INTERESTING ARTICLE ON FOLLOWING THE HERD

Why Contrarians Make Money And Trend Chasers Lose Money
Simon Maierhofer
On Friday April 17, 2009, 11:33 am EDT

Don't you hate being left out? Going against the grain is usually the unpopular direction to go. Nobody likes to be the oddball out. For the sake of popularity, humans tend to conform to the general trend eventually, especially if the trend continues to persist.

As it turns out, when it comes to investing, being the oddball is much more profitable. Oddballs in the investment community are considered contrarians and contrarian investors have been one of the few to actually book profits over the past year or so.

If you are willing to exchange some of your trend conforming popularity in return for profitability (don't worry, making money will once again increase your popularity score), this article is for you.

Trend chasing - a losing proposition

Most investors - novices and pros alike - rely on news and news- based forecasts to make their buy/sell decisions. News is always good at the top and bad at the bottom. Excessively bullish news will trick you into the market before it falls, excessively bad news will squeeze you out of the market before it bounces.

Here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean: Equity mutual fund cash reserves reached an all-time low of only 3.5% just before the market topped in October 2007. This means that 96.5% of mutual fund managed assets got to participate in the decline that followed.

Broad index funds such as the Dow Jones (NYSEArca: DIA - News), S&P 500 (NYSEArca: SPY - News) and Russell 1000 (NYSEArca: IWB - News) lost over 50% from top to bottom. Most actively managed mutual funds did even worse. Why? Because fund managers based their decisions on positive news.

In the fall of 2008, the Federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation shifted most of its $65 billion in assets from bonds to stocks and real estate. This move came just before the bear's attack intensified.

In 2007, companies belonging to the S&P 500 index spent a record $590 billion repurchasing their own shares. On average, this buy-back decision resulted in a 50% loss. Index components like General Electric (NYSE: GE - News) and JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM - News) did much worse than the broader market.

General Properties (NYSE: GGP - News), one of the largest mall operators in the states, had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to its aggressive and overleveraged expansion at the height of the real estate boom.

Yes, as the example of General Properties and once highflying homebuilders (NYSEArca: XHB - News) shows, trend chasing is actually the root cause for the financial and economic meltdown. The fear of losing out on profits caused even the most prudent investors and business men to throw caution to the wind.

As Ben Stein commented in the New York Times, nearly all of us are part of creating the prevailing trend, which inevitably turns against its creators. Ben noted that 'almost all economic pundits and soothsayers - whether on television, in newspapers, or at brokerage firms - are asked to tell the future. Some of them are stunningly well paid for their efforts, even though they are wrong decade after decade. Yet, we cry out for someone to tell us the future, like children who want to hear the end of the story.'

If you are looking for a crystal ball of what the future holds - as long as it relates to equities and economics - resisting your urges and swimming against the current is your best bet.

Easier said than done

As so often, this is easier said than done. Certain people, perhaps even prior contrarians with a stellar reputation and brilliant mind, may abandon their out of the box views and conform to the general trend tempting you to do the same.

Crispin Odey, a London hedge-fund manager who gained fame and money by shorting U.K. banks, has switched teams and is now cheering for the bulls. After being short for most of 2008, Mr. Odey started to accumulate bank stocks again earlier in 2009. The SPDR KBW Bank ETF (NYSEArca: KBE - News) is the U.S. cousin to U.K. bank stocks.

On a larger scale, even Mr. Roubini, one of the few economists who predicted the real estate meltdown and Mr. Soros, the billionaire investor who came out of retirement to steer his Quantum fund to an 8% gain in 2008, believe that the worst is over. Albeit slow, they expect an economic recovery to begin over the next year or two.

Like sand on the beach

Look around and you'll see that economic forecasts are as abundant as sand on the beach, and they are worth just as much. It is tough to find a precious gem (an accurate forecast) amidst worthless sand.

To further illustrate the folly of news and news based forecasts, consider this: On March 9th, the day the market bottomed, the Wall Street Journal featured an article called 'Dow 5,000 - There's a Case For It.'

True, there might be a case for it eventually (more about that below), but as it turned out, the market decided that March 9th was not the time and place in history.

