Gamestop resterà con noi (per sempre)

Venerdì 31 gennaio 2021, per tutti i mercati finanziari e per tutti gli investitori, esisteva solo Gamestop. la sola cosa che contava era Gamestop.

Lunedì 1 febbraio, ovvero nel successivo giorno di mercati, Gamestop era già stata sostituita: questo perché i Fondi Hedge, nel frattempo, avevano dimezzato le loro posizioni SHORT su Gamestop . Lunedì 1 febbraio, ovvero cinque giorni fa, esisteva una sola cosa, per tutti i mercati e per tutti gli investitori. L’argento.

Dovevano esserselo sognato nel weekend, l’argento, perché poi non è successo. Non è successo assolutamente nulla, all’argento.

Ma per nostra fortuna, è arrivato Mario Draghi a riempire quello spazio. E per gli altri quattro giorni della settimana, per tutti (quotidiani, TV, e soprattutto chat e social) è esistito soltanto Mario Draghi.

Vista l’esperienza degli ultimi mesi, un gestore professionale, attento e consapevole dovrebbe a questo punto avere già messo Mario Draghi dietro le sue spalle e fuori dalla sua testa, e dovrebbe concentrarsi sulla seguente domanda: quale sarà il tema dominante della settimana prossima? Dopo il Bitcoin, dopo l’argento, dopo Gamestop, e dopo Mario Draghi, che cosa arriverà ad intrattenere la frenesia dei compulsivi da tastiera? Come lo riempiranno, lunedì, il vostro tablet?

Non ci tiene in ansia, questa domanda: la nostra strategia di investimento NON si fonda sul “tema social del giorno”.

Ed in ogni caso, siamo più che pronti anche per questo “ballo del qua-qua”, il cui ritmo aumenta ogni mese che passa. Ma non mette in difficoltà i portafogli dei nostri Clienti.

Forse, dobbiamo ammettere che in alcuni momenti proviamo fastidio, per via del baccano, del rumore, del “noise”. Che rende più faticoso, per noi che facciamo questo lavoro con passione ma pure con competenza professionale, trovare la linea da seguire, il percorso di investimento, la tendenza fondamentale al di sotto del “noise”.

Come risolviamo questo problema in Recce’d? Come separiamo le informazioni utili dal “noise”? Quel metodo è il nostro “segreto industriale”, e non ve lo riveliamo. Però, per i lettori del Blog, con questo Post regaliamo un esempio concreto.

L’esempio concreto riguarda proprio l’attualità: di queste settimane, di giorni, di queste ore.

In questo Blog, vi spiegheremo per quale ragione per noi, e per i nostri portafogli, l’episodio Gamestop era e resta più importante del tema “Mario Draghi”. E non di una volta: di cinque o di dieci volte.

Naturalmente, tra tre, sei, e anche dodici mesi nel Blog vi offriremo una verifica in merito.

Oggi, vi aiuteremo mettendovi a disposizione due articoli, entrambi molto importanti, pubblicato nel corso dell’ultima settimana, articoli che noi di Recce’d abbiamo lavorato per selezionare, tra mille e mille, e fare questo regalo ai lettori del Blog.

Il primo dei due articoli ci è utile per fare il punto, insieme a voi, sulla situazione del Bitcoin e delle cripto-valute in generale.

A flood of central bank stimulus and widening interest among retail and institutional investors has sustained the rally in cryptocurrencies, analysts say, even as sceptics warn that the market is in the midst of a bubble.

Bitcoin kicked off February at just above $36,000, about $5,000 beneath the all-time peak it hit last month. The digital currency briefly wobbled after reaching the high in early January, but has so far avoided a repeat of the brutal crash in 2017. Some investors put that down to a deluge of central bank stimulus, which has inflated the price of assets globally and triggered a frantic hunt for returns.

