Il gregge che procede senza sollevare lo sguardo

Abbiamo più e più volte spiegato, con dettaglio, anche qui nel Blog, che esporre il proprio portafoglio, e quindi i propri soldi ed il proprio di risparmio, al rischio di mercato, comperando tutto ad occhi chiusi, senza rendersi conto del rischio di un ribasso dei mercati, non è una strategia di investimento, ma è invece una pericolosa ingenuità.

Guidati dai promotori finanziari delle Reti di vendita, che si fanno chiamare wealth managers ma non sono managers (sono solo venditori, non decidono nulla) una buona percentuale di investitori italiano oggi si trova proprio in questa situazione: “se i mercati salgono, tu guadagni e noi guadagniamo; se i mercati invece scendono, tu perdi i tuoi soldi, e non guadagniamo esattamente lo stesso”.

Questa situazione spiega perché la maggioranza degli investitori finali ha accolto con soddisfazione il recupero delle Borse dell’ultima settimana: e non fa nulla che la guerra in Ucraina è ancora in corso, e non fa nulla che salgono i tassi ufficiali di interesse, e non fa nulla che l’epidemia di COVID sta risalendo. Per questa categoria di investitori, la realtà non conta (più), l’importante è solo che la Borsa salga (anche se manca un motivo).

Cosa spiega questo atteggiamento, che è ai limiti della isteria collettiva? Prova a spiegarlo qui sotto un articolo del Financial Times, che vi proponiamo di leggere.

In particolare, vi segnaliamo la frase dove si parla di “agganciarsi ad un indice di mercato e poi auto-proclamarsi un genio”: è una frase che spiega più di molte altre, e che poi però prosegue dicendo “è una fase in via di esaurimento, il gioco sta cambiando”.

Per questa ragione, è utile leggere questo articolo, ed è utile riflettere su questo fenomeno proprio oggi. Il momento, per i mercati e quindi per tutti noi investitori, era e rimane delicatissimo: sicuramente per gli investitori la situazione è cambiata, rispetto agli anni 2020 e 2021, e sicuramente non è una buona idea “aspettare e vedere quello che succede”.

Per ogni investitore, era e rimane decisivo decidere PRIMA.

Three horsemen of the apocalypse have arrived: war in Europe, pestilence in Asia and interest rate rises in the US.

The market response: shrug and keep on buying the risky stuff. Almost unbelievably, European stocks have now fully recovered from the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Stoxx 600 index dropped more than 10 per cent from immediately before the invasion in late February to the low point on March 7. It is now right back where it started, after the biggest weekly rally since late 2020. Roughly the same goes for Germany’s Dax, which dropped even more heavily and is now close to the starting point again.

This is despite an overwhelming consensus that the EU economy will suffer, possibly greatly, from the war next door, largely through the impact of painfully high energy prices. Goldman Sachs, for one, has chopped its growth forecast for the year from close to 4 per cent before the war, to 2.5 per cent now. But it seems the developing narrative that the Ukraine war will foster greater EU cohesion and, crucially, heavier government spending on defence, is winning the day.

In Asia, this week brought a rather depressing reminder that Covid-19 is not over. On Monday, Chinese stocks in Hong Kong had their worst day since the global financial crisis, with a more than 7 per cent drop after authorities announced a six-day lockdown in Shenzhen to counter another coronavirus outbreak. Analysts at ANZ calculated that just a one-week shutdown of the region could lop as much as 0.8 percentage points off growth for the year. Clearly, the path back to well-functioning global supply chains will not be smooth.

Making matters worse, investors are fretting that at some point soon, China will have to pick a side more clearly over the conflict in Ukraine. “There’s a worry that China will somehow get itself embroiled in sanctions,” says Ron Temple, head of US equities and co-head of multi-asset at Lazard Asset Management. Again, though, fast-forward to the end of the week and China’s stock markets are back in business after Liu He, the Chinese president’s closest economic adviser, promised measures to boost the economy, along with unspecified “policies that are favourable to the market”. Details were not immediately forthcoming, but it does not matter — investors can spot a good dollop of extra monetary or fiscal stimulus from 50 paces.

