To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (50536 ) 3/19/2000 10:17:00 AM From: Alex Respond to of 116796
Hedging manoeuvres disguise the truth By BRIAN HALE WALL STREET Monday 20 March 2000 Springtime for old-economy stocks; winter for technology and Nasdaq? Don't hang your hat on it. The two-day, 8 per cent rally in the Dow Industrials produced lots of words about "old economy" stocks sweeping back into favor and technology stocks falling from grace; and not only in America ... land of opportunity... The latest born-in-the-USA theory flashed around the globe's markets faster than the last cold keg at a midsummer picnic as everyone aped Wall Street, selling the story that the technology bubble was over and the old economies' walking wounded were back in the front lines. It's an attractive story for those who like to skim along the surface, and proves yet again that the media helps to create reality, rather than just reporting it. But it's a shame that it's not true because apeing an unreal version of Wall Street made monkeys out of lots of investors around the world. The truth is a little harder to find. A bit turns up here, a bit there, another piece in the corner. No one ever puts all the jigsaw together but you can see enough corners, bits of sky and shapes in the middle to venture a good guess at what game was really going on down on Wall Street last week. Same game as always ... hedge funds, principal trading desks and the other high-rollers making money; almost everyone else losing. Back-track a little to this column's comment two weeks ago about the short-squeeze building on Wall Street; suggestions that it was the biggest squeeze on short-sellers ever seen; and worries that it was exposing the share market to much greater volatility because short-sellers were a large component of natural buyers and the squeeze was pulling many of them out of the game. Next, skip over to the futures market. From last October the biggest play for hedge funds since the old "Tokyo cash-and-carry" days has been going long (buying) Nasdaq futures at the same time as shorting (selling) SP 500 futures - usually in the ratio of two-to-one. The play got even bigger after George Soros and a few other heavyweight hedge-funders confessed that a lot of their 19 per cent quarterly returns came from the long/short game that can be played through Nasdaq 100 Index futures, through options or through options on futures. A day before last week's gyrations started, a lot of big money started to flow the other way - going long the largely old economy SP 500 Index futures and going short Nasdaq. Short squeeze? This reversal made a lot of people stop and think; particularly as we were heading into March's usually volatile triple-witching - the quarterly expiration of index futures, index future options and stock options. Wall Street awoke last Monday to pullbacks on Asian bourses. You might wonder what or who caused that ... but it was perfectly timed for the reversal play. Heavy selling in the US futures market made for a big drop at the opening, with the Dow down 193 points at the opening and the Nasdaq Composite Index plunging a gut-wrenching 209 points. Ten minutes later, the so-called old-economy rebound began. Closing scoreline: SP down 0.82 per cent, Nasdaq down 2.8 per cent. Tuesday was even better for the reversal game players, with the second-biggest point decline in Nasdaq history, a 200-point (4.1 per cent) drop, and the SP down 1.77 per cent but the play really started to come alive on Wednesday when the SP climbed 2.43 per cent while Nasdaq dropped another 2.63 per cent, taking its cumulative three-day plunge to almost 10 per cent. Thursday was the icing on the cake. Wall Street sharemarkets closed with the SP up another 4.76 per cent and Nasdaq also up, by 134 points or 2.94 per cent, but the real game turned at 11 o'clock in the morning when the Nasdaq composite was still down another 2.5 per cent. That was when the big players started to reverse their reversal and go back to the long Nasdaq/short SP play.
They made a bundle but the reversal play only works for a few days at a time and maybe a couple of times a year. Then it's time to reverse the reversal and go back to the game that works most of the time. It was time to go back to it on Thursday because the Nasdaq options expired on Thursday - unlike the SP options, which were caught up in the quarterly triple-witching. Of course it helps the game along if you can get the spectators to join in, and Wall Street (helped by America's financial cable TV) is very good at that. It's full of spin doctors like technical analysts who can talk about bounces off target levels and strategists who can talk about the rotation of money from technology into the old economy. So, once the game is running there's never a shortage of pundits predicting major declines in tech stocks or big leaps in older stocks, and that usually is enough to attract a wave of momentum traders. That in turn forces a wave of covering by investors and hedge funds who are caught "shorting" individual stocks or stock options and, according to some people, Thursday produced an extra wave of corporate buybacks by old-economy companies suddenly worried that their share prices would roar away before they could use their allocated buyback money. And of course it was triple-witching week, so everyone who has been collecting a nice earner from shorting call options on shares that haven't gone anywhere but down for a long time was facing big problems as shares tore through strike price after strike price, particularly if they couldn't buy back the calls and had to go looking for shares. Talk about a witches' brew. Fuji Futures' Philip Ruffat, who had a good seat in the stands for this game, says the supposed "old economy return/tech wreck" divergence clearly ran out of steam late on Thursday morning, with Nasdaq outperforming the SP after the mid-afternoon when the options players were unwinding their reverse play while his technical colleague, Holly Liss, points out that the Nasdaq June contract recovered nearly 52 per cent of the week's losses in only one session. Ruffat sees a continuation of the return to techs that hoisted the Nasdaq Composite by another 1.71 per cent on Friday while the Dow dropped 0.33 per cent and the SP 500 barely moved despite gains in its tech stocks and falls in its old economy stocks. It would be an irony if the "old economy resurgent" stories die too slowly and misled investors do start to suck their money out of techs and push it back into old-economy stocks because the ultimate truth is the weight of money - but you wouldn't hang your hat on that happening. Still, there's always tomorrow's Fed interest rate-setting meeting to shake things up.theage.com.au