Investing for Sustainable Gains

The last two weeks of unemployment claims data have shown not only the usual seasonal lull in new claims, but also shown a trend downward.  We are still far from a healthy employment market.  If the current downward trend continues at the current rate, we might expect a healthy employment market, with meaningful jobs growth, by the end of the year.  (This is an extrapolation of the current trend in the “Claims Oscillator” on the chart below.)  On the other hand, with Congressional stimulus and Federal Reserve credit injections waning, banks still crippled, and few strong growth industries…

I saw some comments over on CalculatedRisk which compel me to explain how the Federal Reserve actually works in reality. It is different from the Fed’s self-generated mythology - and also from the skeptics’ mythology.

The Fed will have you believe that they “set interest rates”.  The skeptics will say no, the market sets rates, and the Fed merely follows and claims victory.

Neither is true, and yet both are true.  As usual, look not at what they say, watch what they do, and follow the money!  What does the Federal Reserve actually do?  They buy and sell debt, and they talk a lot.  But it is by means of the first activity that the Federal Reserve is able to manipulate the total amount of credit (what we now use as “money”) that is available in the economy. It does this by expanding or contracting its “balance sheet”.  For every security stored inside the Fed’s balance sheet … and paying interest to the Treasury … after the Fed takes its cut … someone else has a large amount of credit to spend on something.  The Fed creates credit “ex nihilo” - out of nothing.  A mighty power, which is why the Fed Chairman is frequently described as the most powerful man in the nation.

Those claiming that the Fed is a fictitious organization often point out that short term interest rates lead the Federal Reserve’s policy target rate. The market leads and then the Fed follows, right?  Well, the Fed does have to react when short term rates pressure the bounds of the policy target, because otherwise rates would go where the Fed doesn’t want them to go. But ask yourselves — how many folks spend thousands of hours each year trying to figure out where the Fed wants rates to go, and get there first? The market is doing the Fed’s bidding because that’s where the money is. What actually happens is that the Fed telegraphs to the market which way the rate is about to go — or the market has figured out where the Fed will be telegraphing, and has front-run them, which amounts to the same thing but yields more profit for the banksters.

Now, if the Fed can convince the market where it wants the market to go, and the market goes there, it’s a lot less work for the Fed.  And thus a lot less expensive. But there are times when the Fed has to take the market by the horns and implement massive adjustments.  This is part of what happened in 2008-2009. Sometimes the Fed dances with the market, and sometimes the Fed picks the market up bodily and shoves it into place…

But back to the standard operating procedure: the main tool is the policy press release issued at each Fed meeting, which typically reveals (in a few words) the Fed’s outlook for short-term rates. Secondary tools are the minutes released between the meetings, the “Beige Book” economic analysis, and also the public speeches which are frequently given by the various Fed members.  Each of these helps to set the market’s expectations of future policy.  Conversely, the market also communicates with the Fed, by way of current interest rate pressures (relative to the current Fed target rate) and prices in the rate futures markets.

Now, which is more powerful?  The market would always go where the Fed leads it, unless it believed the Fed were fully able to implement its targets.  On the one side, the Fed’s ability to drain credit from the market (by selling assets on its balance sheet and siphoning cash out of the system) is a potent, but not omnipotent, lever for raising interest rates.  By shrinking the supply of short-term credit, the Fed can fully offset private-sector increases in credit, and force short-term rates upwards.  This generally moves the long-term rates up as well — who wants to lend long when short rates are paying more, and less risky?  But sometimes the market is in full fraudulent bubble mode, in which case the Fed can force up short-term rates, but long-term lending supply doesn’t respond immediately, and rates fail to respond — as Greenspan’s “conundrum” showed in the 2004-2007 tightening cycle.

On the other side, by expanding the supply of short term credit, the Fed can fully offset just about any private-sector decrease in credit, and force rates downwards. And again, drops in short rates tend to result in drops in long rates, as yield-seeking borrowers are forced to make longer commitments (and thus take on more inflation risk).  This again can fail (or at least take a long time) when the market is in full panic mode, in which case the Fed can also force down long-term rates by purchasing long-term securities.  (But as Bernanke is now experiencing, even after buying up over $1 trillion in fraudulent mortgage securities and flooding the banks with enough cash to give nearly $3,000 to every man-woman-and-child legally in the country, the Fed can force short term rates to zero, and it can pull 30-year rates under 5%, but it still can’t make  creditworthy borrowers out of overindebted individuals and institutions, nor can it make others lend for 30 years in a climate bordering on hysteria over long-term fiscal/policy stability questions…)

So which is more powerful?  From 2004-2008 we saw the market bubble with low long-term rates, despite (belated) Fed efforts to raise rates.  In 2008-2009 we saw the market panic with a total credit freeze (infinite rates - no credit at any price!) in many parts of the market. But we also saw the Fed go thermonuclear and force short rates to zero and long rates to record lows.  So in the short term, the Fed is more powerful.

