Non può che salire (parte 2)

Oggi Recce’d pubblica quattro nuovi Post. II quattro Post di oggi riprendono esattamente i temi dei quattro Post di sette giorni fa. Questo perché (ovviamente) i temi davvero importanti per voi e noi investitrori sono esattamente i medesimi: la settimana appena conclusa ha lasciato tutto com’era. Siamo preparando un nuovo Longform’d dedicato al tema dei tassi di interesse, dei rendimenti delle obbligazioni, e della Federal Reserve: verrà pubblicato … quando sarà stato completato. Non sentiamo l’urgenza di scriverne oggi (anche se si tratta del tema intorno al quale ruotano, e ruoteranno tutti i mercati finanziari di tutto il Mondo per tutto l’anno (ed oltre) per ila ragione che ne scrivemmo già quattrodici giorni fa, e che ne abbiamo scritto anticipando i fatti di queste settimane fino dallo scorso mese di agosto 2020.. Per questo siamo tranquilli: i nostri lettori hanno già oggi le idee chiarissime su ciò che sta per accedere.

Forse lo hanno detto anche a voi, che “la Borsa sale sempre”: beh, non è esattamente questa la verità, come vedete nei due grafici qui sotto, oppure anche ogni giorno nel vostro portafoglio titoli.

La ricerca della felicità è legittima, ma spinge l’essere umano a fare cose irrazionali: tra queste una è quella di illudersi di essere capace di trovare “l’investimento che sale sempre”.

E’ un sforzo del tutto inutile, perché quell’investimento non esiste.

La gestione del vostro portafoglio di investimenti, per essere di successo, deve invece partire proprio dal presupposto che è opposto a quello: ovvero, dovete partire pensando che alcuni dei vostri investimento andranno sicuramente “sotto”, ed anche di tanto. Questo, non lo potete evitare, in alcun modo. E’ naturale, come i giorni di pioggia.

La sola cosa che potete proporvi è di ricevere dall’insieme dei vostri investimenti un ragionevole rendimento, ma non ogni giorno, ogni settimana ed ogni mese. Solo alla fine delle diverse fasi dei mercati finanziari.

Associato a questo obbiettivo, ne dovete assolutamente raggiungere un secondo: il controllo delle oscillazioni dell’insieme delle vostre posizioni investite.

Questo è uno dei sei “canali tematici” intorno ai quali stiamo organizzando il lavoro per il nostro nuovissimo Blog, che presenteremo a breve. La gestione di un portafoglio di investimenti.

Ci è sembrato necessario anticipare in questo Post alcune delle considerazioni di maggiore attualità.

In altri Post, sempre pubblicati oggi, abbiamo descritto una fase di mercato nella quale “il gioco si è fatto duro e per individui duri”, duri nella mentalità, nel controllo del sistema nervoso, nella capacità di analisi e nella strumentazione che è indispensabile per effettuare l’analisi.

Facciamo un esempio concreto: il momento del mercato, in questo 2021, è ben rappresentato da una volatilità intra-giornaliera esasperata che però non esprime con forza una direzione per i mercati finanziari nel loro insieme. I numeri, effettivamente inbsoliti e molto grandi, del Bitcoin, di Tesla e di Gamestop non ci forniscono informazioni utili sullo stato delle economie sottostanti, sono un fatto che ci informa piuttosto dello stato dei mercati finanziari.

Numeri così clamorosi innescano però la tentazione al trading, che in particolare negli Stati Uniti ha coinvolto milioni di investitori, la maggior parte dei quali privi di esperienza e privi di conoscenza.

Delle implicazioni di questo fenomeno di massa, che a tratti assume le caratteristiche di una vera e propria isteria collettiva, noi abbiamo scritto, sempre oggi, in un altro Post.

In questo Post, vi proponiamo di leggere le considerazioni di una esperta della consulenza finanziaria, considerazioni pubblicate in un articolo del Financial Times.

Abbiamo giudicato di grande interesse questo articolo che vi riproponiamo, perché è capace (noi non siamo capaci) di riportare gli stati d’animo e le sensazioni di una categoria di investitori. In aggiunta, spiega bene che cosa si intende con “YOLO”

I did something I very rarely do last weekend. I watched a live football match on TV. My husband and stepchildren are all football fanatics, but I’ve never been bitten by the bug. I usually go upstairs and read when matches are on, but since I invested in a £300 pair of wireless noise-cancelling headphones, we can now peacefully coexist on the same sofa. So why the change of heart?

The answer is my growing interest in trading platforms, their sponsorship deals with football clubs, and their expanding presence in sports-linked television advertising. One of the biggest personal finance stories of the pandemic has been the huge rise of investing and day trading around the world, especially among young people. In the UK, one in 10 investors today got started in the past year, according to research by consumer website Boring Money. It found the newcomers have an average age of about 30, and nearly two-thirds of them are men. Bored, sitting at home, and unable to spend money, it seems they are happy to take risks — and they’re a captive market for trading platforms.

