Authers: To illustrate the point Jeremy made, the difference in behavior between the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 in 2000 was dramatic. (And there were plenty of far more stratospheric pure dot-com companies outside the Nasdaq 100 that peaked at the same time.) The S&P still carried on horizontally for two or three months before nose-diving, much as it has moved horizontally for the past two months.
How similar do things look now? It’s always a problem putting Bitcoin on a chart with anything else, because its performance is so remarkable. But yes, there is something rather similar about how the cryptocurrency has dived while the S&P moves sideways.
Note that there was already an uncomfortable similarity even before the Bitcoin price dropped below $30,000 this morning.
One more analogy with how the most exciting speculative assets of this era seem already to have peaked: The SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) boom topped in February. So did the spectacularly successful ARK Innovation ETF run by Cathie Wood, which is full of exciting plays on future technology investments. These are arguably better comparisons to the dot-com era, when companies went public without ever having generated earnings or even sales, and when there was great excitement about new technology. That excitement has proved to be justified two decades later, but it didn’t stop a lot of people from losing money in 2000.
To continue on the issue of timing the stock market, it seems to me that timing the bond market could be critical. For years, the standard point made by equity bulls has been that even if share prices look historically expensive, bonds appear even more extreme, Can we see a true unwinding of the stock-market bubble without first witnessing an unwinding of the bond bubble?
On that issue, one reader reminded me of a passage from Jeremy’s 2017 letter for GMO, which brought attention to the fact that profit margins and the multiple that people were prepared to accept moved higher in the mid-1990s.
There are of course a lot of arguments about what caused this. Perhaps the most popular explanation is that the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan lost the plot and started propping up the stock market, deliberately or otherwise. It was very low rates that enabled higher multiples and higher profit margins. But, of course, we have even lower real rates today.
This was what Jeremy said four years ago:
“The single largest input to higher margins, though, is likely to be the existence of much lower real interest rates since 1997 combined with higher leverage. Pre-1997 real rates averaged 200 bps higher than now and leverage was 25% lower. At the old average rate and leverage, profit margins on the S&P 500 would drop back 80% of the way to their previous much lower pre-1997 average, leaving them a mere 6% higher. (Turning up the rate dial just another 0.5% with a further modest reduction in leverage would push them to complete the round trip back to the old normal.)”
“So, to summarize, stock prices are held up by abnormal profit margins, which in turn are produced mainly by lower real rates, the benefits of which are not competed away because of increased monopoly power, etc. What, we might ask, will it take to break this chain? Any answer, I think, must start with an increase in real rates.”
The issue now is that real rates are historically low and could easily rise and trigger a rush for the exits. We also have more leverage and more monopoly concentration than we did four years ago.
On Jeremy’s argument from 2017, real rates might not even need to go positive to burst the bubble in stocks. To what extent do low rates keep the bubble inflated? And how much of a “tantrum” in real yields would be needed to bring down the stock market?
Grantham: Even if we stay in the recent, post-2000 low-interest-rate regime, a full scale psychological bubble can still burst as they did in 2000 and 2007 (including housing). Although, to be sure, they fell to higher lows than before and recovered much faster.
Still, an 82% decline in the Nasdaq by 2003 was no picnic. In the longer run, a low interest-rate regime promotes lower average yields (and higher average prices) across all assets globally. However, I strongly suspect that there will be a slow irregular return to both higher average inflation and higher average real rates in the next few years, even if they only close half the difference or so with the pre-2000 good old days. Reasons could include resource limitations, energy transition and profound changes in the population mix—with more retirees and fewer young workers throughout the developed world and China, which collectively could promote both inflation and higher rates.
There is still so much cash in the system from fiscal stimulus to the Fed as buyer of last resort. Several clients have asked whether it’s fair for stock bulls to fall back on this dynamic as a reason for there to be room to run. In short, is the liquidity argument valid?
Money In System Means Volatility
Grantham: First, let me make it clear that I am not an expert on money or liquidity. However, although the rate of increase in M2, for example, is extremely high, the growth rate has declined in recent weeks precipitously, about as fast as ever recorded from roughly 18% year over year to 12%.
Just as bull markets turn down when confidence is high but less than yesterday, so the second derivative determines the effect of liquidity. The best analogy is the fun ping-pong ball supported in the air by a stream of water. The water pressure is still very high and the ball is high, but the ball has dropped an inch or two.
Moving to asset allocation, which several of our readers have asked about, is the traditional 60/40 portfolio still the ideal strategy? And what do you think about alternative hedges like mega-cap tech stocks or even Bitcoin as a piece of a portfolio?
Grantham: Asset allocation is particularly difficult today, with all major asset classes overpriced. With interest rates at a 4,000 year-low (see Jim Grant), 60-40 seems particularly dangerous. Two sectors are at historical low ratios however: Emerging-market equities compared the S&P and value stocks vs. growth.
In addition to a cash reserve to take advantage of a future market break, I would recommend as large a position in the intersection of these two relatively cheap sectors—value stocks and emerging market equities—as you can stand. I am confident they will return a decent 10%-20% a year and perhaps much better.