And, of course, the US Federal Reserve finally did it. It raised interest rates for the first time since 2018, with a quarter-point increase that is likely to be just the first of several through the course of this year. The dreaded end of the monetary stimulus has hung over riskier assets for months. In the end, though, the S&P 500 index shot more than 2 per cent higher on Fed day and just kept on going from there. The Nasdaq Composite, stuffed with precisely the high-tech stocks that are considered most vulnerable to tighter monetary policy, has had its best week in a year. Sure, it is down by nearly 13 per cent so far in 2022, and Goldman Sachs’ index of unprofitable tech stocks is still down around 60 per cent this year. But a 6.5 per cent gain in the Nasdaq in a week is not to be sniffed at. “I still think some of the speculative tech stocks in the US are overvalued,” says Lazard’s Temple. “But there’s still a strong case for US equities. Maybe for the next few years, we grow the earnings into the valuations.”

The game has changed; tracking indices higher and calling yourself a genius is a trick that has worn thin. Investors “overdosed” on clinging to broad stock market indices in recent years, says Michael Kelly, global head of multi-asset at PineBridge Investments. Putting blunt rate rises to one side, the Fed’s process of chopping back the $9tn balance sheet it has run up to provide stimulus to the financial system will be tricky for investors to navigate, he notes. “It’s very hard for the markets to front run it,” he says. “I don’t believe the ‘priced in’ story. I don’t believe it can be priced in.” Exploiting niches rather than following the herd will be important from here, he says. Still, investors clearly are determined to pick out the positives. In a note this week, Credit Suisse’s investment committee said that following an ad hoc meeting, it had decided to flip to an overweight position in equities. The benign reaction to the Fed rate rise suggests “markets have had enough time to digest the changed economic outlook”, it said. “Glimmers of hope” over a ceasefire in Ukraine have emerged, it added. And a pullback in commodity prices suggests the Russian shock could “allow the global economy, including Europe, to stay on a solid growth path”.

Analysts at UBS Global Wealth Management said the pick-up in US stocks since the Fed’s meeting shows “how rapidly markets can turn if investor perception of geopolitical risks changes”. “It also reinforces our view that simply selling risk assets is not the best response to the war in Ukraine,” they said. In short: markets are all about how fears match up to reality, and everything could have been worse. We should hope that is not tempting fate.

Nell’articolo qui sopra, si legge che secondo la grande banca internazionale UBS “è sbagliato reagire alla crisi dell’Ucraina vendendo gli asset rischiosi in portafoglio”: si tratta di una frase che, ad un esame superficiale, sembra semplicemente una frase di buon senso, e che invece ad una lettura più attenta si rivela per ciò che è, ovvero un ennesimo tentativo di manipolare l’investitore finale, portandolo ad agire contro i propri interessi.

Questo perché, con quella frase (che poi ritrovate anche nelle frasi dei promotori finanziari in Italia, come leggete qui sotto) si vuole fare intendere all’investitore che i mercati sono volatili a causa di un unico fattore di incertezza, che sarebbe secondo questa lettura il conflitto in Ucraina.

Le cose non stanno assolutamente in questo modo. Recce’d ne ha scritto ogni mattina ai propri Clienti in The Morning Brief, e poi ne ha scritto anche in questo Blog, e più di una volta, nelle ultime quattro settimane.

A differenza di chi vende UCITS e Fondi Comuni, Recce’d non ha alcun interesse nel “tenervi investiti sui prodotti finanziari”, se questi prodotti finanziari per voi non hanno alcuna prospettiva di guadagno nei prossimi anni.

Il nostro lavoro è del tutto diverso: noi non dobbiamo piazzare nei portafogli degli investitori Fondi Comuni di investimento e polizze assicurative, bensì dobbiamo dire ai Clienti su che cosa investire per guadagnare ragionevolmente rischiando in modo ragionevole, quando esistono opportunità per farlo sui mercati.

Come detto, a proposito dell’attualità dei mercati, e a proposito del fatto che l’Ucraina oggi NON è il fattore principale, NON è il fattore determinante per le performances dei mercati finanziari internazionali, noi di Recce’d abbiamo scritto, e più di una volta, in questo Blog nel 2022.

