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Monthly Archives: April 2016

Is it Really All About Oil?

oil&stocks levels

A large number of stories in the financial press this year have revolved around the relationship between equity prices and oil.  In fact some commentators have focused on a recovering oil price as the key lynchpin for rising equity prices.

As an example, the Wall Street Journal published an article this year “Oil, Stocks at Tightest Correlation in 26 Years”. Many other publications and strategists have written pieces this year noting the close relationship between oil prices and equity index performance.

The human mind is conditioned to look for patterns and in the tumult of early 2016 the oil market meltdown started playing a leading role in explanations of why global equity markets were under stress.  But as any econometrics professor will say “correlation is not causation“.

In this note we look at the sensitivity of asset class returns to changes in the price of oil.  We take a risk management perspective and find that while oil price sensitivity is significant when analyzing one-on-one relationships, the effect is close to zero and statistically insignificant in a multivariate context.

Eq Beta to OilWhat you see is not always what you get.  We conclude that rising oil prices have little long-term significance for broad equity market prospects and that a rising oil price is more of a reflection of supply curtailment efforts.

 

The key lesson to us from our analysis is that commonly heard explanations for asset return drivers are often incomplete and in some cases highly misleading.

Every market environment has its own context and no single factor in isolation will ever be able to fully explain the complexities of market behavior.  Even in hindsight it is often hard to pin down a story that holds up to serious scrutiny.

Best to stay humble and realize that over shorter time periods capital markets will always be subject to a lot of noise of no material significance to long-term investors.

Click here to download the report: Is It All About Oil

Sincerely,

Eric J. Weigel
Managing Partner and Founder of Global Focus Capital LLC

eweigel@gf-cap.com

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Low Volatility – One Factor or Several?

park-bench-waterfall-1202609-639x427Once a month in our Equity Observer  publication we share our analysis of what stock selection factors are working.  This year the best performing factor in our global sample is “low volatility”.

The issue of what constitutes a factor will be endlessly debated, but while “low vol” does not quite rank up there among academics with the original Fama-French-Carhart variables (market, size, value, momentum) there is nevertheless a growing investor demand for lower volatility strategies.

The growing demand for “low vol” strategies does not seem entirely driven by the performance of these strategies relative to core benchmarks.  For example over the 2015-2013 period the S&P Low Volatility Index under-performed the S&P 500 core index by 3.4% annualized.  Yet demand for these strategies appears to have grown as manifested by the large number of new ETF’s launches in this space.

Investors seem particularly interested in the capital preservation characteristics of “low vol” strategies and appear willing to sacrifice returns during the good times in return for less pronounced equity market downdrafts.

Low volatility strategies seem here to stay.  Given their market beating returns thus far in 2016 it is reasonable to expect growing interest.  We therefore analyze our global sample of 13,000 stocks to ascertain the basic characteristics of low volatility stocks. Vol_decile

Stocks in the lowest volatility decile have an average return volatility of 20%

Higher volatility stocks exhibit low levels of market sensitivity (beta)

During periods of equity market stress ‘low vol” strategies should out-perform broad market indices

The lowest volatility decile enjoys the highest current yields while the “high vol” names in Decile 10 barely register for income

Lower volatility stocks have lost their historical valuation advantages.  The growing demand for ‘low vol” and its close cousin dividend income have eroded the typically lower valuations seen in lower volatility sectors and stocks.

low vol returnsEven after adjusting for sector and region/country effects we observe a strong monotonic relationship in YTD returns across volatility deciles.

The lowest volatility stocks (Decile 1) have had the highest 2016 returns while the highest volatility stocks have shown the greatest losses.

 

Our general conclusion is that “low volatility” strategies play a useful role for investors looking to provide short-term downward protection in their equity portfolios.  However, we think of “low vol” as part of a package of stock attributes designed to lessen market exposure during periods of equity market stress.  These strategies along with lower betas, higher yields and exposure to more stable sectors should exhibit lower levels of downside capture.

