Investire per il 2022: come si fa gestione nella volatilità

In questo Blog, alcuni mesi fa, abbiamo già introdotto la figura di Paul Singer, il gestore a capo del gruppo Elliot Management.

Vi abbiamo segnalato questa figura, di grande competenza ed esperienza, e vi abbiamo suggerito di seguirne il pensiero, le analisi e le pubblicazioni.

Se a qualche nostro lettore fosse sfuggito, noi riportiamo qui sotto il contributo di Paul Singer al Financial Times di questa settimana, contributo che più in basso noi riprendiamo e colleghiamo ad altre considerazioni.

The writer is the founder and co-CEO of Elliott Management

Despite recent jitters over the Omicron variant, global stock market prices remain at or near their highest valuations in history. Bond prices reflect the lowest interest rates in history. And is it any surprise that inflation has broken out of the boundaries of the last 20 years, given the stated goal of policymakers to create more of it?

Across the market landscape, risks are building, many of them hidden from view. Yet, in a surprising twist, a growing number of the largest investors in the world — including socially important institutions such as pension funds, university endowments, charitable foundations and the like — are currently lining up to take on more risk, which could have catastrophic implications for these investors, their clients’ capital and the stability of broader public markets.

What is driving this behaviour? In the main, it is driven by the radically expansionary monetary and fiscal policies undertaken by developed-world governments since the end of the global financial crisis, which were accelerated after the Covid-19 pandemic rattled markets and depressed economic activity last year. And in part it is driven by benchmarking — the practice of institutional investors measuring their performance against a benchmark such as the S&P 500.

As monetary and fiscal policies have pushed securities valuations to new heights, institutional investors have been tempted to overweight their portfolios to stocks, even at record-high prices, for fear of missing out on extraordinary gains. The buying pressure created by these strategies is only driving prices higher and herding capital into risk assets.

At present, risks are at, or close to, the highest levels in market history. For instance, the market capitalisation of all domestic US public and private equities is now at 280 per cent of gross domestic product, much higher than the previous peak of 190 per cent just before the collapse of the dotcom bubble. And household equity allocations are at an all-time high of 50 per cent.

Eventually, rising inflation, rising interest rates or some unforeseen turn of events could cause a substantial stock and bond market decline, perhaps in an unpredictable sequence. What then for the institutional managers when the rush for the exits begins? One answer might be that the authorities will never allow a sustained downturn in asset prices to happen again. This points to one of the key problems with the current set of monetary and fiscal policies in the developed world: they mask and minimise risks while preventing stock and bond prices from performing their indispensable signalling roles.

Currently, policies across the developed world are designed to encourage people to believe that risks are limited and that asset prices, not just the overall functioning of the economy, will always and forever be protected by the government. Due to this extraordinary support for asset prices, almost all investment “strategies” of recent years have made money, are making money and are expected to keep making money. The most successful “strategy,” of course, has been to buy almost any risk asset, leaning hard on the latest fads, using maximum leverage to enhance buying power and buying more on the “dips”. So it is no wonder that under these manufactured conditions, investors would “move out on the risk curve” — investor-speak for taking on more risk unconnected to expected returns.

Most investors who say that they are willing to bear more risk do not actually mean that. What they really mean is that they fear missing out on the higher returns experienced by other investors — in other words, missing their benchmarks. However, the ability of governments to protect asset prices from another downturn has never been more constrained. The global $30tn pile of stocks and bonds that have been purchased by central banks in order to drive up their prices has created a gigantic overhang. With inflation rising, policymakers are reaching the limits of their ability to support asset prices in a future downturn without further exacerbating inflationary pressures.

With all this in mind, it is puzzling that a growing number of otherwise sober money managers are in the process of boosting their allocations to riskier assets, rather than trying to figure out ways to make some kind of rate of return without giving back years of capital accretion in the next crash or crisis. Investors who have upgraded their risk levels, relying on policymakers to protect the prices of their holdings, may suffer significant and perhaps long-lasting damage when the government-orchestrated music finally stops.