On my Money Clinic podcast this week, I met 19-year-old Ross, who’s been trading throughout the pandemic, riding the GameStop wave. Spurred on by social media messaging boards and trading videos, his high point was making £230 in around five minutes trading shares in AMC, the US cinema operator. One of a group of so-called “meme stocks”, Ross later found he could lose money just as fast when a trade in Nasdaq-listed Genius Brands backfired, wiping out a quarter of his portfolio. Oof. He reassured himself that in more normal times, he could just have easily blown the cash on a big night out. But he also wondered whether there was more to investing than placing high-risk bets on fast-moving shares.

I enjoyed discussing this with him on the podcast (Merryn Somerset Webb makes a guest appearance) and Ross has resolved to invest 90 per cent in a stocks and shares Isa for the long term and keep back 10 per cent for riskier trades. For young people who fear Covid-19 has sucked the life out of their financial future, the potential to make a lot of money quickly with a risky gamble by trading shares, forex or crypto has a powerful allure. Everyone knows someone who is boasting about having made a packet.

There’s plenty of Fomo-inducing hype on social media (fear of missing out) including videos of young traders bragging about how much they’ve made. They rarely admit to losing money, unless this is followed by revealing an even bigger win. There’s an expression, “doing a Yolo” (you only live once) and betting the majority of your account on a single trade. One ad doing the rounds shows footage of footballers celebrating a winning goal is shot together with a young man in a shirt and tie pumping his fists after executing a winning trade. In real life, he’d be more likely to be weeping like Gazza Claer Barrett Ross has never done it (“that really is just gambling”).

Even so, hearing him describe the trades that got his heart pumping as he obsessively watched market movements for eight hours at a stretch shows how habit forming and addictive this high-stakes form of investing can be. It’s no coincidence that both sports betting firms and trading apps are marketed at the selfsame group of consumers — young men. Online gambling firms are far and away the biggest sponsors of UK Premier League football teams, accounting for 40 per cent of shirt sponsorship deals, but trading platforms are muscling in on this market. Broker eToro is one of the biggest football club sponsors in Europe. Three Premier League teams — Newcastle, West Ham and Sheffield United — have signed “sleeve sponsorship” deals with online forex and CFD brokers (contracts for difference, a shorthand for spread betting).

Watch a live match on TV, as I did, and the commercial breaks are dominated by ads from gambling apps and trading platforms. Sometimes, I struggled to tell which was which. One ad doing the rounds shows footage of footballers celebrating a winning goal is shot together with a young man in a shirt and tie pumping his fists after executing a winning trade on his smartphone. In real life, he’d be more likely to be weeping like Gazza. The website for the same platform carries the statutory warning that 74 per cent of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. Most young investors don’t have that much money to invest, which intensifies their interest in risky trades with the potential for quick profits. On the podcast, the experts were keen to stress that holding funds and shares for a matter of years, rather than a matter of minutes, could increase the chances of a more sustainable return.

Damien Fahy, a former financial adviser who set up the popular Money to the Masses website to demystify investing for young people, had a few lessons to pass on. “When you’re young, increasing your contributions is the fastest way to increase the size of your portfolio,” he says. True, making a regular monthly investment into a diversified portfolio of funds within an Isa lacks the drama of trading GameStop. As markets turn choppy, there’s the benefit of pound cost averaging — buying more for a cheaper price.

As dull and sensible as this sounds, he says that if a 20-year old invested £125 per month, the historic long-term returns on equities suggest there’s a fair chance they could amass a £300,000 portfolio by the age of 65. His assumptions are based on the Barclays Equity Gilt Study, which shows a long-running return of about 5.5 per cent per year on UK equities. Assuming investors made shrewd choices that increased their average annual return to 9 per cent (ambitious, but not totally outlandish) they could amass £1m over that 45-year timeframe. Even if they didn’t want to invest time in researching funds and stocks, investors could boost the value of their pot by increasing the size of their monthly contributions as their earnings power rises.

And the tax advantages of investing within a pension or stocks and shares Isa are good lessons to learn early on. There’s no such thing as a risk-free investment, but playing a long-term game is likely to be a better bet for most.

Claer Barrett is the FT’s consumer editor, and a financial commentator on Eddie Mair’s LBC drive-time show, on weekdays between 4-7pm: claer.barrett@ft.com; Twitter @Claerb; Instagram @Claerb

Come già detto, riteniamo utile leggere in questo articolo la descrizione delle sensazioni e degli atteggiamenti della categoria di investitori che qui viene rappresentata.

Le conclusioni alle quali arriva l’articolo, noi non le condividiamo: anzi la vediamo in modo molto differente.

Ma anche per noi, e soprattutto per noi di Recce’d, che NON operiamo in quel modo, è importante conoscere come agiscono gli altri investitori sui mercati finanziari.

Anche per questa ragione, ora vi proponiamo in lettura un secondo articolo, da noi accuratamente selezionato.

