Today’s Reaction is the Normal One

How many of you had “Up Day” on your bingo card for “reaction to Iran bombing and Straits of Hormuz closure” yesterday?  (Be honest.)  That’s why I’m so surprised about how many calls I’m getting today, asking me to explain why we sold off so aggressively this morning.  We can’t look at today’s move without the context of yesterday’s.  And once again, I really should have bought VIX futures before I took a short vacation!

Today’s equity market reaction expresses the kind of fears that were somehow ignored yesterday.  The potent combination of relentless dip buying and the expectation that this geopolitical event would be like so many others – short and with minimal impact upon the majority of US stocks.  This morning, we saw the realization that this is not a situation that is likely to resolve itself as quickly as, say, Venezuela, and that the impacts are likely to be much more widespread. 

Oil and bonds told us yesterday to be concerned about inflation, but we weren’t listening.  April WTI Crude futures were up by 2.78% on Friday and 6.28% yesterday, though they did close well below their overnight highs.  Meanwhile, rather than displaying a solid “flight to quality” bid, 2- and 10-Year Treasury yields rose by 10 basis points yesterday.  They had both fallen by about 6 bp on Friday, partly on that safety bid, but yesterday and today bond investors focused more on inflationary and budgetary concerns that might arise from a conflict that could keep oil prices elevated for some time.  Heck, if bonds didn’t follow the usual “flight to safety” playbook, perhaps it’s understandable why stocks wouldn’t either.

Despite my efforts to stay disconnected over the past few days, plenty of people found me to ask questions – both on Saturday morning (it was early out west) and yesterday.  The weekend questions involved what might happen, yesterday’s involved stocks’ blasé response.  I attributed the latter to two key factors:

1. Investors and active traders are fully conditioned to see every dip as a buying opportunity, no matter the reason, so it was unsurprising that stocks bounced after the open.  That was typical.  So too was the subsequent rally, since they also can’t resist the urge to avoid missing a tradeable bounce.  But the fact that it persisted long enough to erase all the day’s losses even as the effects on the risks to energy supplies and the global economy remained murky is a testament to the dip-buying psychology.  Some of it is FOMO, some of it is simply that investors are loath to abandon the dip-buying strategy that has worked so well for so long.  It’s hard to blame them, even if it seems short-sighted.
2. Many investors have come around to a type of thinking that I have advocated for some time – that equity markets are terrible at pricing in geopolitical events.  The initial knee-jerk moves have often proved to be overdone simply because they are reflexive.  Equity investors are very good at pricing in events that directly affect stock prices – earnings, revenues, cash flows, etc. – and not so good at pricing in events with more nebulous effects.  Thus, for the most part, market psychology has evolved to largely ignore geopolitical events that don’t have obvious, immediate impacts on those factors.  The events in Venezuela, for example, could be largely ignored because that country was outside the economic mainstream for decades and its oil exports were relatively negligible.  Hence, because it was over quickly and left few nasty side-effects for the vast majority of US companies, investors could shrug off the effects.  Traders were once again expecting a quick, relatively painless set of events for their favorite stocks.

Unfortunately, item 2 was misinterpreted, particularly after another round of bombings reminded us that this might persist longer than we’d hoped.  Remember, while we have asserted that stock markets are not adept at pricing geopolitical events, and often do well by ignoring them, bond and commodity markets are excellent at them.  Stock traders should pay close attention to those markets and risk problems when they don’t.  In most cases, the rubric “how will this event affect Microsoft (MSFT)?” is a reasonable one.  Few global events would really dent that company’s earnings.  But when rates rise thanks to global inflationary concerns, it is indeed fair to expect that stocks could suffer a broad re-rating.  And that is what we saw this morning.

Yet even as I typed this, the dip buyers were re-emerging, right on cue.  Yesterday, the S&P 500’s (SPX) 100-day moving average once again provided support and the 50-day offered resistance.  This morning, although SPX convincingly broke below its 100-day moving average, the selloff ran out of steam in the 6715-ish region that punctuated late-December’s lows.  And once again, buyers stepped in to chase the bounce once the selling stopped.  Old habits die hard.

SPX, 6-Months, Daily Candles with 50-Day (grey) and 100-Day (purple) Moving Averages and Horizontal Line at 6715

Source: Interactive Brokers, past performance is not indicative of future returns.