February 11, 2018

by Steve Stofka

The recent market correction, defined as a 10% decline, has been a real time stress test for our portfolios. There hasn’t been a stock market correction since the 11% drop in December 2015 to January 2016. Because the end of January was near the height of the stock market, you can more easily find out how much your portfolio declined relative to the market. As of the close Friday, the SP500 had fallen 7.2% since the end of January. That is your benchmark. Later in this blog, I’ll review a few reasons for the decline.

You can now compare the decline in your portfolio to that of the market.  If you use a personal finance program like Quicken, this is an easy task. If you don’t, then follow these steps:
1) Write down your January ending balances at your financial institutions, including any savings accounts or CDs that you own.
2) Write down the current balances and calculate the difference in value since the end of January.
3) Divide that difference by the balance at the end of January to get a percentage decline.

For instance, let’s say your balances at the end of January added up to $100K and your current balance is $95K (Step 1). The difference is $5K (Step 2). Your portfolio has declined 5% (Step 3) compared to the market’s 7.2%, or about 70% of the market. If the market were to fall 50% as it did from 2000-2002 and 2007-2009, you could expect that your portfolio would fall about 35%. Are you emotionally and financially comfortable with that? A safety rule of investing is that any money you might need for the next five years should not be invested in the stock market.

The next step is to compare the gains of your portfolio in 2017 to the market’s gain, about 24%. The gain should be approximately the same as the loss percentage you calculated above. If the gain is slightly more than the losses, you have a good mix.

The chart below compares two portfolios over the past ten years: 1) 100% U.S. stock market and 2) 60% stocks/ 40% bonds (60/40 allocation). Notice that the best and worst years of the 60/40 portfolio are nearly the same while the best year of the 100% stocks is 10% less than the worst year.

The 60/40 portfolio captured 80% of the profits of the 100% stock portfolio ($101,532 / $128,105) but had only 60% of the drawdown, or decline in the portfolio. Compare that with the chart below, which spans only nine years and leaves out most of the meltdown of value during the Financial Crisis. There is no worst year! La-di-da! Investors who are relatively new to the stock market may underestimate the degree of risk.

The 60/40 portfolio captured 58% of the profits of the 100% stock portfolio ($152,551 / $262,289) but the drawdown was 63% (11.15% / 17.84%).  If the drawdown is more than the profits, that doesn’t look like a very good deal for the 60/40 portfolio, does it?  That is how bull markets entice investors to take more risk than might be appropriate for their circumstances.  Come on in, the water’s fine!  An investor might not see the crocodiles. Markets can be volatile. This has been a good reminder to check our portfolio allocation.

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Why?

So, why did the market sell off? Let me count the ways. It began on Friday, February 2nd, when the monthly labor report showed an annual gain of 2.9% in hourly wages. For much of this recovery, economists have been asking why wage growth was sluggish as unemployment fell. Economists who like their idealized mathematical models don’t like it when reality disagrees with those models. Finally, wage growth showed some healthy gains and the market got spooked. Why?

As wages take more of the economic pie, profits decline. Companies respond by raising prices, i.e. higher inflation. As interest rates rise, there are several negative consequences. Companies must pay more to borrow money. Fewer consumers can afford mortgages.  Homebuilders and home improvement centers like Home Depot and Lowe’s may see a decline in sales. Car loans become more expensive which can cause a decline in auto sales. There is one caveat: even though hourly wages increased, weekly earnings remained stable because weekly hours declined slightly.  Next month’s reports may show that inflation concerns were overestimated.

This past Monday, ISM released their monthly survey of  Non-Manufacturing businesses and it was a whopper. 8% growth in new orders in one month. Over 5% growth in employment. These are two key indicators of strong economic growth, and confirmed  the fears stirred up the previous day’s labor report. Inflation was a go and traders began to sell, sell, sell.

For the past year, market volatility was near historic lows. Volatility is a measure of the predictability of the pricing of SP500 options. A profitable tactic of traders was to “short” volatility, i.e. to bet that it would go lower. There were two exchange traded funds devoted to this: XIV and SVXY. Traders who bought XIV at the beginning of 2017 had almost tripled their money by the end of the year. When volatility tripled this past week, the whole trade blew up. People who had borrowed to make these bets found that their brokers were selling assets to meet margin calls.  Within days, XIV was closed and investors were given 4 cents on the dollar. SVXY may soon follow. Investors had been warned that these products could blow up. Here’s one from 2014.

The stock market is both a prediction of future profits and a prediction of other investor’s predictions of future profits! The prospect of stronger interest rate growth caused traders to reprice risks and returns. Much of the impact of the selling this past week was in the last hour on Monday and Thursday, when machine algorithms traded furiously with each other. The last hour of trading on Monday saw an 800 point, or 3% , price swing in just a few minutes. In the closing ten minutes of that hour, Vanguard’s servers had difficulty keeping up with the flow of orders.

Contributing to the decline were worries over the government’s debt.  The new budget deal signed into law this week will likely increase the yearly deficit to more than $1  trillion.  There was soft demand for government debt at this week’s Treasury bill auction.  Even without a recession in the next ten years, the accumulation of deficits will increase the total debt level to about $33 trillion.

This correction is an opportunity for the casual investor to make some 2017 or 2018 contributions to their IRA. Profit growth is projected to be strong for the coming year. The correction in prices this week has probably brought the forward P/E ratio of the SP500 to just below 20, a more affordable level that we haven’t seen in few years.