Monthly Archives: May 2014

A CFA Candidate’s Perspective

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Each season CFA Society Minnesota invites finance students to learn about the CFA Program by interning with the local society. Students assist society committees with research for their projects, and are encouraged to take on tasks that broaden their skills and industry insight. Augsburg College senior Kyle Louzoun-Heisler will be sitting for Level I next year, and wrote this commentary with the assistance of Freezing Assets contributor Lissa Rurik, CFA. If you’d like to work one-on-one with a future CFA Candidate this season, please contact us to volunteer!

There seems to be a consensus in the literature of the major financial institutions that stocks, despite a five year bull, will continue to make small but positive gains. They seem to agree that low interest rates, low inflation, and an improving economy will continue to support increases in the stock market, albeit small. However, there are risks, including shifting geopolitical climate, the Federal Reserve, and asset bubbles that pose threats to stock market gains. Despite these concerns, the majority of firms recommend a Bull market strategy.

With the stronger stock market many firms suggest investing in stocks instead of bonds in 2014. However, there are strategies to navigate a rising interest environment. The recent climate has many financial firms predicting a higher treasury yield and a steeper yield curve. The Fed is central to this topic because there is reason to believe the fed funds rate will be increased in the future. BlackRock and Ascent are predicting a modest increase in rates to about 3.5%. However, this is largely based on the pace of tapering. And despite the recent fear over the fed raising tapering ahead of schedule, the meeting minutes show no such thing. Both Ascent and Columbia Asset Management recommend investing in shorter financial institutions debt, rather than utilities and industrials, citing a bank’s ability to pay lower interest on deposits and receive higher rates on loans.

In order to gain in a rising rate environment, BlackRock and US Bank are in favor of investing in munis and high yield bonds. Those in favor of high yield bonds cite the investment climate (with the Fed’s quantitative easing, economic improvement, and low default rates) and interest rate risk as the primary reasons to consider those options. Furthermore, as interest rates increase, high yield bonds can protect from that risk. Although last year high yield bonds offered the best return in 2013, BlackRock believes they will be closer to fair value.

In addition to high-yield bonds, BlackRock and US Bank favor municipal bonds as well. BlackRock mentions that March was one of the three best months for munis in 20 years. However, despite these ending, it still makes sense to look at these bonds because of their tax exemptions.

Although BlackRock mentions the Emerging Markets as a potential investment, Columbia asset management recommends it. Columbia believes that investors should stop playing duration defense. Furthermore, credit risk is preferred to duration risk. Like BlackRock, Columbia mentions the possible increase in the yield curve, but they believe that the curve has already taken most of it in. They say that if you want more of an investment-quality bond, corporate and munis make sense, but that if you have longer latitude it makes sense to look at the EM debt. Although EM debt did poorly last year, they believe it will perform better as those economies improve. Columbia believes global demand to increase and thus EM debt values to react favorably. Abbot Downing also believes that EM debt will improve as those markets grow and will be a good long-term investment.

BlackRock and Columbia are asset management firms.
Ascent is a private wealth management firm- subdivision of US bank.

Summertime

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One of the greatest things about the bond market is early close. While our equity counterparts are slaving away until 4:00 ET today, SIFMA has recommended a pre-holiday close of 2:00 ET. There are fewer early closes than there used to be, but we still get to leave early to kick off the summer.

And the livin’ is easy…

You could barely work today in Credit even if you wanted to. Judging from the number of messages we’re getting, it feels like the street has already sneaked away to the Hamptons.

Fish are jumpin….

Supply this week reflected the anticipated exodus – there was about $20 billion in new issue, and the fish did most of their jumping on Monday and Tuesday. Concessions were a bit spotty, with some deals priced to go, and others, not so much. Secondary trading was again a mixed bag, with some weakness showing up in longer-dated bonds. The Enable Midstream deal was a case in point – this midstream gas company is a new issuer, and they brought $1.65 billion across three tranches. All looked to be well oversubscribed, but the 5 year has tightened 6 basis points in the secondary, while the 10s and 30s are a couple wider. It looked like the market was going to jump all over this deal, but ended up throwing some of the catch back.

And the cotton is high….

Spreads are still tight. Even though summer is barely upon us, it’s hard to imagine the cotton getting too much higher. Maybe investors should think about harvesting. There was very little movement in spreads overall, and excess returns month-to-date are slightly negative, driven entirely by the long end. As we doze off in the Adirondack chair, a cool beverage resting on its wide arm, it looks like credit spreads will be stable as far off into the horizon as the eye can see…

…so hush…

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

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Lissa Rurik, CFA, CAIA

Recently some market prognosticators have alluded to similarities between today’s investment environment and that of the mid-1990’s (among others, Liz Ann Sonders at Charles Schwab). Remembering back to that time, the three predominant forces that all strategists addressed in their commentaries were technology (the internet), falling interest rates and globalization (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Asian Tigers). Of course, these trends weren’t necessarily independent from one another, and our economy today reflects the continued impact of all three elements.

Globalization continues to progress and expand as places such as Vietnam and countries in Africa replace the former developing markets of China and countries within Latin America. Interest rates have arguably bottomed, but remain low (notwithstanding the vastly increased levels of global debt – another topic for another day). Perhaps most importantly though, technology advances driven by the internet have continued to evolve, encompassing smart phones and other mobile computing devices along with the emergence of the cloud.

As an angel investor I hear many pitches from startup ventures, and I have noted that a significant proportion of new business ideas entail a use of the mobile device /cloud platform model. Some that come to mind include:

  • a system for police evidence gathering, data management and diagnostics;
  • a process for emergency room response and patient data management;
  • online educational assessments and in-classroom diagnostics;
  • health care supply management with wearable bar code apparatus for inventory ordering; and
  • data collection and management for use in preparing environmental impact statements.

