED).
The margin rules should be modified to include the leverage of the firm being purchased.
This has GOT to end well....
IMO, QESTEALTH is still going on. Every time excess reserves go down by $200 or $300 billion, they pop back up to ~$2.6 trillion. Those FRNs are coming from somewhere. Then, you have your obvious straw purchases of USTs through countries like Belgium. Where'd those FRNs come from?
Tickmill CEO said today that most of retail FX traders are massively short EUR/USD. We all know what will happen now.
Fascinating that people know stocks, bonds, RE, etc. are manipulated by hook and by crook and yet knowing this you still expect that a real "market" is suddenly going to show up and result in an equity collapse or bond vigilantes taking over???
Things are so bad stocks have got to go up...bond yields down...RE prices up...that is simply in the interests of "national security"...no laws can be broken because anything done in the interests of national security are both secret and allowed.
Compare valuations...
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/02/fundamentally-flawed-chapter-34-us-real.html
with liabilities...
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/02/fundamentally-flawed-chapter-31-why.html
These asset valuations will not be allowed to find true supply and demand...I'm not saying there won't be a day of reckoning...just saying it won't likely look anything like '08-'09!
LOL............
Love your stuff Ham-bone. Yes, at this point the oligarchs know full well that there simply is no political, monetary, economic, or fiscal solution to the mess they have created. This time, everyone gets to bleed as that which cannot be sustained, won't be. Good luck "cashing the check" if you actually pull off a "big short". Every financial center/institution will simply be closed, indefinitely. The final chance to fix it all was in 2008. Should have let those "tanks in the streets" show up after all. Now, it appears humanity must re-learn what real value is. The last time this happened, a world of less than 2 billion people went to war. Now there is 7+ billion. Interesting times.
Thanks Laws...I just can't imagine after all this that there will come a point when the Fed and politicians says "no more". They only know moar and moar. Seems we are well on our way...resultiing in less and less.
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/04/so-simple-even-economist-or-fed-can-get.html
and every step requires even more intervention and takes us farther from free markets or "capitalism"...leaving us with a choice of ever greater statism (delaying the collapse) or pull the manipulations and collapse immediately. Ackkkk.
Truth is the Fed and .Gov in control of infinite debt have decided to make nearly all of us the greater fools...if we won't buy, they'll do it for us. If we won't lend...yup, they'll do it for us. But this way they can still maintain a few winners while the rest lose.
We are headed for a Seneca Cliff.
I think I'll be planting my corn tomorrow.
Ham-bone, your narrative is easy for those who believe gov't through central banks (they're not independent, as we know - they're symbiotic) can truly defy gravity, but in reality, they can only slow it, even in the most rigged markets throughout history (price controls in USSR).
You give way to much credit to governments & CBs to somehow perpetually forestall inevitable laws of physics.
Why, if you're correct, have we have had 3 major, disruptive corrections in markets (defined as you will) and prices of asset classes in just 15 years?
I'll go further; at this point, all the actions you speak of by these entities are Meryl setting up a larger, more pernicious correction.
They're merely refusing to allow what could be normal, healthy forest fire burns to control the amount of tinder & kindling & scrub, and ensuring that the next inevitable forest fire will be larger than the last one.
Truth - I don't disagree that their efforts are doomed...only that since '09 and really since '11 the whole game has changed. Bond markets were first warped by QE and then in July of '11 bond markets ceased to exist. Once that was broken, CB's owned it. That is also when commodity market prices collapsed on heavy buying in certain segments. Also, since then, no serious equity corrections. Once the Fed took over one segment...the whole thing is too interconnected so pretty sure they had to go all in.
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/02/fundamentally-flawed-chapter-6-debt.html
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/03/china-sells-treasurys-yields.html
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/03/brics-blink-or-more-correctly-wink-and.html
Of course it will fail but pretty sure not in a price correction manner...I'm guessing the ultimate failure will be more akin to N. Korea like ongoing disconnect between economic negative reality and financial boom BS. Real economic issues will get worse and haves / have nots grow more contentious. All this likely leads to a stronger statist response.
