Global Macro Trading Journal

darkhorse,
you seem to trade completely differently from me and most people who stock pick. You use technicals plus stops. I can't follow Einhorn purely without understading the thesis completely and agreeing with it because I will have no staying power. Volatility would shake me out, also he wont tell me when he is out, what he thinks of the news, earnings etc. Following stock tips without understanding and agreeing with the thesis is just a fast way to a poor house and in order to understand the thesis I will have to have experience in that sector. Guys like Einhorn do an absurd amount of work, they even interviewed ex-employees. Instead of following them bindly(Which will give me no staying power), I pick stocks from people whom I respect(And this goes WAY beyond their track record) and that I believe is a slam dunk obvious pick, most of their picks I put in the 'too hard, not enough expertise in the sector category'(I saw all the picks from the last VIC in Omaha and I couldn't find one that I truly understood and saw no flaws in it) but every once and while I run into one

Sure macro has different areas to it but I rather be a master at that and beat the experts there than to have to be a master in 10 sectors and try to beat the experts in those 10 sectors

Furthermore my view is that stocks are in a secular bear, so stock picking skill is worth less than in the 80's and 90's because of diminished risk premia. Also given the end of the Great Moderation and start of the Great Delevering the value of macro skills went up
 
Furthermore guys who are really great at stock picking usually move the market when they put their pick out. IIRC GMCR went down 17% when Einhorn disclosed, had I shorted instantly I might have taken a bit of that move but minutes is not enough to do due diligence

These gaps work as a synthetic 'vig'(Or a artificial bid ask spread), showing a long-run profit that makes up for this vig should be quite a challenge

GMCR end up going down much lower but that is 1 sample. If you ask Einhorn himself how he would trade with a broker that would charge 10% or something like that to put a position in I bet he would say he would have to be SUPER selective. And thats what I'm doing
 
Quote from Daal:

darkhorse,
you seem to trade completely differently from me and most people who stock pick. You use technicals plus stops.
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Well you're right about that... there are so many instances of major moves where a position "acts right" the entire time, either on the way up or the way down, that I don't see the point of holding a position through meaningful price action adversity. (For MY style that is; I am not demanding that others drink my particular brand of vodka.)

I will miss some opportunities thanks to my price action risk mgmt principles, but also gain exposure to many more opportunities than others have access to, because my internal risk management process allow me to "invest first, investigate later" in the Soros style, and otherwise operate on a more fast and frugal information diet. If I like the fundamental thesis, I don't need someone else to tell me when to get in or out. Price does that.

This is the way Jesse Livermore did it -- though he didn't use charts, he definitely used price action and had a "best in class" attitude towards the behavior of his positions -- and it makes perfect sense to me. Livermore was also sort of the original macro guy in the sense of overlaying it all with a firm grasp of general conditions.

I understand it's not for everyone... just articulating one trader's point of view.
 
Quote from Daal:

Furthermore guys who are really great at stock picking usually move the market when they put their pick out. IIRC GMCR went down 17% when Einhorn disclosed, had I shorted instantly I might have taken a bit of that move but minutes is not enough to do due diligence
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Well sure, though that was kind of a special case -- and for guys like me, most of the value those guys provide is on the long side, where they tend to be early. (Though they can be pretty early on the short side too in plenty of instances.)

Quote from Daal:


GMCR end up going down much lower but that is 1 sample.
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Yeah but that is why I cited GMCR... it was still a legit opportunity in terms of elbow room in the valuation, allowing one to use price action to get in at a later time. My methodology requires significant awareness of, and exploitation of, short term price behavior, there's no question about that. But this does not restrict me from holding a great position for a significant trend move once an opportunistic entry has been established.

Quote from Daal:


Furthermore my view is that stocks are in a secular bear, so stock picking skill is worth less than in the 80's and 90's because of diminished risk premia. Also given the end of the Great Moderation and start of the Great Delevering the value of macro skills went up
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p.s. I think views like this have to qualified by time frame. Marc Faber said it best a couple years back (paraphrase), "You may be right about a bull move in stocks merely being a correction within a secular bear, but if that 'correction' means stocks increase in value by 100%, is the correctness of your secular opinion really going to make you feel better?"

Point being the secular viewpoint is so wide and unwieldy relative to intermediate time frames that it can be a crime (or at least a shame) to miss certain moves on the 'secular' justification.
 