In questo articolo, si affronta un tema che leggerete spesso, e sempre più spesso, anche sul vostro quotidiano: la necessità (resa evidente dalla vicenda Gamestop un mese fa) di rivedere le regole dei mercati finanziari, che mai come nel 2021 sono stati giudicati “ridicoli”, “folli” e “manipolati” da esperti della massima levatura, così come anche da una buona fetta del pubblico degli investitori.

Riteniamo utilissima la lettura di queste righe, ed in particolare la comprensione del passaggio dove si parla di “distrust of markets”, ovvero di “sfiducia nei mercati finanziari”.

La litania di “record di Borsa”, negli ultimi quattro anni, ha lasciato molti soddisfatti, ma allo stesso tempo ha suscitato in molti altri diffidenza e sfiducia: ed infatti, come vedete tutti, la direzione alle Borse oggi la danno i meno informati, i principianti, quello che chiedono “cosa è lo S&P 500 ma che al tempo stesso sono in grado di create un momento di terrore (persino per Yellen) facendo salire Gamestop.

La ricostruzione di una credibilità, per i mercati finanziari di tutto il Mondo, risulterà essere un primario imperativo già nel 2021, e poi nel decennio seguente.

In parallelo, dovrà essere ricostruita anche la credibilità delle Banche Centrali.,

Da queste due necessiità, deriveranno profondi cambiamenti per ognuno di noi investitori.

Congressional hearings lack stateliness in the virtual realm. The pomposity is starker without the grandiose backdrop of the Capitol Building, while technical snafus and amusing unmuted asides can trivialise any subject.

But they can still produce understated drama, as the recent hearing over January’s stock market tumult showed. On February 18, the House of Representatives’ financial services committee grappled with the outlandish GameStop saga. It looked at how the video games retailer suddenly became a battleground in a titanic tussle between a bunch of hedge funds betting against it and a horde of aggressive retail traders loosely organised on a spicy Reddit forum.

The online brokerage Robinhood emerged as the hearing’s main target, with its co-founder Vlad Tenev peppered with questions and criticisms over its decision to restrict trading in GameStop at the peak of the turmoil. Although forced into doing so for regulatory reasons, many Reddit traders suspected that it was quietly doing the bidding of Wall Street. However, the unstated defendant at the virtual trial was the integrity of America’s financial markets. Despite several participants paying lip service to them being the “envy of the world”, it appears that an increasing number of Americans think markets are somehow “rigged”. To them, GameStop was not just a stock market gamble but a rebellion. “I don't think of my purchase as an investment, but as putting my own skin in the game as a fuck you against a rigged system,” a user called One_Guy_One_Jar said on Reddit. Another user ILikeCatsAndPlants posted: “This isn’t an investment for ourselves, it’s an investment in breaking the parasite class.” Setting aside bigger and thornier questions about the fairness of the broader economic system — or the integrity of the finance industry as a whole — is the US stock market really “rigged”, whatever that may mean? Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, a financial reform advocacy group, is in no doubt about the answer. “Anyone who says this system isn’t rigged isn’t being honest,” he argues. “We have an incredibly fragmented market system with layers of created complexity that serves no purpose other than to conceal the wealth extraction that the system now serves.”

To many in finance, the often amorphous vitriol — and the conspiracy theories it often nurtures — is baffling, frustrating and worrying. They say the complex US market ecosystem is mostly a product of its messy evolution, inertia, myriad often conflicting vested interests and the remorseless march of technology. Maureen O’Hara, a finance professor at Cornell, expert on stock market microstructure and an author of a book on Wall Street ethics, cautiously agrees. Although markets have always been an inhospitable environment for amateurs, by almost every measure American equities are more transparent, cheaper to trade or invest in, and better-policed than ever before, she argues.

Far from perfect, of course, but not the cesspit of dodgy dealings that many think. O’Hara sees the current distrust of markets as the result of myriad toxic factors, such as low levels of financial literacy; uniformly malignant depictions in popular culture; and the long shadow of the financial crisis and the feeble crackdown on malfeasance in its wake. The fact many ordinary Americans have no savings in the stock market and are unable to reap its benefits doesn’t help.

Should a “fair” market mean that ordinary, individual investors have the same chances to succeed as amply-resourced investment companies stuffed with professionals that have dedicated their entire lives to trading and investing? That would be like saying a pub football team should be able to compete with a Premier League side. What matters is that the rules of the game are the same for all sides. And this may be a controversial view, but it is hard to see concrete, meaningful and malignant examples of where they are not. But critics and defenders of the current market ecosystem agree on one thing: the vibrancy of the financial system depends on people’s willing faith and participation.

The current distrust in markets is now so entrenched and profound it arguably represents a subtle, insidious threat to its overall health. Gary Gensler is on course to be confirmed as the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He faces a mammoth inbox. Yet the biggest overarching challenge he will face will be to restore some of the credibility of US financial markets among ordinary Americans. Drastic actions may be necessary. Are markets really rigged? What could or should be done to improve their credibility?