So, don't get me wrong, this won't work. But not working doesn't mean prices being allowed to find an equilibrium between demand and supply. Not working can mean economic debilitation and the only answer always greater statist intervention to "save us" from collapse.
Sounds like the time I would normally go all in......
/s
All the cool kids are doing it. Only weirdos don't BTFD.
Wait for it . . . wait for it . . .
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=19O5
Whenever I try to warn boomers about the coming crash they say "so what, it will just go right back up"
Or that: "Debt doesn't matter." I suppose on that they are partially correct. Debt doesn't matter, until it does, and it is then that you wish you didn't have any.
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Must be about shearing time.
Hey, wait a second. No follow up on the Freddy Gray story? Is it not exciting click bait anymore?
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2015/04/breaking-news-no-evidence-found-tha...
This makes me angry and inspired to burn down a locally owned business.
The Mayor setup Destruction Zones. She was in on the lie.
Gartman says it is gonna get ugly....better load the boat with SPY calls. LOL
How soon people forget; it's as if 2008-2009 and S&P 666 never happened.
There are three kinds of fools: fools, damn fools, and retail day traders.
Here ...kitty...kitty. Drink the milk.
Look at the floweres baby boomers, just look at the floweres.
http://youtu.be/2dCn7d_jDjg
That's a good clip Doc. She went native and killer her younger sister.
I'd like to see some incapacitated ex-fed heads on pikes. Those "shape shifting" lizards just jump into new bodies...
No need to cock a Ruger LCR. The MAC of personal protection - Point and Click.
If the milk turns out to be sour, I ain't the kind of pussy to drink it. You know what i mean?
Embrace the MyRa boomer bitchez! It's the only game left.
I call bullshit, Mr. TD Ameritrade.
Nice try.
Good. I need another wool sweater.
The would know since they sold all their retail inventory to HFT dark pools.
Well if they can't have lamb for dinner there is always cannibalism. If they have to start eating each other, the algo's will be reprogrammed for war and the market be become the Somme and Gallipoli battles and there will be blood everywhere......
Just one more example of the infinite stupidity of the human race.
It is pretty bad, maybe worse than the dot.com bubble and 2007 peak. So many people who know nothing of finance or economics, starry-eyed with visions of dollar signs, "learning to trade" in the markets and get the retirement they always wanted. When I started hearing the commercials on radio for online trading courses, it threw up the large caution flag... and that was more than a few years ago. Now with the market having recovered a few times and gone parabolic, it has sucked everyone in. Time for the smart money to exit and let the retail investor take it to their grave.
Asking a couple questions first.
Stock goes up while catching a falling knife on the way down in the FX trade, only an algo could trade that because an algo can move as fast as a viper. But like a viper, it's not aiming for a meal, it's striking on instinct while 'something' is moving. The viper (algo) doesn't know what it's trying to latch on to, it just reacts and the trade gets hosed.
Point being in a trade it would be a zero offer based on the exposure and liabilities offered in that trade action especially with the fundementals that all governments are printing money hand over fist. All that QE in public eye printed from thin air, and of course 'accidentally' by way of fractional reserve ratios operating at 1 to 9. Once the QE enters the banking system to be poured into the paper assets the ratio is always enforced. When people see 1 trillion in QE, it's really 9 trillion in QE because the entities recieving the funds 'wave the magic wand' of fractional reserve ratio over the given sum and accidentally increase the available money supply by a factor of 9.
Best to take the third position in that type of action. Don't trade pig slop against computers blindly playing three variables on the hope of a profit. Never works.
So how's TD's mortgage portfolio doing back north, Fred?
I'd go all-in in stocks (mostly foreign) long before I'd go all in on TO and VanBC condos.
There are those who prosper in the economy but for those who don’t, every man has own recession. In an up year for stocks, many individual investors lost out.
“In 2014, 33% of investors ended the year with negative or zero returns… In 2014, the median investor had a 4.2% return."
Wrote Fortune in January:
“According to a study from SigFig.com, which makes a portfolio tracking app, as many as a third of all investors may have ended up either losing money or not making anything at all in the market in 2014. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 was up nearly 14% for the year.