Investors worried about equity market downturns should not view these strategies as a substitute for properly assessing and managing the risk of their overall portfolios.

Click here to download the report: Low Volatility – One Factor or Several?

Sincerely,

Eric J. Weigel
Managing Partner and Founder of Global Focus Capital LLC

eweigel@gf-cap.com

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Less Bunny, More of a Rocky Balboa Market!

Rocky Balboa View

Rocky Balboa View

The start of the year felt like a Rocky Balboa fight.  Risky assets were absolutely pummeled during the first 6 weeks of the year and were down for the count.

Most investors were taken by surprise by the strength of the first punch and the retail section started emptying out early. White towels were being thrown about but out of nowhere equity markets started gathering strength.

Just like a fighter on the ropes biding time equity markets started little by little chipping away. By the end of February stocks had stabilized and the first real signs of a competitive fight emerged during the first week of March.  The point count had evened out and by the end of the month the count had swung around in many categories. At the end of Q1 world equity markets were essentially flat but there were surprises galore.

The biggest surprise by far this year has been the re-emergence of Emerging Market Equities.  The asset class had been left for dead after many years of disappointing returns, but this year the asset class is punching above its weight – already up 4.4% (MSCI EM).

Q1 2016

Q1 2016

EM equities have vastly out-performed developed markets especially those in Asia and Europe.  A 9% gap has developed between developed and emerging international stocks (MSCI EAFE).

Despite the poor showing of the average Chinese stock how is it possible that EM equities as a whole are up for the year? No doubt investors are somewhat stunned by the YTD eye-popping returns to resource-oriented markets such as Brazil and Russia.

In our sample of global equities the average Brazilian stock is up over 24% while the average Russian equity is up about 16%.  South Africa, another major EM market, punches in at an average stock return of close to 14%.   Other emerging markets with average YTD returns exceeding 10% include Indonesia, Turkey, Chile and Malaysia.

Commodity markets have no doubt recovered, but is the strong performance of EM simply due to a recovering commodity market? 

Precious metals have done very well this year with gold up 15% and silver up 9%.  While $20 oil is still mentioned from time to time, energy markets have had a tenuous recovery but still show losses close to 10% for the year.  Smaller components of commodity indices such as grains, livestock and industrial metals are all only slightly above water this year. Our conclusion is that there is more to the re-emergence of EM equity markets than simply a direct benefit from recovering commodity markets.

While broad based equity indices have gyrated at times like a punch drunk Rocky Balboa behind the scenes we have been witnessing a strong rotation toward out of favor sectors such as Energy, Materials, Utilities and Telecom.  Momentum sectors of the past few years such as Health Care and Technology have receded.

The country and sector performance numbers indicate to us that global investors have been quietly changing their stripes.  Glamour sectors and equity markets with the best post-Financial Crisis performance are being re-priced.

2016 q1 factor perfPart of this shift toward more value-sensitive sectors and regions may be driven by a desire to better protect the downside and capture yield in what most strategists would agree is a low capital market return environment.

We perceive that investors are changing their stripes.  Valuation levels are being more carefully examined.  Investors are also showing a desire for lower risk both from a return as well as financial statement perspective. Momentum strategies have lost their punch as have sell-side analyst recommendations.

Many of the characteristics typically associated with larger capitalization companies such as lower volatility, higher yields, stock buybacks and higher levels of profitability seem to be gaining favor among global equity investors.

We see global markets being more similar to Rocky Balboa – at times exhausted and bloodied but despite great hardships triumphant in the end.  For the foreseeable future we see ourselves living in a risk on/off world with investor preferences increasingly tilted toward capital preservation strategies.

Click here to download the report: Less Bunny, More of a Rocky Balboa Market

Sincerely,

Eric J. Weigel
Managing Partner and Founder of Global Focus Capital LLC

eweigel@gf-cap.com

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