FactSet StreetAccount Summary – US Weekly Recap: Dow +0.45%, S&P +0.31%, Nasdaq +0.89%, Russell 2000 +0.73%
SENTIMENT WATCH
Value of the global art market hits record €51bn in 2014
When Pablo Picasso’s “Women of Algiers (Version O)†fetched $179.4m at Christie’s on Monday it became the most expensive artwork to be sold at auction.
In the same sale, Alberto Giacometti’s life-sized sculpture “Pointing Man†sold for $141.3m making it the most expensive sculpture sold at auction.
(…) the total value of the global art market surpassed €51bn in 2014, a 7 per cent increase on the previous year and its highest ever level, according to estimates in the 2015 Art Market Report published by the European Fine Art Foundation. Lots sold for more than €1m accounted for 48 per cent of the value of the fine art market. (…)
The volume of sales also rose 6 per cent in 2014, with 39m works sold. This, however, was less than the peak reached in 2007. About 1,530 lots worth more than €1m were sold at auction, a rise of more than 16 per cent on 2013. (…)
But Does Picasso Sale Signal a Top for Stocks?
(…) Whether we’re in a bubble or even an overvalued market is a worthy debate. But these examples are not proof of overvaluation or really much of anything else. They are anecdotal observations, one-off transactions in a ludicrously small market dominated by a ludicrously wealthy clientele. Given the choice between quantifiable data or anecdotal tidbits, you should always choose the data. So no, these sales are not proof of anything other than the simple truth that some people have very large bank accounts that they are unable to exhaust through normal profligacy or by paying insane prices for a handful of unique objects of art.
There are many ways to understand why these stunning nine-figure transactions are not investment-sentiment indicators.
Anecdotes can tell you about a small subset of investors or even individuals, but they don’t measure the crowd. This is important, because sentiment is a yardstick of the crowd’s emotional state. Collectively, what are the masses thinking, saying and most importantly doing with their money? There are many ways to measure sentiment, and the best of these avoid anecdotes.
Some traders rely on sentiment surveys, especially the American Association of Individual Investors’ bull-bear readings. I have yet to find a whole lot of value in this metric aside from those rare times when the readings are at extremes. Survey responses tend to swing wildly in response to what just happened, and they typically lag behind market cycles.
If you are going to use AAII survey data, I prefer the asset allocation survey. During the past 23 years, individual investors on average have held a portfolio made up of 60 percent stocks. As of April, stocks and stock mutual funds made up 67.9 percent of individual portfolios, according to AAII. That is a somewhat higher than the average, but below the extremes seen in the past. In 1999-2000, equity holdings were 17 percent higher than the mean, while in 2005-07 they were 10 percent more.
There are lots of other ways to measure sentiment: the VIX (sometimes known as the fear index), mutual-fund flows, put-call ratios, the Arms Index (a technical measure of advancing and declining shares), the percentage of stocks reaching new highs and lows, the percentage of New York Stock Exchange shares trading below their (choose one) 50- or 200-day moving averages and so forth. For the most part, these kinds of sentiment readings tend to be quite noisy while offering no definitive insight much of the time.
Back to the artwork: There are more than 7 billion people in the world. There are almost 320 million people in the U.S. How many folks can afford to spend almost $200 million on a Picasso or $150 million on a Giacometti? There are about 2,300 billionaires in the world. That pretty much defines the size of the market for these sorts of collectibles.
That means these record-breaking art auctions may say something about the rarefied world occupied by the super-rich, but their informational value is of little importance to market sentiment. So stay calm and don’t panic just yet.
Maybe.
But let’s consider other investor sentiment gauges, courtesy of Short Side of Long:
Retail investors currently hold least amount of cash since 2000
Households equity exposure remains 2nd highest since WW2
Newsletter writers & finance advisors are extremely complacent
Global fund managers continue to be highly overweight equities
Not much fire power left…
Epsilon Theory: More Probable Than Not
The only thing that I ask from this group today and the American people is to judge me from this day forward. That’s all I can ask for.
– Alex Rodriguez press conference, February 17, 2009, regarding his steroid use from 2001 – 2003.
I’m ready to put this chapter behind me and play some ball.
– Alex Rodriguez “apology†letter, February 17, 2015, regarding his steroid use from 2010 – 2012.
Brady: I would never do something that was outside of the rules of play. I would never have someone do something that I thought was outside the rules.
Reporter: So you never knowingly played with a football that was under 12.5 pounds?
Brady: No.
– Tom Brady press conference, January 22, 2015.
Now, we all know that air pressure is a function of the atmospheric conditions. If there is activity in the ball relative to the rubbing process I think that explains why when we gave them to the official and the officials put them at let’s say 12.5 … once the ball reached its equilibrium state it’s probably closer to 11.5.