Yet most investors’ portfolios don’t seem to have experienced gains anywhere near that. SigFig’s data suggests that the average investors’ investment account rose just over 4% last year.
http://fortune.com/2015/01/06/stock-market-2014-losers/
I received a letter in the mail yesterday from Fidelity. The letter was praising me for my 2015 401K contributions.
I bet they were happy. Been selling peaks every chance I get since 2015 began. Let's hope the Caymans don't sink like the PM portion of the portfolio did.
From a MACRO perspective LoP, keep your eyes on this.
18:00 CNY Manufacturing PMI (Apr) 50.0 50.1
18:00 CNY Non-Manufacturing PMI (Apr) 53.7
18:30 AUD PPI (QoQ) (Q1) 0.2% 0.1%
18:30 AUD PPI (YoY) (Q1) 1.1%
* Times are GMT-8
The PBoC has been raising yuan value in the usd/cyn (cny)trading band. They're doing that, IMHO because they see some $usd strengthening over the next couple of months. (terms of trade softening)
Just because they're fully invested doesn't mean Boomers can't tap into some margin. Let it ride!
Fellow collegues, time to get your student loan money out.
After the markets closed - He said "A broad look at the 6.5 million customer accounts at TD Ameritrade indicates that retail investors are "pretty quickly unloading" stocks, the online brokerage's CEO said Thursday.
Not surprised. Online trading has changed everything. Reason people are looking at their accounts so often - or engaged as he calls it - is to make sure they get the hell out at the first real sign of collapse, risk tolerances notwithstanding. It really doesn't matter if retail is fully invested. They can divest at the drop of a hat.
401k? Luxury! I used to dream of having a 401k.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
Did you see the grin on his face when he spoke about "the data coming in" as though fundamentals or technicals are reliable anymore. You could see him laughing inside.
-
Friday the markets will be pushed upward in triple digits; you can't have the FED speak and end on a sour note; that is now illegal.
Yes, but the CNBC matrixtards have been instructed to take out auto loans to buy shares.
According to The Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/11569329/Jeremy-Warner-Negative-interest-rates-put-world-on-course-for-biggest-mass-default-in-history.html
What makes today’s negative interest rate environment so worrying is this; to the extent that demand is growing at all in the world economy, it seems again to be almost entirely dependent on rising levels of debt. The financial crisis was meant to have exploded the credit bubble once and for all, but there's very little sign of it. Rising public indebtedness has taken over where households and companies left off. And in terms of wider credit expansion, emerging markets have simply replaced Western ones. The wake-up call of the financial crisis has gone largely unheeded.
The combined public debt of the G7 economies alone has grown by close to 40 percentage points to around 120pc of GDP since the start of the crisis, while globally, the total debt of private non-financial sectors has risen by 30pc, far in advance of economic growth.
One by one, all the major central banks have joined the money printing party. First it was the US Federal Reserve. Then came the Bank of England and later the Bank of Japan. Just lately, it’s the European Central Bank. Now even the People’s Bank of China is considering the “unconventional” monetary support of bond buying. Anything to keep the show on the road. It’s what Chris Watling of the consultancy Longview Economics has termed the “philosophy of demand at any cost”. A crisis caused by too much debt has been fought with even more of the stuff.
Many would contend that it is central bank money printing itself which is the primary cause of today’s low interest rate environment. Up to a point, it’s a view that is hard to argue with, for that is indeed the whole purpose of QE – to depress the yield on government bonds to the point where investors are forced to seek higher risk alternatives.
Other contributory factors include “financial repression”, where ever more demanding solvency regulation forces banks and insurers to hold more bonds, whatever the price. Alternatively, some part of the explanation may be down to QE having starved the repo market of the bonds it needs as collateral, even if most central banks have arrangements to lend the stock back to markets for these purposes.
All this official interference has no doubt influenced negative yields. Yet it also raises a deeper question, which is whether central banks are the primary cause of the collapse in interest rates, or whether they are merely accommodating wider forces in the global economy that they are powerless to influence - persistent sluggishness in demand and productivity growth.