Recce’d giudica questo articolo eccellente, e da più di un punto di vista: è una sintesi equilibrata ed insieme efficacissima dello stato degli affari, sui mercati finanziari, ed è chiarissimo anche quando fa riferimento agli atteggiamenti delle diverse categorie di investitori.

Se leggete con attenzione questo articolo di Paul Singer (uomo che certamente NON ha alcun interesse personale a deprimere i mercati finanziari) avrete un quadro preciso di dove si trovano, oggi i soldi che avete investito sui mercati finanziari. Non c’è molto altro da aggiungere.

C’è però da rispondere alla domanda: e quindi? Cosa facciamo? Come operiamo? Come modifichiamo il portafoglio titoli?

Recce’d ha una propria risposta, che concretamente si traduce nel portafoglio modello che successivamente si traduce nei portafogli dei nostri Clienti.

Questo è il servizio che Recce’d propone ai propri Clienti: una gestione di portafoglio in remoto, che non impone a nessuno di trasferire i propri soldi, e che risolve ogni eventuale complessità operativa nel modo più semplice e gestibile, consentendo al Cliente di beneficiare dei numerosi vantaggi dei propri portafogli modello, ed al tempo stesso mantenendo sempre il proprio Cliente perfettamente informato ed anche consapevole di ciò che sta facendo, in totale ed assoluta trasparenza.

Noi non facciamo parte della schiera di imbonitori iscritti all’Albo che sono costretti a raccontare sempre che “tutto va bene come meglio non potrebbe”. Non ci tocca di fare “marchette”, come si dice in gergo.

I nostri Clienti sono tra i pochi ad essere consapevoli dei rischi che stanno correndo, e non solo questo: noi siamo capaci di farli guadagnare, mantenendo i rischi sempre sotto stretto controllo.

Un lavoro importante, e risultati che pochissimi sono in grado di garantire. Non parliamo tanto del rendimento, quanto della consapevolezza e l’equilibrio.

Torniamo alle parole di Paul Singer che avete letto più in alto: tra le moltissime cose che meritano una sottolineatura, noi scegliamo oggi di sottolineare l’accenno ai Fondi Pensione ed ai loro problemi, un tema urgente sul quale ritorneremo poi in un Post successivo.

Poi riprendiamo anche nello specifico una frase di Singer: At present, risks are at, or close to, the highest levels in market history.

Quando i prezzi, sui mercati finanziari, risultano scollegati dalla realtà sottostante, nel brevissimo termine questo a molti sembra essere “un successone”, ovvero “una bellissima cosa”, e questo perché “è facile guadagnare”.

Recce’d vi ripete che i VERI guadagni, nella gestione del portafoglio in titoli, NON si fanno così.

I VERI guadagni sono quelli che restano ALLA FINE di una fase di mercato. I conti si fanno alla fine: sempre, ed anche questa volta.

E quindi, come si gestisce il portafoglio in titoli in una fase come quella che Singer più sopra ha descritto alla perfezione?

Noi al Cliente lo abbiamo illustrato, e per diverse settimane, nel nostro The Morning Brief: quando i prezzi sui mercati finanziari sono del tutto scollegati dalla realtà, chi vince lo fa se è capace di gestire la volatilità e le sue improvvise esplosioni.

L’articolo che segue, sempre della settimana scorsa e sempre dal Financial Times, vi sarà utile a comprendere il natura, origini e ruolo della volatilità in una fase nella quale le Banche Centrali mantengono elevata la liquidità per i mercati finanziari: cosa che a molti risulta difficile da comprendere. Perché non rimane sempre tutto tranquillo?

In aggiunta, vi segnaliamo che, come già fatto da Paul Singer, anche in questo articolo si mette in evidenza l’importanza, negli anni 2020 e 2021, dell’atteggiamento di alcune categorie di investitori verso il rischio: in particolare laddove si dice che: More and more people got sucked into similar positioning. In the process, the risk of systemic financial instability shifted from banks subject to stronger regulatory oversight to under-supervised and poorly regulated non-bank participants in the market.