But in the long term, the actions of the Fed have economic and political consequences. Buying up Treasuries is seen as printing money and enabling Congressional waste.  Buying up mortgage securities is not only probably illegal (based on a tight reading of the Federal Reserve act and the legal technicality that Fannie & Freddie debt is not “full faith and credit” debt of the U.S.), but also has political consequences as people begin to realize that fraudulent lending is “crime that pays”.  Some of those political consequences lead to “Audit the Fed” movements and other political pressures, and those in turn remind us that in the end, the Federal Reserve is only as powerful as Congress allows it to be.

But remember to watch what the Fed actually does!  It’s the Temporary and Permanent Open Market Operations that matter!  And the alphabet soup of lending programs.

And finally:  A more transparent Fed would go a long way toward cleaning up the Augean Stables of American Finance, and while that would be painful for us all in the short term, in the long term, accurate and transparent national accounting is vital to restore investor confidence in security of prinicipal and reasonable rates of return, on investments one can be proud of.

As previously mentioned, I’ve run the claims chart for the time period from 1998-2005 (before-during-after the dot-com recession). Comparing the dot-com chart with the current chart (see both charts below) shows:

• The dot-com equivalent of the current year is 2004. Claims rose in 2001-2 and were max for most of the first half of 2003, just as they rose in 2007-8 and were max in 2009.
• The claims during the dot-com bust were far lower than the current bust.
• In fact, for this time of year, the current 2010 claims (well over 400,000) are noticeably worse than any part of the 2001-2003 employment bust (clearly under 400,000).
• The same “partial recovery” pattern was seen in both 2004 and 2010:  Claims in 2010 have not yet normalized, and are typically about midway between the preceding “boom” and “bust” levels - corresponding to a “Claims Oscillator” of 50% - about the same as in 2004.

What we have today is this…

… as compared to this …

Today’s claims data showed continued failure of the labor market to “normalize”.

This chart uses the style of my patented(*) Weekly Claims reports, and applies it to another series with strong seasonal variation: New House Sales(**). The actual data are used (without seasonal “adjustments”) and plotted in context to allow comparisons (without needing “adjustments”). Historical data are included back to 2004.

This chart shows something that is well known, and puts new perspective on something less well known, and a bit disturbing. First, we see that sales peaked in 2005 (and just to be safe, 2004 is plotted with dashes). And, for each month from 2006 until late 2009 each year’s sales was weaker than the prior years. This much was well known. Today’s release on January 2010 sales is disturbing. The actual number is lower than in 2009! (2009 was, until now, lower than any prior data point back to the start of the series in 1963. Prior to 2010 (and 2009) the low for January was 28 thousand homes, back in 1982. And the population and number of households are both much larger today.)

This new data suggests that the government’s attempts to prop up demand for houses are failing. Perhaps, in order to improve demand for houses, we need  improved business and employment conditions? Tax gimmicks can induce some people who were ready to buy a house to do so earlier, but in the long run people will not buy many houses unless they are confident they will earn enough to make the payments. Furthermore, the market must be stable enough that people will not worry about suffering large capital losses if a personal crisis forces them to sell unexpectedly. Both of those require less one-time government market intervention, which doesn’t sustainably stabilize either jobs or prices, rather than more! It is unfortunate that neither the Realtors nor the Homebuilders seem to grasp this point, since they appear to have the attention of Congress, yet they have repeatedly asked only for tax gimmicks, rather than sustainable solutions…
* - Just kidding… but I do think it’s a good style for this class of data!
** - It takes more than just a structure to make a house into a home, so I reject the term “New Home” sales. (You can buy & sell houses, but you have to <i>make</i> your home - yourself!)

What do you really own, in your 401k?  Those shares of stock, those bonds - are they really the best way to invest in America’s future? Your future? The world’s?

If your 401k plan is like mine, you have some mutual fund choices - maybe even a lot of them. The mutual funds are either “passive” (index) stock funds, with a little of everything (within the index), or they are “active” (managed) stock funds… plus some bond funds. One example is the S&P500 index of most of the largest U.S. corporations.

Now, I save into the 401k because of how the game is rigged: I like to defer taxes until I actually need the money, and there’s the “free money” in the form of a “company match”. But I’m not happy with where I have to put my money in order to get those benefits. Do I really want to be financing the 500 largest corporations in the U.S.? Not all of them are exactly paragons of wise economic activity! Just look at what the fraud banking and health care sectors have been bribing lobbying Congress for… or the war-profiteers military-industrial complex… or the toxic junk & fast food vendors… or the telecommunications and power monopolies utilities… do I want to be investing in all THAT? Is investing supposed to be about profiting from the weaknesses of others, or about building up our collective strength? Even for otherwise reasonably productive large corporations, too often I hear about cutting quality in the name of profits, failing to actually serve their customers, and distributing rewards to management rather than shareholders.