Quote from darkhorse:


p.s. I think views like this have to qualified by time frame. Marc Faber said it best a couple years back (paraphrase), "You may be right about a bull move in stocks merely being a correction within a secular bear, but if that 'correction' means stocks increase in value by 100%, is the correctness of your secular opinion really going to make you feel better?"

Point being the secular viewpoint is so wide and unwieldy relative to intermediate time frames that it can be a crime (or at least a shame) to miss certain moves on the 'secular' justification.
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I'd agree with Marc if he is talking about short-term trading but I use the secular view to justify my long-term decisions(Spend time learning macro instead of details about the oil industry companies cashflow statements and things like that, be underweight in equities most of the time, adjust my expected % gain in bull moves % loss in bear moves etc).

Put this way, I rather spend time understanding the macro variables to understand the Great Depression or Japan 90's than to learn the likely result of the use of fracking to the free cash flow of energy companies. I would have to invest a ton of time in the latter in order to feel like I can outsmart the experts there, and those skills are not likely to be robust enough to be used again

In geek's terms, the Return on Total Time Reading in my view is higher in macro than it is in details of certain industry stocks for the next 10 years or so
 
With regards to short-term trading I wouldn't use(And don't use) secular views in it, except perhaps to multi-month trades. In that case I would be a bit more defensive if the trade involved stocks and a bit more aggressive if it involves commodities
 
Nice debate on broad vs specific exposure. Allow me to provide a more specific example of the benefits of simplicity vs complex/targeted exposure. A good illustrative example was commodities and financials during the 2007-09 bear market. Financials rolled over a lot earlier than the general market, and were down huge in 2007, whereas commodities kept going great guns up to H2 2008. Some made very nice returns in 2007 to mid 2008 by a simple long commodities short financials spread, whilst the S&P was not down that much. For example, from the Oct 2007 peak, XLF fell 1/3 up to early July 2008, whereas the RJI commodity ETF rallied 40% over the same period - a 73% return on the spread trade. The spread then lost 43% in the next 7 trading sessions, mainly due to a huge 35% bear market rally in the XLF.

In individual stock names it was even more extreme. Fannie Mae went up 170% in those 7 days, despite being ultimately destined for $1 per share and below.

By contrast, SPY rallied 7.6% during that period.

So, let's compare the total return to max drawdown ratio of all these plays:

i) simple bear play - short SPY from peak (Oct 2007) to trough (March 2009). Total return: approx 55%. Max DD: 27%. Ratio: 2:1

ii) sectoral bear play - short XLF from peak to trough. Total return: 85%. Max DD: 60%. Ratio: 1.42:1

iii) stock-specific bear play - short FNM and LEH from peak to trough (I am being favourable to stockpicking here by choosing 2 ideal shorts that went to zero or near enough to it). Total return: 99%. Max DD: 120% (this DD took place in 3 trading sessions, lol). Ratio: 0.825:1

iv) long/short thematic play - I already showed the results from short XLF long RJI above. Unless you somehow ran the trade for 1 year then exited near the peak, you were looking at making about 1:1 return to max drawdown here, maybe up to 1.5 if you were nimble.

So, let's compare the stock-picking thesis against this data. The two most perfectly selected shorts of the greatest crisis of the modern era; the best long/short 'market neutral' sectoral macro spread play during that time; a more basic targeted sector short in financials; and a simple plain vanilla short SPY, which would have taken all of 2 seconds to analyse. Note that these are all picked with 20/20 hindsight, which gives a huge artificial benefit to the stockpicker thesis - in reality there's a very real risk that your stock or sector picks actually suck or just perform in line with the sector or market, yet with far more risk. So, these results make the stockpicking approach look better than it really is.

Now, if the 'stockpicking is optimal, simplistic bets are lazy' theory is correct, what would you expect? The stock shorts, after extensive research, should have provided the best return to risk ratio. The spread trade should have provided the 2nd best R/R ratio, as it was hedged against most grey swans and caught the weakest and the strongest sectors in the market over that period. The targeted XLF short should have been the 3rd best, and the boring, lazy, simple SPY short should have provided the worst returns relative to risk.

What actually happened? The complete opposite! Boring, lazy short SPY had a fantastic 2:1 R/R ratio, not to mention the least exposure to grey/black swans.

Relatively simple short XLF made 1.55 times more than short SPY but at the cost of a monster 60% drawdown over twice as big as that in the overall market. SPY was superior on a R/R basis by a factor of over 1.4.

The spread play turned out to be a Texas hedge, dropping 42% in a week and a half while the market only budged 7.5% i.e. it was *at least* 6 times riskier than simple short SPY, yet made only 1.3 times as much - in other words, it was a shittier trade by a factor of 4.5 times.

