2023 ALL-TIME DANGER (May 3, 2023): In 2021 we achieved especially dangerous all-time record unprecedented investor behavior. In the U.S. we had greater net inflows into U.S. equity funds in 2021 than in 2001 through 2020 combined. We also experienced all of the following all-time record extremes from early 2021 through early 2022: 1) the ratio of the total dollar volume of insider selling divided by the total dollar volume of insider buying; 2) the ratio of the top 50 U.S. companies by market capitalization relative to the entire U.S. stock market; 3) the ratio of the total market capitalization of the top 50 U.S. companies relative to the total U.S. GDP; 4) the overall valuation of the top 50 U.S. companies relative to the total market capitalization of the the rest of the world; 5) the total volume of call buying; 6) the average daily net inflow into U.S. passive large-cap equity funds; 7) the divergence in behavior between the most-experienced investors who had never been heavier net sellers especially of the biggest U.S. company shares, versus the least-experienced participants who had never been more aggressive net buyers of U.S. equities.
This article on Bloomberg from November 25, 2021, which doesn't even include the huge net inflows from the past several weeks of that year, highlights how investors became far too heavily committed to U.S. stocks at the worst possible time in history:
2023 has smashed all previous U.S. large-cap stock-market extremes including those of 2021 and 2022.
It was truly amazing to have all of the previous extremes surpassed for all previous U.S. large-cap equity bubbles including 1837, 1873, 1929, 1973, and 2000. I was convinced that we might never see such overenthusiasm, overinvesting, and overcommitment to the biggest U.S. stocks for another century or more. However, it didn't take a century to revisit these all-time distortions, as every single one of the above all-time records from 2021-2022 was surpassed in 2023.
Practically every week we get a new all-time record or two: 1) the lowest VIX (15.53) during a bear market; 2) the longest rebound from an intermediate-term bottom during a bear market (nearly 7 months); 3) frequent record ratios of the biggest U.S. megacap shares relative to the rest of the S&P 500 or relative to other indices of small- and mid-cap U.S. shares. The last statistic is especially ominous, since the degree of overcrowding into the biggest U.S. companies has consistently been proportional to the subsequent total percentage losses for the best-known U.S. equity indices and funds. The following three charts highlight the astonishing enthusiasm for the biggest U.S. companies in recent weeks:
If U.S. Treasuries are paying over 5% guaranteed with the interest exempt from state and local income taxes, how can other investments compete?
The simple answer is that on a rational or analytical basis there is no reason to purchase U.S. stocks, real estate, art, collectibles, or anything else if you can get 5% or more on U.S. Treasury bills. Only emotional reasons would justify purchasing fluctuating assets, especially since so many of those are trading near all-time record overvaluations and as described earlier in this update have rarely been more popular.
The 17-week U.S. Treasury bill usually sports among the highest yields of all U.S. Treasuries since it has only existed since October 2022 and many institutions aren't aware of it. This is a far more intelligent choice than putting money into absurdly-overpriced U.S. large-cap equity funds including QQQ, XLK, and SPY.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is trying to slow the U.S. economy. Do you really think they'll fail in that pursuit?
The U.S. Federal Reserve has just raised both of its key overnight lending rates by a total of five percent over a relatively short time period in order to slow the U.S. economy. Regardless of whether there is a soft landing or not, current valuations especially for the largest U.S. stocks aren't compatible with contracting economic growth. We don't need to have a recession in order to have a stock-market crash, since merely returning to fair value will produce massive percentage losses. Moreover, bear markets almost always bottom at a 30% to 50% discount to fair value.
Gold mining and silver mining shares are often among the earliest assets to complete both tops and bottoms in any cycle. History always repeats itself with minor variations.
Even though the price of spot gold almost exactly revisited its all-time high from August 2020, the prices of gold mining and silver mining shares remained dramatically below their peaks from that month. This served as an important negative divergence to warn us that, even though this sector is traditionally one of the strongest bear-market performers, for some period of weeks or months we are going to experience a meaningful correction in this sector which has been underway since April 13, 2023.
Funds including GDXJ and GDX are likely to complete their bottoms ahead of nearly all other risk assets over the next several months. Gold has repeatedly failed to remain above 2050 U.S. dollars per troy ounce, including a failed attempt on Wednesday, May 3, 2023, and will likely drop below 1800 before resuming its long-term uptrend which has been in effect since the beginning of this century. After gold mining and silver mining shares complete their pullbacks and begin to rebound, the clock will be ticking for most other stocks which will fall to multi-year lows over the subsequent several weeks or months.
The biggest losses for U.S. stocks will be in 2024-2025, not in 2023. However, we are going to drop a lot more in 2023 than even many bearish analysts are anticipating.
In 2024-2025 U.S. stocks are likely to return to their levels of 2013 and perhaps even 2012. In 2023 we generally won't approach or drop below most of the March 2020 bottoms, because it's not yet timely for such an event to occur. Bear markets are like avalanches: they start out slowly and build up momentum on the way down. All pullbacks are followed by powerful recoveries, each of which convinces most investors that the bear market is over and we're in a new bull market. If you don't believe this then check how many times during the past 1-1/2 years Jim Cramer has insisted that the bear market has ended. Each time he and many other analysts became convinced that "the bear market is over", a renewed, ferocious downturn ensued.