That is not the system I want to be supporting and sustaining with my hard-earned savings. I cannot count on such a system to provide for my retirement, nor would I want to think that my last days of peace and relaxation were funded by such activities! So, I say no to the S&P500. And despite various fancy titles, unfortunately the other stock funds are pretty much the same witches’ brew.

No stock funds for me… So, what about bonds? This is long enough, so I leave that for the next post…

Update Feb. 18: similar chart as last week, but the new “Job Engine Oscillator” has been added… This ranges from 0 to 100%, with 100% being a strong economy - claims at a minimum (for a given week) within the data on the chart, and 0% being a terrible economy - claims at a maximum (for a given week)…  This week’s data shows a drop in the Oscillator and a weakening of claims. Making matters worse, one wonders whether the claims last week may have been impacted by the East Coast blizzard.

The weekly unemployment claims data is looking a bit better than in early January, but it still sits midway between the “healthy economy” levels and last year’s “panic” levels.  This doesn’t feel like a recovery. I will try getting the equivalent data from the 2000-2005 period for comparison..

The claims data remain quite weak. Although this week’s claims were lower than last week’s, that’s just the seasonal pattern. The problem is that the three points for 2010 are only slightly better than the data from the same three weeks in 2009. The 2009 data were horrifying, and the 2010 data are too close to the 2009 data, and too far from the 2006-2008 “healthy job market”, and nowhere near indicating “recession over”.

Update: In late 2009 the data started returning to the “healthy” 2006-2007 levels, but that trend seems to have reversed. In fact, if things continue we might see 2010 data <i>worse</i> than the 2009 data.  (But I hope this doesn’t happen!)

Click on chart for larger version:

This does not look good!  The second week of January is now tracking much closer to 2009 (red) and not returning to the 2006-2008 levels.

Investors are typically most sensitive to portfolio “drawdowns”; those periods when, on balance, the investments are worth less than their peak. “Drawdown”, commonly used by hedge funds, refers to the percentage that a fund’s Net Asset Value (NAV) is below peak. We don’t pay hedge fund managers, but it helps to think like one*, and the “drawdown” concept is quite useful.  We strictly limit our maximum conceivable drawdown to ensure we do not jeopardize our investing/savings goals.  We then manage our portfolio accordingly.

Our first step is to monitor our own NAV. This just involves summing up the value of all holdings periodically (weekly), and tracking inflows and outflows. We use an imaginary number of “shares” and then pretend that each inflow/outflow is “buying” or “selling” some shares in our “personal hedge fund”. Meanwhile, market-driven changes in portfolio value push the NAV ($/share) up and down. After a few hours of setup, having our own NAV is trivial with a spreadsheet.

Now, given a NAV and a drawdown limit, one starts to invest rather differently.

First, the drawdown limit forces conservatism when it is most needed: when things are going badly. With a drawdown limit, there is no “doubling down”, Martingale doom path. When things go bad, you have to get into zero-risk assets and let the yield rebuild NAV before you take on risk.  For those with a trading appetite, this provides a “reset” time to get back in the groove. For those without a high risk-appetite, it provides a “nerve-soothing” time to re-assess the market before getting back into risky assets.

Second, it leads one to ask whether a given investment is really the best way to get the intended return, because other methods might deliver the same return with less drawdown risk. For instance, a ladder of individual Treasury bonds held to maturity has zero drawdown, whereas a bought-and-held intermediate Treasury bond fund can swing by many percent — yet both deliver similar yields. Similarly, it leads one to ask when and how buy-and-hold is a sensible option for stock-market money.  Suppose the maximum drawdown limit is 10% and the stock market has just shown that it can move down 50%.  Chasing performance and buying back into a broad market index after a long bull run puts a lot of drawdown risk into the portfolio - with more than just 20% of assets in a market index, a 50% crash hits the drawdown limit!  But chasing performance is a dumb strategy for a buy-and-hold 401k type fund. Maybe it would be better to buy dividend-yielding stocks whenever they are near 52-week lows, and then carry them in the portfolio only at purchase value, while harvesting the dividends and only noting the capital gains when “profit taking” time comes?

