Ultimi quattro mesi del 2018: portafoglio e performance (parte 2)
Durante questo weekend, viene spedita ai nostri Clienti la nostra più recente Lettera, che oltre a fare il punto sulle strategie verso la fine del 2018, offre pure un consuntivo dei primi 8 mesi.
Avrete tutti letto, seguendo le vostre abituali fonti, quali sono i risultati delle gestioni GPM e dei Fondi Comuni nella prima parte del 2018: proprio su questo argomento, abbiamo fornito al Cliente nella Lettera a lui dedicata i dati più aggiornati e più significativi.
In questa sede però offriamo ai lettori un commento di carattere più generale e rivolto al futuro: cosa ci si deve aspettare, in termini di performances, da qui a fine 2018, dato che il contesto internazionale è fortemente caratterizzato da caratteristiche come divergenza e compiacenza?.
Un notissimo commentatore di Bloomberg, il trader Richard Brinslow, scrive che ...nessuno lo sa (nella sua rubrica che è riservata a chi sottoscrive).
Abbiamo selezionato per voi lettori alcuni brani, che descrivono alla perfezione lo stato di agitazione, isteria, confusione ed anche caos che si osserva ogni giorno sui mercati globali in questi ultimi mesi.
Ci piace in particolare la citazione di Cooleridge, e l'espressione di "willing suspension of disbelief". L'espressione "suspension of disbelief" in inglese ha un significato forte, che in italiano potrebbe essere reso come sognare ad occhi aperti, oppure volerci credere a tutti i costi, oppure negare l'evidenza.
With Nasdaq now set for its best Augusts since the year 2000 (the dead cat bounce peak right before the 74% plunge to 2002) and stocks soaring in the face of dismal macro data, slumping housing, a collapsing yield curve, lower bond yields, and now a rising VIX, one wonders - aside from the ubiquitous corporate buybacks - is driving this hysteria at the vinegar strokes of the longest bull run ever.
I was sent a technical piece yesterday from someone who doesn’t believe news should figure at all into the analysis. It’s an approach I have an enormous amount of sympathy with. This is a rare time that it’s questionable to stick with that view. As I read it, all I could think of was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Because the only way to navigate these markets is to engage in a conscious willing suspension of disbelief. You read the news and have to accept the surreal to have any hope of understanding what is going on.
Even the news-oblivious charts have figured out that normal rules don’t apply. And that’s why they have been working so well.
The gist of the piece was that just about every asset it looked at was doing one of two things. Approaching resistance where it was expected to fail or had failed at resistance and was headed the other way where it would do the same. The world is in a state of flux and the last word that should be found in any piece of market analysis is "definitive."
Beware the person telling you something has bottomed or peaked unless it includes the “for now” tag line.
(...)
My working theory is that the confusion sown by the ebullient stock market has every other asset uncertain and conflicted. That’s a danger. Sometimes certain sectors just have to go their own way. And while models take a long time to figure this out, we carbon entities can sometimes out-think them. We should take advantage of it while it lasts.
(...)
That old game where you play which of these don’t belong with the others is a lot of fun. Sometimes, however, being able to choose correctly is a very valuable tool. Spoiler alert: it’s the stocks.
Aside from them we are in a risk-off environment. And must play things from that perspective. We all just get repeatedly confused because we’ve been trained to think the world lives or dies based on how much trickle down we are led to expect from a rising S&P