A reasonable 2023 downside target for QQQ would be 200 or 190, and I think we will go lower than that before the end of this calendar year. This should be followed by a rebound of perhaps 40% over a period of several months, after which we will begin a much more severe downtrend.
U.S. equity indices keep making upward spikes as is characteristic of an intermediate-term topping pattern in a bear market.
QQQ briefly surged to intraday highs of 323.63 on May 1, 2023 and 322.47 on May 3, 2023. Topping patterns within bear markets feature repeated attempts to stage upside breakouts, just as bottoming patterns within bear markets are accompanied by repeated sharp downward moves. Investors tend to be easily fooled into believing that repeated upward intraday surges are bullish when they are profoundly bearish.
VIX fell to 15.53 at 11:02 and 11:03 a.m. on Monday, May 1, 2023 for the first time since November 5, 2021.
In past bear markets, multi-month low extremes for VIX were an important sell signal. Similarly, when VIX climbs to a multi-year high and then begins to form lower highs, as I think will be the case much later in 2023, this is a useful buy signal for U.S. equities and their funds.
Investors are repeating the same recency-bias mistake as the Fed had done in 2020.
Why did the Fed wait so long before starting to increase overnight lending rates? Didn't they notice that the U.S. stock market was approaching record bubble levels near the end of 2020? Of course they did, but the deciding factor in not raising rates at that time or in early 2021 was because we hadn't experienced a true inflationary binge since the early 1980s which was forty years earlier. If something hasn't happened for a long time, you start to believe that it's highly unlikely to reoccur even if it is by far the most probable outcome.
Investors are making the same serious mistake today. They're not putting most of their money into U.S. Treasury bills, in most cases not because they aren't aware how overpriced megacap U.S. shares are today (although some are simply ignorant), but because we haven't experienced a crushing bear market since early March 2009 which was more than 14 years ago. Anything which is that far in the past seems psychologically as though it can't happen again, even though it is by far the most likely outcome.
The U.S. dollar index has been making higher lows since early 2021. The correction from the last week of September 2022 essentially ended at the beginning of February 2023 and we have been experiencing higher lows in preparation for a dramatic move higher for the greenback over the next several months.
I keep reading about how I should invest in anticipation of a falling U.S. dollar. As with most media coverage this is badly misguided. One of the major risks to the global economy is that the U.S. dollar, which reached its highest point in September 2022 in more than twenty years, is likely to achieve a 40-year zenith within two or three years. Bet on a rising U.S. dollar, not a falling one.
Investors are overly concerned about commercial real estate and are not nearly concerned enough about residential real estate.
Work-at-home popularity in recent years, encouraging companies to lease significantly less office space, has become widely broadcast and Charlie Munger was recently featured as highlighting this point. This phenomenon is probably more than built into current valuations for commercial real estate and associated REITs. Investors are ignoring the far more dangerous all-time record ratios of residential real estate in most neighborhoods to the average household incomes in those neighborhoods. Eventually residential real estate, like all other assets, must regress to fair value as measured by the average long-term ratios of housing prices to household incomes. This implies a 50% average decline for houses in most U.S. cities over the next few years if you don't adjust for inflation. If U.S. stocks end up mostly completing historic nadirs in 2025 then real estate might complete its bottoming process in 2025-2027 as residential housing prices tend to retreat to important lows a year or two later than the equity market.
The bottom line: 2023 has experienced even more dangerous extremes than 2021 or 2022, and those had been among the most-overvalued episodes in U.S. history for large-cap U.S. equities.
We can debate how much lower QQQ, XLK, and similar assets are likely to drop over the next 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 years. I feel pretty confident that QQQ will eventually trade below 80 which would not even be as large a total percentage decline as its 83.6% collapse from its March 10, 2000 top to its October 10, 2002 bottom. This would represent a slide of 75% for QQQ from its current level. Other funds which are laden with heavy weightings in the largest U.S. companies will suffer proportional declines.
Disclosure of current holdings:
Below is my current asset allocation as of 4:00 p.m. on Monday, May 1, 2023.
The order is as follows: 1) U.S. government bonds; 2) shorts; 3) gold/silver mining; 4) coins; 5) individual securities.
TIAA(Traditional)/VMFXX/FZDXX/Savings/Checking long: 26.44%;
26-Week/17-Week/52-Week/2-Year/8-Week/3-Year/5,10-Year TIPS long: 13.02%;
I Bonds long: 9.35%;
TLT long: 9.04%;
XLK short (all shorts are currently unhedged): 21.45%;
QQQ short: 8.74%;
XLE short: 4.59%;
XLI short: 2.37%;
XLV short: 1.62%;
SMH short: 0.69%;
GDXJ long: 11.45%;
ASA long: 7.33%;
GDX long: 3.25%;
BGEIX long: 1.59%;
Gold/silver/platinum coins: 6.10%;
HBI long: 0.31%;
EWZ long: 0.20%;
EWZS long: 0.08%;
PAK long: 0.02%;
EGPT long: 0.01%.
The numbers add up to more than 100% because short positions only require 25% to 30% collateral in stocks/funds and less than that in U.S. Treasuries (by SEC regulations; some brokers require more) to hold them with no margin required.