Granted, this paradigm has been in play for at least four or five years. But the level of innovation unleashed – as it permeates almost every business field and process – reminds me of the impact those early internet innovations had on that mid-1990’s economy… the productivity enhancements therein, and the consequential investment opportunities that resulted for many years to come.

A recent publication by Berkeley Professor John Zysman encapsulates the importance of the cloud concept. Essentially he finds that the internet was a catalyst for productivity because it enabled a decomposition of sorts in the production and delivery of goods, a reallocation of resource inputs to their cheapest source, and subsequent formations of global supply chain networks. Productivity growth was robust as this occurred. Today, the cloud not only extends the potential for enhanced productivity, but it almost leverages that productivity back upon itself and expands from there.

As noted by Sand Hill Group, the McKinsey Global Institute, and Deloitte Access Economics, the most obvious element of this process reflects the fact that the mobile/cloud platform can be used by anybody, whether consumer, employer, or coder on-the-go, because cloud support can be accessed independent of location and computing infrastructure.   That means we can work while riding a bus, we can collaborate with our colleagues at any place and time, and we can launch a new business with a relatively limited capital investment regardless of that business’s potential for growth.

Zysman’s piece discusses the cloud in its beginning years as a concept of architecture, in other words, a new way of organizing computing, that has now evolved to include implementation features around how those new architectural concepts are put to work.  And as production was deconstructed with the aid of internet, services on the cloud platform can now be segmented into each step, reconfigured and customized into entirely new elements of enhanced value for the user (thus leveraging productivity back upon itself).   Intense resources are now widely available and technological innovation is accelerated by the access and deployment of big data, design tools, analytics, prototyping, and sophisticated logistics and algorithms.  And as the development of applications on the cloud can be decoupled from the infrastructure, it lessens the investment requirements and speeds the time-to-value for any given business or technical innovation.

The investment community in the mid-1990’s pondered the economic importance of the internet with comparisons to the industrial revolution. The truth around that allusion may remain debatable…. However, the innovation and disruption arising as the cloud develops, and the resulting ongoing productivity gains, are at least as impactful to the economy and financial markets today as were those dot.com investment opportunities we all marveled upon two decades ago.   Maybe that’s where the 1990’s mid-bull market similarities align.

Is the innovation of the cloud platform as important as the internet was before it? (Comment below)

Are Wall Street and Main Street on the Same Block?

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Back in 1972 after Nixon’s landslide re-election Pauline Kael, the film critic at the time for the New Yorker magazine allegedly quipped “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” While it’s a matter of debate if she actually said this, the point is still clear—sometimes we let our own circumstances and biases cloud our interpretation of data.

For instance we were listening to one market prognosticator that said that he thought that we might be seeing a new level of frugality among consumers that we have not seen in several decades, which might explain some of the recent data and resulting market action. While we believe that the consumer is more cautious than in time’s past, we also think that the data has reflected consumer caution for a while. Why the discrepancy? In our observation since us investment types make our living in part off the performance of the market, sometimes we confuse a rising market with rising fortunes for Americans in general. Therefore it can be easy therefore to neglect data that contradicts our own personal experiences even though it might not reflect what the rest of the country is experiencing.

One such brief example may be comparing the New York Wall Street bonus average per employee to that of various income level increases in the United States. While the bonus of the average Wall Streeter has remained relatively strong as of late, the real median household income has not been as robust. While admittedly the latter is inflation adjusted, one gets the general idea. Plus we haven’t seen much of inflation the last several years. Plus GDP data has been arguably mundane the past few years.

NYC Wall Street Bonus Compensation, % of Total Compensation

2013nycsecuritiescompasperc

(Click above image to view larger graphic)

Real Median Household Income in the United States

fredgraph

Gross Domestic Product

fredgraph gdp

Therefore sometimes we investors might have to be cautious in interpreting a strong market with a strong consumer or a strong economy.

When Doves Cry

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Credit is a funny asset class. It is part risk-on, part risk-off, and sentiment in and around the sector reflects its Jekyl and Hyde nature. This past week was a case in point. We’ve had dovish comments recently out of both Yellen and Draghi, both suggesting that current economic activity allowed for plenty of flexibility on monetary policy. The prospect of continued or even further stimulus gave risk assets a bit of a boost, and credit spreads did well for a few days. Not coincidentally, it was the same period in which equities did well.

Then the market saw a couple of days of bad news – mixed signals from the economy, and weak earnings out of Wal-Mart sent stocks lower, and credit followed suit. 10 year bank credits are usually the most visible in the cash markets, and they widened by about 5 basis points.

As a result, credit markets were very receptive to new issue in the early part of the week, but supply tapered off as spreads moved wider. $40 billion in investment grade corporates came to market, and follow-on secondary trading activity has been mixed. Most new issues look like they’re trading wider, some are trading tighter. Pfizer was among the biggest issuers, bringing $4.5 billion across five tranches, and Volkswagen did $3.5 billion. Pfizer bonds are lagging since their deal priced on Monday, with spreads wider by 3-5 basis points. The Volkswagen deal priced amid some spread weakness on Thursday, which perhaps explains why their bonds are trading 3-5 tighter.

At the same time, interest rate levels dropped to the low end of their range – 10 year rates dipped below 2.5%. Bottom line, even though credit felt squishy going into the end of the week, the average spread month to date has barely changed, and prices of investment grade bonds have moved higher. As one trader commented, in spite of the spread weakness, the market still feels constructive.

Or maybe the market just doesn’t know what else to do. It is totally hooked on central bank stimulus. Maybe I’m just 2 demanding, but it’s hard to see valuations surviving a hawkish attack.