Il momento peggiore per molti investitori

La maggior parte degli investitori oggi è compiaciuta: “Quanti soldi ho fatto, nel 2019!”

Non saprebbero dire il perché, né saprebbero dire ciò che potrebbe succedere da domani, ai loro soldi: e (notate bene) mica hanno ancora venduto.

Aspettano: convinti, anche loro, come milioni e milioni di altri, che “quando vedrò che le cose si mettono male, avrò tutto il tempo per vendere, e venderò tutto”. (ma non hanno ancora venduto, oggi).

Ogni volta, è sempre così: sempre il medesimo meccanismo. Spinto dalle reti di vendita nel vortice dell’euforia, si fanno convincere che “questa volta è diverso, questa volta non è come le altre volte”. Finiranno a piangere poi sul latte versato, come tutte le altre volte.

A voi lettori potrebbe essere utile leggere anche qualche opinione qualificata, e diversa dal “mainstream”.

Ne abbiamo selezionata qui una, di pochi giorni fa, che a nostro giudizio spiega con grande efficacia perché questo è il momento peggiore per la grande maggioranza degli investitori nel Mondo.

(Non per i Clienti di Recce’d.)

What do you do when the bond market is basically uninvestable and the stock market keeps hitting all-time highs and you know in your gut that none of this will end well? What do investors—big and small—do in such unfortunate circumstances, like the ones we collectively find ourselves in now?

I’ve been racking my brain for years to figure that out. Increasingly desperate and with the end getting near, I called Mark Spitznagel, the founder of Universa Investments, a hedge fund that exists to help investors grapple with the inevitable market crash.Spitznagel, 48, and a former trader in the Chicago pits and at Morgan Stanley, understands what’s been happening and how for the last decade central banks around the world have been warping our financial markets by keeping interest rates artificially low. “These monetary distortions lead to this reckless reach for yields that we are all seeing,” he tells me. He sees risk being mispriced everywhere. “Randomly go look at a screen and it’s pretty crazy,” he says. “Big caps, small caps, credit markets, volatility; it’s crazy. Reach for yield is everywhere.”

He thinks we are in one of those periods where people have lost their collective minds when it comes to the financial markets. “When the stock market is no longer tethered to fundamentals—that’s the distorted environment we live in, that’s just where we are—when that happens, any price can print,” he says. “Any price can print. We shouldn’t be surprised by anything on the upside at this point because what’s tethering the markets? People need yield and when they pursue yield because of the momentum that we have in the markets today, anything is possible.”He thinks the yield hunger games, as I like to call what’s been happening for the last decade, “makes people take crazy risks” because “interest rates and prices are wrong” and “otherwise wouldn’t even clear the market. They are just absolutely wrong. But of course, central bankers think they know what the natural rate is and that it will all be fine. They think they’ve got it all figured out.”

He disagrees. First, he thinks the massive program of quantitative easing—where after the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve intervened in the debt markets, buying up nearly everything in sight in an effort to raise the price of long-term bonds, driving down their yields—was a mistake. In the process, the Fed’s balance sheet ballooned to $4.5 trillion in assets, from around $900 billion. (These days, the Fed’s balance sheet is around $4.2 trillion.) “I’m a free market guy,” he says. “Whenever the government gets involved in things—and this is pretty much across the board—they make things worse. I can probably prove that. But it doesn’t really matter. We take what we have and this is the world we live in. And we’ve got to deal with it. I don’t want to complain too much about it. But we’d all be better off today had we not done that. There would’ve been more painful at the time but you rip the Band-Aid off, I think we’d all be better off.”

He also thinks central bankers don’t know how to stop the monster they have created. “I do not think that central bankers will ever be able to pull away from this,” he explains. “They will never be able to ‘normalize’ rates. In our lifetime, recessions and stock market crashes really have been instigated or started by central banks sort of pulling away the punch bowl. They raise rates and that has led to a slow down and ultimately has led to these crashes that we see. Every single one, that’s how it’s happened. But we’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole this time, I am absolutely convinced that that is not even on the table this time.” He thinks central bankers are just testing the market when they suggest—as Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, did throughout 2018 when he raised short-term interest rates four times—that they wanted to try to return to letting supply and demand set the price of money, a position that he reversed in 2019 when he pivoted and then lowered interest rates. “They’re not stupid,” he says of central bankers.

“They are reckless. But they are not stupid. And they realize that global economies are in a situation now where central banks can’t pull away. And they’re bluffing if they say they can.