Posts Tagged 'short selling'

Short post on short selling and a short-term bottom …

Published October 8, 2008 Trivial , Universal 2 Comments
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I think we’re about to get a much-needed reminder that stock markets don’t always go down.

Could happen today, could happen tomorrow, and it may or may not happen after one last big selloff, but we’re going to get a relief rally very soon. I don’t expect it to last long, but I do expect it to be rather violent and dramatic. Maybe we get back close to 11,000 on the Dow.

My short-term optimism (and change in opinion) stems from a conversation I had with a hedge fund guy at a conference on Tuesday. He said every hedge fund guy is desperately looking for new stocks to short. ‘You can’t have enough short ideas,” he told me.

It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s actually good when investors are all bearish because that means there’s a lot fewer people with stock they want to sell. (Remember, short selling is a bet against the market in which investors sell borrowed shares of stock in hopes of buying them back at a lower price and pocketing the difference).

It’s been especially difficult for hedge funds because the government unwisely banned short-selling in more than 1,000 different stocks (the list was at first 800 stocks, and was supposed to be limited to financial companies, but the list has expanded to the point of ridiculousness both in terms of size and scope).

At first, I thought the short-selling ban was keeping the market unnaturally high, but now I think it may have had the unintended consequences of making things worse. Hedge funds who may have covered their shorts haven’t done so because they know they can’t put them back on. Some sectors like technology may have been especially hurt as hedge funds looking for shorts have had to target companies outside the financial industry.

So I think the lifting of the short-selling ban Wednesday night could prove to be a catalyst to spark that rally. The Fed could come together with the European Central Bank to lower rates in a coordinated attempt to stimulate the markets.

Again, in the long term, I don’t think anything the government does will prevent an extended, deep slowdown, the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades, if not generations. The market will probably sink much lower than where it is today.

But at this point, even a short-term rally would be most welcome.

A Bill We’ll Be Paying Back For Generations …

Published September 19, 2008 Deep , Universal Leave a Comment
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Ok, so I’ve admitted that the government probably had to do something to stem the financial crisis.

Now I’m going to talk about all the ways this bailout could – and probably will – go wrong (with the caveat that all the details still haven’t been worked out).

  • Everyone talks about how this plan will be reminiscent of the government’s ultimately successful strategy to create the Resolution Trust Corp. (RTC) in 1989 to help resolve the Savings & Loan banking crisis.  Numerous difficulties arose during that bailout as more than 2900 institutions and $900 billion in assets ultimately had to be rescued, and yet the cost and complexity of this current crisis will easily dwarf anything seen in the S&L crisis. The bad loans in question are larger in scope, broader in reach, and more intricate in design. Deciding which assets to buy, how much to pay for those assets, and how to get rid of them will be extremely delicate matters, and if we have learned anything about government, mistakes will be made in the process.
  • The plan will certainly cost U.S. taxpayers a lot of money. Some optimists are talking about how the government could end up making money from this deal if they’re able to pick up these assets at very distressed levels and then sell them back at higher prices once things settle down. Such a scenario is possible but highly doubtful. What is much more likely is that the U.S. balance sheet, already drowning in foreign debt and facing enormous future liabilities caused by a troubling demographic shift (e.g. Social Security), will continue to deteriorate. This will lead to higher inflation, a higher deficit, higher taxes, a weaker dollar and ultimately, a large transfer of wealth to other nations.
  • This bailout, even if successful and profitable, will once again institutionalize the concept of moral hazard into our economy. This is something I’ve talked about before in this blog, but economic moral hazard basically means that people will take on too many risks if they believe they will be bailed out if things go bad. There are folks, including me, who feel that the S&L bailout is one reason why the financial system got so quickly back into trouble. The Glass-Steagall deregulation of the industry didn’t help, either. I hear a lot of people say our current predicament is too critical and dire to spend time philosophizing about moral hazard, but that’s a circular argument which will never lead to addressing the issue.
  • That’s why it’s so critical the government makes sure all institutions that need help suffer some kind of repercussion as it designs and implements its plan. And when the dust settles, government should begin modest re-regulation of the financial industry to try and ensure this level of risk-taking doesn’t happen again. Finally, the government should go hard after people who committed crimes during this period, and take back some of the billions in ill-gotten gains from those bad apples. No need to play the blame game immediately, and you’re never going to get back all that money (thinking about the multimillion-dollar bonuses many of these guys got over the past several years is a bit sickening), but people as well as institutions need to realize that overly risky behavior could lead to punishment down the road.
  • The one thing we do know about the current plan is that the SEC has declared all-out war on short sellers (investors who sell borrowed shares in hopes of buying the stock back at lower prices and pocketing the difference). The agency has banned short selling on 800 financial-related stocks and forced large short sellers to disclose their positions. I hate this. It frankly disgusts me. It’s something a country like China would do (and has done). I’m a long-only investor, but short sellers are an easy scapegoat – they provide liquidity in the market and often correctly point out flaws in companies and business models. However, I do understand that confidence can make or break our financial system, and plummeting stock prices caused by unchecked short selling certainly threatened to exacerbate the crisis. So, while this ban sets a very bad precedent, I suppose I can live with it as long as it is a very temporary measure. In the end, the ban will only work if time and some breathing room was the only thing the market needed to stabilize. If this bailout isn’t sufficient and we have even more serious systemic issues, then this market rally will be only a temporary reprieve – stocks will fall again and the problems will begin anew as soon as the ban is lifted.

All Clear? Hardly …

Published September 19, 2008 Deep , Universal 3 Comments
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The SEC has banned short-selling on financial stocks. The Treasury has guaranteed money market funds and is cooking up plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy distressed assets and save troubled banks. The market has rebounded huge, taking back all of this month’s losses.

So are we all clear??

Hardly.

I think in the short-term, the moves have bought the financial system time to gather its senses, to take a breath. That’s a good thing, and clearly the ban on short selling is doing a lot to move prices higher (I’m going to write about the numerous, potentially devastating long-term ramifications of all these decisions in a following post).

Something needed to be done. We took out our previous lows and got that panicky sell-off I talked about in an earlier post. The potential for blood on the streets (Main Street as well as Wall Street) was very real. A functioning economy ultimately rests on people’s confidence in it, and widespread panic can cripple the health of such a system to the point where it takes years to recover.

But even if you stabilize the system with these moves, you’re still going to be faced with most of the same issues: A moribund housing market, a stretched-to-the-limit consumer, a weakening job market, a credit crunch, a global slowdown. It will take time and a lot of pain to resolve these issues. Anything we do will at best ease some of that pain, while there’s a very real risk we end up doing something to make the problems last longer than they otherwise would.

In sum, the government may have just put a floor in the market with these moves, and at least temporarily prevented a disastrous widespread panic that could have led to another Great Depression.

But I also think we’ve seen most of the short-term stock price gains we’re going to see (maybe we see another 5-10%).

And the medium-term future for the economy AND the market still doesn’t look particularly bright. We’re going to be stuck in this economic morass for some time to come, and the market will continue to reflect that reality.

 

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