In fact, just a few days earlier, on March 2nd, the ETF Profit Strategy Newsletter sent out a Trend Change Alert recommending ETFs that benefit from a rising market. Such ETFs included traditional broad market index ETFs, dividend ETFs, sector ETFs like the Financial Select Sector SPDRs (NYSEArca: XLF - News) and leveraged ETFs such as the Ultra Dow Jones ProShares (NYSEArca: DDM - News) and Direxion Large Cap Bull (NYSEArca: BGU - News).


Back to the folly of a news-driven market; Wells Fargo's (NYSE: WFC - News) positive earnings report sent stocks soaring last week while Goldman Sachs' (NYSE: GS - News) earnings surprise this week was greeted with indifference. If news drives the market, why does the market react differently to essentially the same piece of news?

The profit prophet

The ETF Profit Strategy Newsletter has often referred to the inverse effect investor sentiment tends to have on the market's performance. On December 15th for example, it noted the following: 'Optimistic sentiment, which should be more visible above Dow 9,000, will give way to further declines. At this point, the best target for a temporary low is 6,700 for the Dow and 700 for the S&P 500. Extreme pessimistic sentiment may drive the indexes even towards Dow 6,000 and S&P 600.'

The beginning of January, right about when investors started to feel comfortable with the market's future prospects again, proved to be the time to load up on short ETFs such as the UltraShort Dow Jones ProShares (NYSEArca: DXD - News), UltraShort MidCap ProShares (NYSEArca: MZZ - News), Direxion Large Cap Bear (NYSEArca: BGZ - News) and many more.

Economists and market analysts often use projected growth and earnings numbers as foundation for their forecasts. We have found that using projected numbers does not deliver accurate results. 'Projected' implies the possibility and often probability of change. Who wants to hear after the fact, 'sorry, we had to adjust our forecast because things got worse than expected?'

The market's built-in indicators

Most people don't know this, but the stock market has several built in indicators visible to the naked eye. Just like a fever is the body's way to let you know something's wrong, the stock market's internal indicators are telling investors whether its current valuations are 'healthy or sick.'

While it does take some common sense to interpret the market's symptoms, you don't need to be a Doctor or rocket scientist to figure them out.

Dividend yields, P/E ratios and investor sentiment are the market's way of letting us know what's going on. An analysis of the above three indicators reveals that the stock market does not bottom until dividend yields, P/E ratios and investor sentiment reach certain levels, just like your body is telling you that you won't be fine until your temperature calibrates back to about 98.6 degrees.

An in-depth analysis of the above three indicators along with the Dow Jones measured in the only true currency, gold is available in the March issue of the ETF Profit Strategy Newsletter. The results show that contrarians will continue to be the ones raking in profits.






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From: Pieter van Leeuwen [mailto:pietertvl@nethere.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 8:58 PM
To: Andreas Meyer; 'Elva Edwards'; Eric Swann; 'Joel McCorkel'; Ken Eng; 'Kenneth Jenness'; 'Marc Rosen (home)'; Marc Rosen; Matt Maciejewski; Steve Dossick; 'Tom Webb'
Subject: Hedgie on yesterday's bond mkt action



http://www.thefieldcheckgroup.com/blog/

5-28 - Potential Consequences of 5.5% Mortgage Rates
Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | By Mr. Mortgage


Mortgage Rates - It Could be as Bad as You Can Imagine

With respect to yesterday’s in the mortgage market — yes, it is as bad as you can imagine. No call can be made on the near-term, however, until we see where this settles out over the next week of so. If rates do stay in the mid 5%’s, the mortgage and housing market will encounter a sizable stumble. The following is not speculation. This is what happens when rates surge up in a short period of time - I lived this nightmare many times.

Yesterday, the mortgage market was so volatile that banks and mortgage bankers across the nation issued multiple midday price changes for the worse, leading many to ultimately shut down the ability to lock loans around 1pm PST. This is not uncommon over the past five months, but not that common either. Lenders that maintained the ability to lock loans had rates UP as much as 75bps in a single day. Jumbo GSE money — $417k - $729,750 — has been blown out completely with some lender’s at 8%. I have seen it all in the mortgage world — well, I thought I had.

