Whoever is selling stocks these days is really appreciative of those who are pushing the market higher. Thanks to overnight rallies in China and Japan on Tuesday night, US stocks launched higher at the open on Wednesday. Now, neither the modest rally in Shanghai (led by official buying) and the bigger rally in Japan (on Prime Minister Abe’s pledge to cut corporate taxes next year) had the slightest thing to do with items that impact the US, but the rally led a wave that rolled through futures markets around the globe until about seven minutes after traditional stock trading hours opened in New York, when the high of the day was set. The next six-and-a-half hours saw a 440-point decline in the Dow and around 50 in the S&P to a net loss of about 1.4% on the day.
“Gee, thanks!” said the pension fund guys who got to unload stocks about 3% higher than they otherwise would have. Who says the fast money monkeys don’t have salutatory effects?
The clue that today’s rally was not going to be sustained was actually in the energy markets. Prior equity oscillations had been mirrored with quite reasonable fidelity in the last week or two, but this morning energy markets were noticeably flat-to-down. Equities soon joined them.
Now, yesterday I mentioned that real yields are near their highest levels of the last five years, and that nominal yields are essentially in the middle of that range. I didn’t illustrate the latter point; but see below (source: Bloomberg).
So it is clear, to me, where you would rather place your bets in fixed-income: with real yields around 65bps and nominal yields at 2.20, you only want to own nominal bonds if inflation is less than 1.55% for ten years. Note that if inflation is negative, then you do approximately the same with TIPS as with nominal bonds, since in both cases your nominal principal is preserved. So it is a narrow set of circumstances in which you do better owning nominals, and you don’t do much better. On the other hand, there are long tails on the other side: ways that by owning TIPS you will do dramatically better.
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