E questa, amici lettori, per tuti voi è già una indicazione operativa.

The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and Gramercy

As bouts of market volatility have become more common in recent weeks, it is clear that investor appetite to buy on dips, while still strong, will be tested when the US Federal Reserve withdraws support for asset prices.

For now, overall liquidity in markets remains high. While starting to taper, central bank asset buying programmes are still huge. But the sharp swings in markets experienced in recent weeks illustrate a phenomenon that we are likely to see more of: “illiquidity in the midst of liquidity” — a phrase I first heard from Gramercy’s founder Robert Koenigsberger.

The seemingly counter-intuitive notion is that liquidity dislocations can occur within the context of ample overall liquidity. Having experienced sudden bouts of volatility in recent years, investors seem generally well equipped to navigate their way through it, including by using market drops as a basis for further future gains. Yet the emergence this time round of two factors that were not foreseen just a few months ago complicates matters: inflation and the investability of China and Russia. Investors now need to assess more carefully the possibility not just of pockets of illiquidity in the midst of generalised liquidity, but also of a retreat of overall liquidity.

Global bond and equity investors have been taken on quite a rollercoaster ride in recent days. Last week’s unsettling fall in stocks was followed by this week’s impressive two-day rally and yet more outsized moves in bond yields. The immediate causes of this volatility were concern — on health, economic and financial grounds — about Omicron, the new and more infectious coronavirus variant, and the manner in which Fed chair Jay Powell chose finally to retire the gross mis-characterisation of inflation as “transitory”. The volatility caused by disorderly closing of “pain trades” was amplified by a longstanding structural imbalance: the lack of sufficient risk-absorbing capital in the face of a sudden shift in conventional market wisdom.

This is not just about the multi-year reduction in the willingness and ability of intermediaries (broker-dealers) to act counter-cyclically. It also reflects the greater uniformity of portfolio positioning in the context of protracted Fed-induced market distortions. Until now, episodes of sudden illiquidity in the midst of liquidity have proved to be temporary and reversible, and for good reason: The Fed’s constant flooding of financial markets with liquidity reinforced the markets’ conditioning to buying the dip, for “fear of missing out”.

Markets are more fragile than investors think With such high market confidence in the “Fed put”, every bout of localised illiquidity encouraged the private sector to extend its leverage to take advantage of a reversible market drop. More and more people got sucked into similar positioning. In the process, the risk of systemic financial instability shifted from banks subject to stronger regulatory oversight to under-supervised and poorly regulated non-bank participants in the market.

This is where the two new global themes come in — inflation and the investability of major emerging economies. Higher and more persistent inflation limits the Fed’s ability to inject liquidity in a substantial and predictable fashion. It also forces other central banks to become less dovish, resulting in a generalised tightening of global monetary policy. The more this reality sinks in, the greater the risk to the markets’ own factories of leverage and debt, threatening an additional endogenous tightening of global financial conditions. Omicron amplifies this risk given stagflationary tendencies accentuated by the unintended effects of well-intentioned pre-emptive health measures.

This week’s understandable imposition of a vaccine mandate on the private sector by New York mayor Bill de Blasio is just one example. The question of China and Russia is more complex. The greater the uncertainties about the scale and scope of direct Chinese government intervention in markets, the higher the risks to global capital, especially so-called tourist flows that ended up far from their natural habitat, “pushed” there by highly repressed yields at home. This can also tighten global financial conditions.

Meanwhile, the more the west is concerned about threats to Ukraine, the greater the possibility of a destabilising round of sanctions and counter-sanctions. The hope is that recent market volatility is a simple repeat of past episodes of reversible illiquidity amid conditions of general liquidity. But the risk, which would grow in response to the persistence of high inflation and emerging market uncertainties, is one of a generalised and more permanent receding of overall liquidity.