“The amount of liquidity that has been injected in the system has found its way into a lot of different assets, including alternatives such as bitcoin,” said Francesca Fornasari, a fund manager at Insight Investment. At the same time, professional and amateur investors are beginning to play a more active role in the crypto market.

“In 2012 it was mostly geeks, anarchists and libertarians in crypto,” said Marc Bernegger, a Zurich-based board member of Crypto Finance Group, a broker and asset manager. “The profile of people entering into bitcoin has definitely changed.”

Many remain sceptical, however, and worry that the sharp price rises reflect increasingly frothy market conditions. For them, bitcoin’s gains echo the recent volatility in share prices of companies like GameStop and AMC Entertainment, as well as a sudden surge this week in the price of silver. The moves in all three markets involved an influx of retail traders, armed with increasingly sophisticated tools and often stuck at home because of coronavirus lockdowns.

Some brokerages such as Robinhood allow traders to bet both on the price of stocks and cryptocurrencies. Since a sharp fall during the broad market ructions last March, bitcoin’s value has increased by nine times. The boom has caused parts of the traditional financial community to take notice, with some banks beginning to cover the market as part of their research offerings. San Francisco-based Coinbase is preparing for a direct listing that would give investors their first chance to buy shares in a big US-listed cryptocurrency exchange.

Grayscale attracts more than $5bn in investor funds in 2020 The planned debut comes as investors are already chasing other proxies for investing in digital tokens without having to hold them outright. Last year, investors poured $5.7bn into cryptocurrency trusts managed by Grayscale, the favoured investment channel of many traditional traders dipping their toes into bitcoin. The figure amounted to more than four times the total net inflows between 2013 and 2019. Most of Grayscale’s inflows come from institutional investors. Data from Chainalysis, a specialist cryptocurrency analytics company, also show an increase in institutions’ purchases of bitcoin, and a rise in average transaction sizes since November.

Joshua Younger, a strategist at JPMorgan, said the size of the bitcoin market had grown to equal about a fifth of gold held for investment and trading purposes, with a market capitalisation for the cryptocurrency of $750bn at its peak earlier this year, meaning it “is far from a niche asset class”. The lure of the high-risk space is increasingly difficult to ignore. “You’re not buying bitcoin to make 20 per cent, you’re buying it to make exponential returns,” said Brett Messing, a partner and chief operating officer of cryptocurrency specialist hedge fund SkyBridge Capital. Analysts at Canadian insurance company Manulife said in late January that the expansion in central banks’ balance sheets and rising public debt would push investors further into alternative asset classes, which could turn cryptocurrencies into “a solution to investor fears that ongoing extraordinary policy support could lead to resource misallocation”. “This doesn’t necessarily imply that investments in cryptocurrencies are appropriate, but it does suggest that cryptoassets such as bitcoin will increasingly become a standard point of reference for investors and policymakers alike,” Manulife said.

But scams and hacks also remain rife, with a recent report from data company Xangle showing that investors have lost more than $16bn to fraud since 2012. Regulators are also increasingly concerned about the size of the market and the unchecked activity taking place every day. Agustín Carstens, the head of the Bank for International Settlements said last week that “it is clear that bitcoin is more of a speculative asset than money”.

Michael Bolliger, chief investment officer at UBS Wealth Management, added that the history of bubbles showed that they could stay inflated for longer than most expected, sometimes without bursting. “Changes in the way assets are perceived can also mean that bubbles may never fully deflate, and this could hold true for cryptocurrencies, too,” Mr Bolliger said.

Del Bitcoin, e dintorni, Recce’d ha scritto tutto ciò che a nostro giudizio c’è da scrivere, e da molto tempo (anche nel Blog).

A noi qui importa soltanto offrire a chi ci legge una serie qualificata di informazioni, per restituire al lettori il clima, l’aria che si respira sui mercati finanziari in questi giorni, in queste settimane ed in questi mesi.

Da questa descrizione, si ricavano informazioni preziose. Le informazioni poi, una volta ottenute, vanno riordinate, selezionate e “prioritizzate”.