– noted physicist and football coach Bill Belichick, January 24, 2015.
That is an allegation [FOMC quashing their own General Counsel’s investigation of leaks] that I don’t believe has any basis in fact. I’m not going to go into any detail but I don’t know where that piece of information could possibly have come from.
– Janet Yellen press conference, March 18, 2015.
The Board’s Inspector General and the Department of Justice are in the midst of an investigation into this matter [FOMC leaks to journalists and market consultants]. We are cooperating fully with them and look forward to the results of their investigation. … I had one meeting with Ms. Regina Schleiger of Medley Global Advisors during the period covered by the staff review. As Vice Chair of the Board, I met with Ms. Schleiger on June 11, 2012, to hear her perspectives on international developments.
– Janet Yellen letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling, May 4, 2015.
Mr. Bernanke said that he was sensitive to the public’s anxieties about the “revolving door†between Wall Street and Washington and chose to go to Citadel, in part, because “it is not regulated by the Federal Reserve and I won’t be doing any lobbying of any sort.†He added that he had been recruited by banks but declined their offers. “I wanted to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest,†he said. “I ruled out any firm that was regulated by the Federal Reserve.â€
– New York Times, April 16, 2015.
Senator: Fletcher, there’s an old saying, to the victors belong the spoils.
Fletcher: There’s another old saying, Senator. Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.
– “The Outlaw Josey Wales†(1976)
(…) I’ve inherited a lot of my father’s traits, and one of them is his intolerance for this mendacity of language, this intentional failure to call things by their proper names, this linguistic exercise in self-puffery and cover-up. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who shares this peculiar sensitivity, mendacity of language has never been more rampant in all of our social worlds, from sports to politics to markets.
With the advent of always-on mass media that projects the illusion of a one-to-one personal connection with cartoons like “Tom Brady†and “Jim Cramer†– corporate entities that are connected with but distinct from human beings like Tom Brady and Jim Cramer – language intentionally designed to influence rather than inform is now ubiquitous in the business of sports and politics and markets Why? Because it works. It delays sanctions until after you play in the Super Bowl, until after you sign a quarter of a billion dollar contract. It deflects attention until after your term in office is over, until after you cash in with a book deal and hedge fund consultancy.
To use the ponderous, legally parsed language of the NFL’s Wells Report on “deflate-gateâ€, language which I think wonderfully encapsulates the pinched spirit of our age, here are four things that I believe are “more probable than notâ€:
1) Alex Rodriguez has routinely used steroids and PED’s of various stripes since he was a sophomore in high school.
2) Tom Brady has routinely bribed equipment managers with autographed jerseys and new shoes in order to receive footballs deflated well below what he knew was the legal limit.
3) Janet Yellen has routinely leaked market-moving information to favored private sector conduits, and has also sought to quash internal investigations of same.
4) Ben Bernanke is for sale to the highest bidder.
But here’s the thing. I’m not that worked up about ANY of these issues. Yes, A-Rod has been juicing for 25 years, and Tom Terrific breaks the rules he thinks he can get away with breaking. Okay. Them and about 5,000 other professional athletes. Janet Yellen, the prime author of Fed “communication policy†(the intentional use of words to influence market expectations), leaks her viewpoint as part of that communication policy and then tries to kill an internal investigation. Okay. Her and every other senior politician and bureaucrat in the history of human civilization. As for Bernanke … a former President of the United States and the leading candidate to be the next President of the United States have personally received more than $100 million in “donations†from mega-corporations and foreign governments, and I’m supposed to be outraged about Ben Bernanke cashing a big check from Ken Griffin?
What I AM worked up about, though, is the mendacity … the utter lack of character and authenticity … on full display in ALL of these cases. All of these cases and so many, many more.
You want to go work for Citadel? Fine, go work for Citadel. But OWN IT. Don’t insult my … I’m not even going to say intelligence, because it’s not an assault on intelligence we’re talking about here … don’t insult my 50 years of life as a reasonably self-aware human being by claiming that you’re taking the high road here by working for Citadel instead of, say, JP Morgan. I mean, the notion that access to the Fed’s regulatory authority over big banks is somehow the defining characteristic of why Ben Bernanke is a sought-after commodity, or that any public outrage here is clearly misplaced because, after all, he won’t be a – gasp! – bank lobbyist, per se … it’s all just horrifically insulting to anyone with the common sense to know that the sky is blue, that 2 + 2 = 4, and that you don’t meaningfully change the air pressure in footballs by rubbing them vigorously. It’s mendacity and inauthenticity in the first degree.