And the perfect short - two individual stocks falling 99-100% each and ending on the pink sheets within a year - well, quite apart from the buttock-clenching 120% 3 day face-melting sucker rally (and another near 100% spike in Spring 2008, again taking only a few trading sessions), if you somehow managed to hold onto your shorts, then you made less than your risk. You dropped 120% to make a 0.85 R/R ratio, comapred to dropping 27% in SPY to make a 2:1 R/R ratio. This makes the stock-specific ideal shorts a worse R/R trade by a factor of 10.5.

So...plain SPY short was the best trade, and over ten times better than the ideal 2 stock short play. The simplest trade had the best R/R ratio and the lowest outright risk. Each additional layer of complexity made things worse.

Clearly, the only way to really earn superior returns by stockpicking here was to buy puts on the short plays (or buy CDS as Einhorn did). But, did Einhorn make 55% on capital with his Lehman play? No he didn't - in fact he was down substantially in 2008. He got the stock pick right but got hosed because he got the big picture call totally wrong.

Now, as darkhorse rightly points out, occasionally you get a flat market where one or two sectors or stocks are on fire. But you also get flat markets where the same sectors or stocks get hammered. Is anyone really nimble enough to switch between the two? Maybe. But on this occasion we were talking about an obvious macro play (shorting an index), versus a complex riskier one (shorting 2 stocks with more specific exposure). The 2008 example shows that the latter might not just take more time and effort, but is quite likely to provide more outright risk and a significantly inferior R/R ratio. That is why simple exposure should never be dismissed as the inferior, lazy trader's option. There is much virtue in simplicity.

In my opinion, stockpicking is best for when there is little or no macro opportunity. You can't earn alpha by big picture calls in a quiet market, and by having a long/short trading book you are earning alpha on both sides whilst massively reducing risk (and you can still dial in the index exposure of your choice via futures). But when you have a slam dunk macro call, the argument for stockpicking is weaker than you would expect.

I would say the best use of stockpicking in big macro plays is for finding the best asymmetric payoffs via options, CDS, and (to some extent) spread plays for their lower overall market risk (although you have to watch out for when these become crowded and start turning into Texas Hedges). Those make more sense to me for targeted exposure than just shorting the stocks themselves. Another lesson from 2008 is that getting the macro right and then finding & picking the best trading vehicle (financial/RE CDS positions) earns a heck of a lot more than just getting the macro right (short SPY).

Summary - simple broad exposure is a very robust, low risk, and surprisingly attractive play. Doing a bit more legwork to pick specific sectors or stocks might actually backfire due to the huge increase in risk. Probably the best play is to pick not just the stocks but the best trading vehicles for them. I personally would prefer the bulk of my exposure in a broad index or (if its just a sector that's going to move) sector ETF, and then a few small speculative asymmetric bets on targeted individual stocks which best express the macro view.
 
Quote from Ghost of Cutten:



In my opinion, stockpicking is best for when there is little or no macro opportunity. You can't earn alpha by big picture calls in a quiet market, and by having a long/short trading book you are earning alpha on both sides whilst massively reducing risk (and you can still dial in the index exposure of your choice via futures). But when you have a slam dunk macro call, the argument for stockpicking is weaker than you would expect.
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Yes -- strongly agree with this and clearly stated as much.

Though in reality it is not quite binary (all macro or all stock picking), but more a continuum where one or the other dominates. In a stellar macro environment one might be heavy on indexes with some light industry baskets as dressing; in a total stock picker's environment one might be equity focused with a few macro trades on the edges.

Quote from Ghost of Cutten:


Summary - simple broad exposure is a very robust, low risk, and surprisingly attractive play. Doing a bit more legwork to pick specific sectors or stocks might actually backfire due to the huge increase in risk. Probably the best play is to pick not just the stocks but the best trading vehicles for them. I personally would prefer the bulk of my exposure in a broad index or (if its just a sector that's going to move) sector ETF, and then a few small speculative asymmetric bets on targeted individual stocks which best express the macro view.
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Disagree with the above, though, because I don't think one can make such a universal statement about "simple broad exposure." It goes back to situational dynamics; sometimes simple broad exposure is the way to go in spades; sometimes it isn't worth squat.

As for 'huge increase in risk', that opens another can of worms. A skilled investor would say this is exactly backwards (the idea that broad exposure entails less risk than a carefully crafted portfolio).
 
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