Per ottenere questo risultato, noi ci facciamo aiutare (ancora una volta) da Mohamed El Erian, che con questo articolo sistema nel modo migliore, a nostro parere, la vicenda Gamestop, spiegando chiaramente al lettore perché le ricadute di quella vicenda, e della altre collegate, resteranno con noi per mesi e mesi e mesi.

Che è precisamente il nostro obbiettivo per questo Post.

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

The retail investor “Reddit rebellion” has painfully been exposed to one of the big lessons of popular political uprisings — although that does not mean it will not return.

First, early gains won during the initial surprise attack on the established order are hard to maintain if the movement is leaderless, lacks staying power and is easily distracted. Second, the established order — supported in its “counter attack” by those wishing to minimise disorder and uncertainty — quickly reasserts its dominance. However, this reassertion tends to happen in ways that fail to deal with the uprising’s underlying causes. That leaves in place the roots of future disruptions.

The story of the uprising is now well known. Facilitated by efficient communication platforms, disposable funds and costless trading apps such as Robinhood, a young group of investors tried to beat hedge funds by exploiting the “pain trade”. In this case, that meant squeezing large short positions held by hedge funds on a handful of stocks, such as GameStop. Scrambling to save themselves, these stressed funds had to raise cash by selling out of their long positions, which put pressure on the market as a whole. The strategy worked extremely well, initially. However, sustaining it proved hard. Retail investors’ ability to buy, a critical element in any short squeeze, was hindered by draconian limits on additional purchases imposed on them by trading platforms. This, in turn, was said to be a function of the requirements imposed on trading platforms by clearing houses.

The buying power of the rebellious investors was also distracted by talk of silver being their next “target” — a problematic approach given the silver market’s much larger size and its relatively low share of outstanding shorts. Finally, infusions of fresh capital stabilised the trading intermediaries and calmed the bloody-nosed hedge funds. Indeed, by midday in New York on Wednesday, GameStop was down 70 per cent from the start of the week, while the price of silver was off 8 per cent from its week high. Hedge funds were back in command, with little pressure to cover their shorts. Many retail investors had become victims instead of predators. And the rest of the market went back to what it was doing before, seeking one record high after another.

All this exposed the structural disadvantages inherent to the retail investors’ strategy. It reminded me of two sayings I learned early in my career as an investment manager: “You have no friends on Wall Street,” and; “If you cannot identify the weak hand, it’s you and you shouldn’t be in this game.” Even so, it would be very short-sighted to believe that markets have fully recovered from this event and remain immune to further disruption. That is because it illuminated several realities which, if not acted upon, could well assert themselves far more dramatically.

It revealed the persistent asymmetry between the establishment and the “little guys” who carry considerable personal and national debt and are rightly worried about their economic future. Their concerns are unlikely to get material relief anytime soon. Their sense of marginalisation and alienation will grow. It exposed a number of regulatory and supervisory gaps. The authorities were caught asleep at the wheel, again. They now need to resolve a series of difficult and, in some cases, competing issues that range from investor protection to market collusion.

It uncovered systemic risk. Judging from the billions of dollars subsequently raised by Robinhood, the financial system came close to a market accident that could have triggered a disruptive “de-grossing” — the simultaneous deleveraging of financial balance sheets. Moreover, it played out amid excessive risk taking and the broad disconnect between finance and the real economy. Ramming that point home, the market’s reaction to having avoided an accident has been to take on even more risk overall.

This retail investor uprising was akin to too many grass roots political movements that promote greater inclusion and participation. It failed to maintain its momentum, and growing counter-pressures frustrated the uprising’s aim of disrupting the established order and democratising finance more. What has not been crushed, however, are the underlying forces that propelled the uprising. In its aftermath, markets have reverted to their old behaviours, rather than internalise its lessons. This leaves open the possibility of more disruptions still to come.