Third, it leads one to reassess asset allocation across the portfolio, and look into sensible market timing strategies. Correlated drawdown risks are most deadly, but also hidden from sight. The sales pitch for Modern Portfolio Theory was that diversification reduced volatility without greatly impairing returns. That was thoroughly disproven from September 2008 to March 2009, when the only assets that didn’t plunge 10% or more were U.S. Treasuries and cash readily exchangeable for them. A simple 75/25 Stock/Bond index method outperformed most MPT-diversified portfolios (though still having a horrific drawdown). Those who used tactical asset allocation based on things like 200-day moving averages did much better still.  MPT may reduce portfolio variability in bull markets, but it’s no defense in a liquidity panic, when everyone else has the same “exotic” investments and needs cash fast.

All of these effects are right in line with the “Investing for Sustainable Gains” philosophy.  And our claim is that a drawdown management approach, implemented well, can deliver long-term total returns comparable or better than other approaches, without jeopardizing one’s financial goals. We will explore some of these ideas in future posts, and if there’s interest, we can post some performance results from time to time as well.  (We will have 3 years of data to show at the end of March.)

- W.S.

* Hedge fund managers only get paid the big bucks (the 20% of total returns, measured by peak NAV) when they are pushing peak NAV up and having minimal drawdowns.  Drawdowns more than 10-20% tend to cause fund investors to pull their money from the fund. Also, looking at the long period of strong performance that is typically needed in those circumstances just to get back to peak NAV, many fund managers realize they won’t get paid big bucks again for a long time, and simply shut down the fund. But individual investors don’t have the luxury of “pulling their money out of their portfolio”, nor can they “shut down” their portfolio. We are stuck with our portfolios! So we believe in not taking excessive losses in the first place.  After all, we’re managing Our Own Money, not OPM!

I’ve had this unscratchable itch after reading CR’s post about the labor force participation rate decline.  I wanted to know how labor force was defined (in the U.S., it’s everyone 16 and up minus students and a bunch of other exceptions), and whether the declining participation was related to the boomers hitting retirement age (or at least, early-retirement age), as opposed to their kids maybe not being so numerous to make up the difference.  At first glance, not so…  I went over to Wikipedia and found the population pyramid from the 2000 census data, which showed that the generational cohort currently entering the workforce is larger in number than the boomers.  Also, only the leading edge of the boomer population is in the 55-64 age group now, where early retirement might make sense for large numbers.

So I went looking for more information.  The BLS has a very nice economist named Mitra Toossi, who publishes reports every couple of years analyzing the labor force.

The most recent report (PDF alert) came out in November 2009.  Not too far back!  It says, on the first page, “the aging of the labor force will dramatically lower the overall labor force participation rate and the growth of the labor force”.  

I can see this.  The population aged 65+ is getting larger compared to the population aged 16+.  And those over 64 are less likely to be labor force participants.  Similarly, the population aged 55-64 is “booming” right now, and they are also less likely to be labor force participants (e.g. kids thru college and house paid off, so a lot of folks have more choices about whether or not to work…)

But then I ask myself, how much of this is “prediction” and how much is rear-view-mirror economythics?

So I open up the same report but from November 2007 (the previous version).  It says “BLS projects that the labor force participation rate will be 65.5% in 2016.”  That’s a no-growth prediction from the rate prevailing in 2007.  The all-time high was 67.1% in 1997 (or 67.3% in 1999-2000 if you look at their data (possibly revised since 2007)… The participation rate dropped to about 65.5% in 2004 after the dot-com recession.

More from the article:  “projected continuation of the decrease in the labor force participation rate of youths…”

“once the baby boomers exit the last years of the prime age group and enter the 55-and-over group, with participation rates roughly half that of the prime age group, the overall labor force participation rate will decline significantly…”

So it seems that some of this “labor force participation decline” was anticipated prior to the recession, and it’s just demographics.  If the marginal benefit from working is reduced (lower pay, less pleasant work environment), some folks who don’t HAVE to work right now, will wait for a better chance later.

On the other hand, given that the decline in participation was forecast years in advance, shouldn’t policymakers have anticipated a deeper recession that normal just from the workforce demographics?  And perhaps more importantly going forward, since we know the boomers are going to be retiring en masse over the next few years (many with their belts fully tightened by the recession) doesn’t this imply a very weak recovery?  If workforce participation is going to be declining even in good times, the number of willing workers will be suppressed, and might even decline outright, even if total population remains stable to slightly increasing.  (It doesn’t help that the 2000s were a weak decade for population growth, with no sign of improvement, either.)  After all, it’s a mathematical identity that GDP is the product of the size of the workforce, the hours per worker, and the productivity per worker…  Size has some headroom due to layoffs, but not as much as it would if population were booming.  Hours are stagnant and honest-work productivity may be plateauing due to computer technology reaching the saturation point…  All of which points to weak growth in the U.S. for a while, which is not bullish for optimistic P/E multiples in the stock market.  Nor for bond default and/or rollover risks, with a lot of bond issuance predicated on perpetual-growth thinking…

Ruh-Roh!  The economy may have had “enough!”

W.S.