Ah, well. Events doth make liars of us all.
Draw your own comparisons to this story arc of The Godfather, with investors playing the role of Kay and the Fed playing the role of Michael Corleone. I think it’s a pretty neat fit. It ends poorly for Kay, of course (and not so great for Michael). Let’s see if we can avoid her fate.
But like Kay, for now we are married to the Mob … err, I mean, the Fed and competitive monetary policies, as reflected in the relative value of the dollar and other currencies. The cold hard fact is that since the summer of 2014 there has been a powerful negative correlation between the trade-weighted dollar and oil, between the trade-weighted dollar and emerging markets, and between the trade-weighted dollar and industrial, manufacturing, and energy stocks. Here’s an example near and dear to the hearts of any energy investor, the trade-weighted dollar versus the inverted Alerian MLP index (ticker AMZ), a set of 43 midstream energy companies, principally pipelines and infrastructure.
US Trade Weighted Dollar & Alerian MLP Index
© Bloomberg Finance L.P. as of 05/02/2016. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
This is a -94% correlation, remarkably strong for any two securities, much less two – pipelines and the dollar – that are not obviously connected in any fundamental or real economy sort of way. But this is always what happens when the Mysterious Stranger comes to town: our traditional behavioral rules (i.e., correlations) go out the window and are replaced with new behavioral rules and correlations as we give ourselves over to his smooth words and promises. Because that’s what a Mysterious Stranger DOES – tell compelling stories, stories that stick fast to whatever it is in our collective brains that craves Narrative and Belief.
There’s nothing particularly new about this phenomenon in markets, as there have always been “story stocks”, especially in the technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sector where you have more than your fair share of charismatic management storytellers and valuation multiples that depend on their efforts.
My favorite example of a “story stock” is Salesforce.com (ticker CRM), a $55 billion market cap technology company with 19,000 employees and about $6.5 billion in revenues. I’m pretty sure that Salesforce.com has never had a single penny of GAAP earnings in its existence (in FY 2016 the company lost $0.07 per share on a GAAP basis). Instead, the company is valued on the basis of non-GAAP earnings, but even there it trades at about an 80x multiple (!) of FY 2017 company guidance of $1.00 per share. Salesforce.com is blessed with a master story-teller in its CEO, Marc Benioff, who – if you’ve ever heard him speak – puts forth a pretty compelling case for why his company should be valued on the basis of bookings growth and other such metrics. Of course, the skeptic in me might note that it is perhaps no great feat to sell more and more of a software service at a loss, particularly when your salespeople are compensated on bookings growth, and the cynic in me might also note that for the past 10+ years Benioff has sold between 12,500 and 20,000 shares of CRM stock every day through a series of 10b5-1 programs. But hey, that’s why he’s the multi-billionaire (and a liquid multi-billionaire, to boot) and I’m not. The next chart shows the five-year chart for CRM.
Not bad. Up 138% over the past five years. A few ups and downs, particularly at the start of 2016, although the stock has certainly come roaring back. But when you dig a little deeper...
Five-year chart for Salesforce.com (CRM)
© Bloomberg Finance L.P. as of ٠٥/٢٠/٢٠١٦. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
There are 1,272 trading days that comprise this five-year chart. 21 of those trading days, less than 2% of the total, represent the Thursday after Salesforce.com reports quarterly earnings (always on a Wednesday after the market close). If you take out those 21 trading days, Salesforce.com stock is up only 35% over the past five years. How does this work? What’s the causal process? Every Wednesday night after the earnings release, for the past umpteen years, Benioff appears on Mad Money, where Cramer’s verdict is always an enthusiastic “Buy, buy, buy!” Every Thursday morning after the earnings release, the two or three sell-side analyst “axes” on the stock publish their glowing assessment of the quarterly results before trading begins. It’s not that every investor on Thursday believes what Cramer or the sell-side analysts are saying, particularly anyone who’s short the stock (CRM always has a high short interest). But in a perfect example of the Common Knowledge Game, if you ARE short the stock, you know that everyone else has heard what Cramer and the sell-side analysts (the Missionaries, in game theory lingo) have said, and you have to assume that everyone else will act on this Common Knowledge (what everyone knows that everyone knows). The only logical thing for you to do is cover your short before everyone else covers their short, resulting in a classic short squeeze and a big up day. Now to be sure, this isn’t the story of every earnings announcement... sometimes even Marc Benioff and his lackeys can’t turn a pig’s ear of a quarter into a silk purse... but it’s an incredibly consistent behavioral result over time and one of the best examples I know of the Common Knowledge Game in action.
But wait, there’s more. Now let’s add the Fed’s storytelling and its Common Knowledge Game to Benioff’s storytelling and his Common Knowledge Game. Over the past five years there have been 43 days where the FOMC made a formal statement. If you owned Salesforce.com stock for only the 43 FOMC announcement days and the 21 earnings announcement days over the past five years, you would be UP 167%. If you owned Salesforce.com stock for the other 1,208 trading days, you would be DOWN 8%.
Salesforce.com stock price appreciation
© Bloomberg Finance L.P. as of 05/19/2016. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Okay, Ben, how about other stocks? How about entire indices? Well, let’s look again at that Alerian MLP index. Over the past five years, if you had owned the AMZ for only the 43 FOMC announcement days over that span, you would be UP 28%. If you owned it for the other 1,229 trading days you would be DOWN 39%. Over the past two years, if you had owned the AMZ for only the 16 FOMC announcement days over that span, you would be UP 18%. If you owned it for the other 487 trading days you would be DOWN 48%. Addition by subtraction to a degree that would make Lao Tzu proud.
Alerian MLP Index Price Appreciation
© Bloomberg Finance L.P. as of 05/19/2016. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
I’ll repeat what I wrote in ‘Optical Illusion / Optical Reality’… it’s hard to believe that MLP investors should be paying a lot more attention to G-7 meetings and reading the Fed governor tea leaves than to gas field depletion schedules and rig counts, but I gotta call ’em like I see ’em. In fact, if there’s a core sub-text to Epsilon Theory it’s this: call things by their proper names. That’s a profoundly subversive act. Maybe the only subversive act that really changes things. So here goes. Today there are vast swaths of the market, like emerging markets and commodity markets and industrial/energy stocks, that we should call by their proper name: a derivative expression of FOMC policy. Used to be that only tech stocks were “story stocks”. Today, almost all stocks are “story stocks”, and the Common Knowledge Game is more applicable to helping us understand market behaviors and price action than ever before.
You see this phenomenon clearly in the entire S&P 500, as well, although not as starkly with a complete plus/minus reversal in performance between FOMC announcement days and all other days. Over the past five years, if you had owned the SPX for only the 43 FOMC announcement days over that span, you would be UP 17%. If you owned it for the other 1,229 trading days you would be UP 28%. Over the past two years, if you had owned the SPX for only the 16 FOMC announcement days over that span, you would be UP 5%. If you