JPMorgan Asks: ‘Has The Marginal Equity Buyer Gone?’

I guess you can’t blame investors being a bit shell-shocked.

After all, it was just a month ago when the VIX ETP rebalance risk that everyone summarily dismissed as an urban legend (at least in terms of whether it would trigger a black swan vol. shock) was realized, thus putting to bed the idea that the potential for those products to create chaos was an old wives’ tale.

During that same bout of flash-crashing madness, market participants also learned that the systematic deleveraging bogeyman was real, when CTAs turned in their worst week in history and between the trend followers and risk party, some $200 billion in equity exposure was unwound.

No sooner had that run its course that Jerome Powell fumbled his first public testimony as Fed Chair and an “unglued” Donald Trump started a trade war.

The events that transpired this week served as a poignant reminder that “technical” risks aside, there are also more fundamental issues at play, not the least of which are the inherent dangers of installing a new Fed Chair at a critical juncture and allowing a reality TV show host to dictate America’s trade policy.

You’ll recall that investors plowed a ridiculous sum on money into equities in January only to yank it right back out amid the February turmoil.

Well in the latest installment of his weekly Flows And Liquidity note, JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou asks the following rather disconcerting question:

Has the marginal equity buyer gone?

By that he means retail investors. Here’s Panigirtzoglou:

We showed last week that equity ETF buying had been improving over the previous two weeks following a large outflow of $20bn in the week ending Feb 8. We noted that this improvement was important for the bullish thesis, as it will take some time until momentum improves and vol normalizes inducing institutional investors including CTAs and other trend following investors to start building up long equity positions again. In other words, we had hoped that retail investors, perhaps induced by “buying the dip” mentality, were emerging as the marginal buyer of equities. This past week has shaken this hope for two reasons. 1) This week has been one of the most erratic in terms of equity ETF flows, with a large inflow on Monday and Tuesday being reversed on Wednesday and Thursday (Figure 1). 2) For the first time since the correction began, the outflows spread out to ETFs that invest outside US equities.