You want to embark on a conscious policy of manipulating market expectations (yes, manipulating is a strong word, but it’s exactly accurate) by planting a carefully constructed Narrative with journalists like Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal and consultants like Regina Schleiger at Medley, journalists and consultants who you know will be influential precisely because they are trumpeting their exclusive access to you? Fine. I totally get it. Once you’ve hit zero on short rates and pushed your balance sheet up over $4 trillion in LSAP’s, jawboning is the only bullet you’ve got left in the gun. But OWN IT. Don’t tell me that you’re meeting with Regina Schleiger at Medley because you want to hear HER perspectives on monetary policy! I’m sure that Ms. Schleiger is a very smart person. I’m sure that she is an insightful observer of the international economic scene. But – and I’m trying to say this in the kindest possible way – there’s not 1 in 100,000 investors who even knows who Ms. Schleiger is, and fewer still who would be willing to pay money or time to hear her personal opinion about the proper course of monetary policy. The exception, we are told, is the Chair of the Federal Reserve, in many respects the most powerful person on the planet … she, of course, is terribly keen to hear Ms. Schleiger’s views on international economics.
And yes, I know that Fed governors have these consultant meetings all the time. I know that their guests do most of the talking. But I also know, because I’ve done it, that professional investors and allocators are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to consultants like Medley, solely to glean a scrap of insight as to what the Fed is thinking, solely to be a willing host of the Narrative virus that the Fed is trying to spread. More to the point, Janet Yellen knows it, too, which is why she has these meetings. The act itself is not a horrible thing … not for A-Rod, not for Brady, not for Yellen, and not for Bernanke. It’s not a crime, or at least not a crime that will shame your children or your fan base. Certainly it’s a difficult and unpleasant thing when you’re revealed, because now you’ve got to deal with the Roger Goodell’s and the Bud Selig’s and the Jeb Hensarling’s and the Elizabeth Warren’s of the world – petty tyrants, all – but you knew there was this chance when you made the decision to break the rules, (or the “rules†in Bernanke’s and 2009 A-Rod’s case). But don’t turn a difficult situation into a personal capitulation to mendacity. Far better to own it.
Believe it or not, I’m not just venting my spleen at the outrageous displays of mendacity that assault us at every turn. I think that there’s an enormous political opportunity today (and I mean political in the broadest sense of the word, a sense that clearly includes the Fed, and arguably includes the NFL and MLB) to embrace authenticity, even if you are authentically an unlikable or – to use the insult du jour – a “polarizing†person. Not only am I convinced that we are each more likely to be successful in our chosen field when acting authentically (don’t you think that if Tiger Woods had embraced his authentically heel-ish nature in 2009, grown a goatee and moved to a casino suite in Vegas, that he’d still be winning majors today?), but also specifically within the chosen field of politics I think there is such a hunger for authenticity that ANY display of honest conviction when confronted with adversity, even if the adversity is well-deserved for breaking a rule, quickly becomes an enormous asset. Maybe this will turn out to be a more interesting election in 2016 than we think. Then again, with the vast campaign coffers already accumulated by Clinton™ and Bush™, two profoundly inauthentic corporate entities, maybe not.
Sigh. I know I’m not going to change anything by writing about this stuff, any more than my father was going to change a sports commentator’s patter by yelling at the TV. Like my father, though, I just can’t help myself. It’s never easy to be authentic. It’s never easy to call things by their proper names. It’s never easy to own it. But here in the Golden Age of the Central Banker, it’s never been more important. Or more politically savvy.
The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car After 1.7 million miles we’ve learned a lot — not just about our system but how humans drive, too.
1 thought on “BEARNOBULL’S WEEKENDER”
Regarding PED’s and ARod (and others), Dan Patrick from Football Night In America on NBC has said a baseball player told him there is a concoction that runs $80 that players take that will allow them to pass any drug test given to them. Is there any wonder ARod has 9-home runs already?
Whether it was Lasse Viren at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics, the 1976 East German Women’s Olympic Swim Team, or any level of football since the 1970’s, people who know sports have seen the technology of chemistry remain ahead of the tools utilized by those who police their various sports. Cheating is very old news, and the shock and surprise of those who are in disbelief of what has transpired shows how willing people are to believe the happy narrative, no matter how implausible.
Sports Illustrated was onto much of the cheating decades before the mainstream press, but there is more money to be made in deceit and coloring outside the lines than there is by playing by the rules, so the general public remained almost purposefully naive.
After his record tying 5th Tour deFrance win in 2003, Lance Armstrong was staying in a suite one floor above mine in a hotel while doing some media interviews. I was so sickened to be so close to this scumbag of a human doping machine that I nearly asked to be moved to a different part of the hotel. Luckily, he checked out the next day.
To make a long story short, for the past near half century, athletes have been and will continue to remain ahead of those who police their sports’ respective doping laws. Logically, those who perform at the highest levels in their sport have little right to the benefit of the doubt when it comes to doping suspicion.
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