With the S&P 500 breaking 1,600 for the first time ever last week and finally getting above those pesky 2007 highs, we decided to look at just how well everything else has done in comparison since all was well before the financial collapse, and see if any other asset classes are back above their 2007 (nominal) highs. You can see the S&P (price only) middling along there about the exact same as Real Estate, just pushing back above the 1000 line.
Disclaimer: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
Managed Futures = Newedge CTA Index, Bonds = Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND)
Hedge Funds = DJCS Core Hedge Fund Index Commodities = iShares GSCI ETF (GSG)
Real Estate = iShares DJ Real Estate ETF (IYR) World Stocks = MCSI World Index (ex USA)
US Stocks = S&P 500
The big winner since the last time stocks were at these levels: you guessed it, BONDS. You know, the bonds that people say are getting bubbly. Hedge Funds and Managed Futures also look quite good in relation to stocks since 2007, although they’ve had their problems underperforming stocks in the past few years. Now, some are pointing out that the S&P is still down significantly in inflation-adjusted terms from the 2000 high (much less the 2007 high), but when comparing all the asset classes to each other – the real vs nominal game doesn’t apply. We would simply shift all the curves lower to adjust for inflation, and the S&P would still be middle of the pack.
It’s also quite a thing to take a step back and remember that huge spike in commodity prices, and the fact that they peaked much later than stocks did. We’ll see what happens over the next six years, but in the meantime – this is a good reminder that it is a marathon, not a sprint. And the fastest one around the track this past year or two or three may still be lagging others in the overall race.
Black Monday 1987 and the 100 foot tall man
Even though it is hard to move more than a few feet in the blogosphere today without seeing a piece on the fateful crash of 25 years ago today, we couldn’t resist getting in on the action. Unfortunately, managed futures was nowhere close to mainstream in 1987 – CTAs were still in their infancy, as was their reputation for solid crisis-period performance (Disclaimer: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results), so it is hard to say how managed futures as they exist today would have performed that day.
However, the futures markets were around back then, and received a fair share of the blame for the day’s trading action – particularly for the rise of portfolio insurance based on the idea of selling futures short during declines to hedge against losses in stocks. This led to a much steeper decline, for instance, in the S&P 500 futures contract than in the actual S&P 500:
That’s right, while the S&P 500 was down -20.5%, the S&P futures contract fell -28.6% (in a single day). The difference between the futures and the cash (-8% in a single day) was a 9 sigma event in and of itself, an event supposed to occur on a normal distribution curve about once in every 50 billion trading days (or about 200 million years worth of data). And the odds of the overall move happening – were something on the order of 1 in a trillion. This is the quintessential example of a “Black Swan Event” coined by Nassim Taleb.
To put that into terms more easily understood, it’s like a 110 foot tall man walked in the door. It simply isn’t possible on a normally distributed data set, meaning – you guessed it – we can’t use normally distributed curves for analyzing the stock market or any other market for that matter. Or for analyzing bands popularity, book sales, or wealth. Bill Gates’ wealth is a 1000+ sigma event.
Of course – the best way to sum up the risk of another October market swoon was made many decades before Black Monday even happened.