What’s cause, and what’s effect? In a speech last year, Ben Broadbent, deputy governor of the Bank of England, argued cogently that central banks are merely responding to these deeper forces. The natural, or equilibrium, rate of interest required to keep growth and inflation at a particular level is simply a lot lower than it used to be, he insisted. To judge by the markets, it may even have turned negative.
There is some support for this view in the way markets have responded to QE. Analysis by Longview Economics found that bond yields actually rose during periods of QE by the US Federal Reserve, and fell when it stopped, the reverse of what you might expect if you think it is the unlimited buying power of the central bank that is causing the interest rate to fall.
Rates would rise during periods of QE because investors expected it to have a positive impact on economic growth, and therefore the equilibrium rate of interest, and then fall once it stopped because the stimulus had been withdrawn. Call it “secular stagnation” - the idea popularised by former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers - if you like, but whatever it is, it's a particularly unhappy place to be. For all kinds of reasons, advanced economies, and perhaps emerging ones too, seem to have run out of productivity-enhancing growth and therefore need constant infusions of financially destabilising debt to keep them going.
The flip side of the cheap money story is soaring asset prices. The bond market bubble is just the half of it; since most other assets are priced relative to bonds, just about everything else has been going up as well. Eventually, there will be a massive correction, in which creditors will suffer sickening losses.
Nobody can tell you when that moment will arrive. We live in an “extend and pretend” world in which economies pathetically fight between themselves for any scraps of demand. One burst of money printing is met by another in an ultimately futile, zero-sum game of competitive currency devaluation. As if on cue, along comes another soft patch in Britain’s economic recovery, with first-quarter growth quite a bit weaker than expected. Like a constantly receding horizon, the point at which UK interest rates begin to rise is pushed ever further into the future. It's like waiting for Godot. When Bank Rate was first cut to 0.5pc in response to the financial crisis, markets expected rates to start rising again in a year. Six years later, Bank Rate is still at 0.5pc and markets still expect them to rise in a year. In Europe it’s not for four years.
Both Keynsian and monetary economics seem to be in some kind of end game. What comes next is anyone’s guess.
HFC!!! The man just rang the bell at the top! Doesn't get any more obvious than this!
The retail investor may be all in but the FED is not
There is no such thing as a stock investor anymore.
Stock trader, yes.
Investor, no.
Up Up and Away
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5akEgsZSfhg (2:29)
Just a thought to ponder. Can you write off your loses for staying in dollars when filling your taxes if you show that inflation, outside of the fed inflation that excludes energy and food, is actually creating a investment loss?
Love to see the look on their faces when that return is filed.
How many retail investors keep a stock position overnight?
How many keep a position over the weekend?
Daytraders trade the day and are out by end of day.
So what is this guy smoking?
Its almost straight line up since 2009.
This will not end now. Who cares if there will be a minor correction, when the FED raises rates at
a cosmetic level.
Stocks are better than paper dollars, right? Thats all.
Stocks may be overpriced now, but we will take this thing to the next level.
You aint seen nothin yet.
I think the CEO is marketing his platform.
Why else would he leave the crypt?
How to bring the banks down; apply for all those credit cards at the same time and then max them out with precious metals and hide them all. Just dreaming out loud.
I took all my investments to Antigua but when I checked back the strip club told me that wasn't even her real name.
Her name was either Gonor Rhea & Sy Philis; loosing ROI.
Is it just me, or is there some serious time dilation going on?
Is the eliptical orbit of Earth so close to the sun that gravity is bending time and perception on Earth?
Most hot masses become more dense as they cool. Only Al Gore (Man Bear Pig) knows.
... when aapl shot up to $134 i thought to myself, there is no fucking way this gets dragged back down to $125 ... goldman and jpm will have to pay up to square all the massive call open interest at $125 ... how little did i know.
No worries; it will be back above $130 in a "flash"; this was to squeeze the long and enter the short to squeeze it all in a weeks work.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102638191
Gartman says its time to sell, so BTFD
If we had a free market I would consider going short, no way Jose . . . I believe we are also near lows for shorts and hedges, that's bodes well for 'All In'. . . let's see how it plays out.
The Apple ankle bracelet will surely run the stock up over $138.00. And then, when they offer matching wrist bracelets...