A good friend in the center of all of the mortgage capital markets turmoil said to me yesterday “feels like they [the Fed] have lost the battle…pretty obvious from the start but kind of scary to live through it … today felt like LTCM with respect to liquidity.”

The consequences of 5.5% rates are enormous. Because of capacity issues and the long time line to actually fund a loan in this market, very few borrowers ever got the 4.25% to 4.75% perceived to be the prevailing rate range for everyone.

A significant percentage of loan applications (refis particularly) in the pipeline are submitted to the lenders without a rate lock. This is because consumers are incented by much better pricing to lock for a short period of time…12-30 day rate locks carry the best rates by a long shot. But to get this short-term rate lock, the loan has to be complete enough to draw loan documents, which has been taking 45-75 days over the past several months depending upon the lender’s time line. Therefore, millions of refi applications presently in the pipeline, on which lenders already spent a considerably amount of time and money processing, will never fund.

Furthermore, many of these ‘applicants’ with loans in process were awaiting the magical 4.5% rate before they lock — a large percentage of these suddenly died yesterday. From the lows of a month ago to today, rates are up 20%. To make matters worse, after 90-days much of the paperwork (much taken at the date of application) within the file becomes stale-dated and has to be re-done with new dates — if rates don’t come down quickly many will have to be canceled out of the lender’s system.

To add insult to near-mortal injury, unless this spike in rates corrects quickly, a large percentage of unlocked purchases and refis will have to be denied because at the higher interest rate level, borrowers do not qualify any longer. For the final groin kicker, a 5.5% rate just does not benefit nearly as many people as a 4.5%-5% rate does. Millions already have 5.25% to 5.75% fixed rates left over from 2002-2006.

This is a perfect example of why the weekly Mortgage Applications Index is an unreliable indicator of future loan fundings and has been for a year and a half with the market so volatile. As a matter of fact you will see this index crumble over the next few weeks at the same disproportional rate as it increased over the past several months if rates don’t settle lower quickly.

With respect to banks, mortgage banks, servicers etc, under-hedging a potential sell-off with the Fed supposedly having everybody’s back was a common theme. Banks could lose their entire Q2 mortgage banking earnings and middle market mortgage banker may never recover or immediately have to close shop.

Lastly, consider sentiment — this is a real killer. This massive rate spike may have invalidated hundreds of billions spent to control the mortgage market literally overnight. This leaves the mortgage and housing market very vulnerable.

Mortgage loan officers around the country are having a very very bad day today explaining to their clients why their rate was not locked and how rates are going to come right back down. They are also taking calls from borrowers with locked loans to confirm that the loan is indeed locked, inquiring as to when it will be approved or fund, and to rush the process in order to fund the loan by end of the lock-in term. This creates a customer service log-jam that chews through lender capacity quickly making the loan process even longer. Loans with second mortgages that need to be subordinated, are in a world of their own. Essentially, everything becomes a rush. Subsequently, loan officers will not feel like getting too aggressive taking new loan applications at least for the next month unless this corrects quickly.

Press surrounding this event will be the talk of Main Street immediately and cast a serious doubt over the housing recovery story that has been the common theme for months. An overnight housing market sentiment killer wildcard is something that nobody was factoring in.

We have to see where all this settles over the next few days before making a near to mid-term call on the outright damage because at this point, Fed or Treasury shock and awe is almost certain — another common theme has been ‘if it doesn’t work throw much more money at it’.

Obviously they have been following this closely for the past few weeks, as conditions began to deteriorate, and have likely been waiting to see where the upper range was before shocking in order to get maximum benefit…that would be a humongous short squeeze in Bonds driving rates lower. The problem is…if they do shock her and it is sold into with the same fury that we have been seeing, there may not be an act two.

The bond and mortgage market got complacent with the ultimate in moral hazard’s — the Fed’s got my back. Complacency is a killer. Where we stand in two weeks in unknowable.

Re-leveraging Through Exotic Interest Only Financing

Those that must close a loan, who were not locked and who need a rate in the 4%’s will be forced into an Agency 3/1 or 5/1 fully amortized or interest only. Obviously, interest only affords the most leverage but is in part what got us here in the first place. Maybe that is the plan behind all of this — today’s rates for good borrowers are still in the high 4%’s.