Per questo, e quindi per non ripeterci, abbiamo selezionato il migliore tra i commenti apparsi nell’ultima settimana, che vi mettiamo a disposizione qui di seguito. la lettura dell’articolo vi potrà essere utili a comprendere quali sono le tre principali implicazioni per l’economia internazionale dei fatti di febbraio e marzo 2022.

Una analisi un po’ meno semplicistica, un po’ meno grossolana, ed un po’ più utile di quelle che ascoltate oggi dai promotori Finanziari e dai capi delle Reti che li arruolano.

Una analisi che quindi vi può essere utile, per non ragionare come la massa e di non fare la medesima fine che farà tutto il grande gregge che si marcia a testa bassa verso il proprio destino seguendo il bastone del pastore, anziché alzare la testa e guardare all’orizzonte.

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

Due to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is being disconnected from the global system, one economic and financial wire after another. This will devastate the economy, once the world’s 11th largest and still a G20 member. Together with a crippled financial system, it will result in a depression undermining the wellbeing of generations of Russians.

What’s happening economically and financially in Russia and Ukraine won’t stay there. In addition to the tragic forced migration of millions of Ukrainians, there are consequences for the global economy and markets, both immediately and in the longer term. By the time the spillovers and spillbacks have made their way through the world, we will have faced some of the toughest economic and financial challenges of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

But there is one important difference: they will all have materialised at the same time. Russia’s vulnerability to the west’s sanctions is visible in the collapse of its currency, queues outside banks, goods shortages, multiplying financial restrictions and so on. The resulting sharp contraction in gross domestic product will take years to reverse and will necessitate a costly transformation of how the economy operates internally and interacts externally.

The major implications for the rest of the world, while uneven across and within countries, are a combination of challenges we’ve seen before.

Due to disruptions in the availability of commodities from both Ukraine and Russia, as well as renewed supply chain breakdowns, the world faces big inflation in costs reminiscent of the oil shock of the 1970s. Also similar to the 1970s, the US Federal Reserve, the world’s most powerful central bank, is already dealing with self-inflicted damage to its inflation-fighting credibility. With that comes the likelihood of de-anchored inflationary expectations, the absence of good monetary policy options, and a stark choice for the Fed between enabling above-target inflation well into 2023 or pushing the economy into recession.

Like the 1980s, mounting payments arrears will be a feature of emerging markets. This will start with Russia and Ukraine, albeit for different reasons. Increasingly, Russia will be both unwilling and unable to pay western bond creditors, banks and suppliers. In sharp contrast, Ukraine will attract considerable international financial assistance — but this will increasingly be conditional on the private sector sharing some of the funding burden by agreeing to a reduction in contractual claims on the country’s public sector. This mix of default and restructuring is likely to spread to other emerging economies, including some particularly fragile commodity importers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Already, they are feeling the pain of elevated import prices, a stronger dollar, and higher borrowing costs.

Like the 1990s, when a surge in market yields caught many by surprise, we should also expect more financial market volatility. Investors are slowly recognising that the “buy-the-dip” strategy for investing has been undermined. That approach had proved very profitable when supported by massive and predictable injections of liquidity by central banks. But it is now facing headwinds, with US monetary policymakers having no good policy alternatives. This comes when the price of many assets is significantly decoupled from fundamentals by the many years of central bank interventions.

Unlike the 1990s, however, investors should not expect a quick normalisation of Russia’s relationship with international capital markets and, with that, a recovery in its debt securities. This time will be messier and lengthier.

All this has three main implications for the global economy. Stagflation has gone from being a risk scenario to a baseline one. Recession is now the risk scenario. And there will be significant dispersion in individual baseline outcomes, ranging from a depression in Russia to a recession in the eurozone and stagflation in the US. While differentiation will also be visible in market performance, this will come after a period of contagion for some as global financial conditions tighten.

The major risk scenario for markets has changed, too — potentially with unsettling volatility and market malfunction. It is a risk that, unlike in 2008-09, is of less relevance to banks and, therefore, the payments and settlement system. That’s the good news. But its morphing and migration to the non-bank sector still poses blowback risks for the real economy.