<action in the stock market is just too blatantly stupid.>
It's "herding", Grantham discusses it here. It's really amplified by leveraged speculative hedge funds, who have turned it into a unstable casino.
Grantham, Gross Gloomy Over Troubles and Bubbles: Chet Currier
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Here's a handy way for optimistic investors to test the strength of their convictions:
Spend an hour or two perusing the latest comments of two widely respected money managers, Jeremy Grantham and Bill Gross.
Gross's views are so glum he himself speaks of them as ``the economics of despair.'' Grantham says the history of investment ``bubbles'' argues for a drop of about 35 percent in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, on top of the 40 percent slide already endured in 2000-02.
``Asia has hollowed out our manufacturing base and is now making inroads into services,'' says Gross, chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, where he oversees $415 billion including the biggest bond mutual fund. ``We can't really educate or innovate our way out of this.''
In the circumstances, Gross says (at pimco.com +Breaking+Commentary/IO/2004/IO_ N ov_04.htm), the Federal Reserve will have to hold interest rates very low. ``While that keeps the patient/economy breathing, it leads to asset bubbles, potential inflation, and a declining currency over time,'' he says.
Grantham, chairman of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., a Boston-based manager of $66 billion in mostly institutional money, says ``the current U.S. equity bubble'' is the 28th he found combing through the history of currency, commodity and stock markets ( gmo.com , registration required).
Painful Pattern
All the other 27 bubbles, he says, ``broke and went back to the pre-existing trend.'' For the S&P 500 to do the same now, he calculates, it would have to hit 720, compared with a recent level above 1100.
``Everything important about markets is mean-reverting or, if you prefer, wanders about a trend,'' he says. ``Prices are pushed away from fair price by a series of `inefficiencies,' and eventually dragged back by the logic of value.''
One of those inefficiencies, says Grantham, is a phenomenon called herding, which occurs among both individual and institutional investors.
In a highly specialized institutional world where managers are measured almost microscopically against benchmarks, Grantham says, ``refusing on value principles to buy in a bubble will look dangerously eccentric. This has guaranteed increasingly larger and longer market distortions.''
Both Sides Now
Gross gives us an external reason -- Fed policy -- to figure on bubbles as a continuing part of the investment scene. Grantham gives us an internal reason, forces in modern financial life that reinforce the human tendency to ``buy because others are buying.''
For myself, I need little convincing that we already live in a bubble-prone age. Stocks, notorious for their attempt to defy gravity in the late 1990s, have since been mimicked by real estate markets in many places, and perhaps some commodity markets too. Look no further than the almost-doubling in the price of crude oil over the last year.
If bubbles are so readily apparent, and so dangerous, why aren't more investors fleeing them? In the week or two since Gross's and Grantham's commentaries came out, stock prices have actually risen.
``The problem with bubbles breaking and going back to trend is that some do it quickly and some slowly,'' Grantham writes. He says the time spans of past bubbles he examined ranged from three minutes to 18 years.
Matter of Time
Thus, a simple strategy of staying away when bubbles threaten poses problems for many people who need to invest within a limited period of years -- before the children are ready for college or it's time to retire.
Suppose you or I detected an incipient bubble in the stock market when price-earnings ratios climbed above 15 to one in the early 1990s, and jumped out of stocks. A dozen years later, we would still be waiting for a proper chance to buy back in, and we would have lost a big chunk of precious time.
So what to do? Investors can heed Grantham's advice to ``lower risk and survive to fight another day.'' Those who don't agree with his assessment of the situation can still take his view into account by submitting their investments to a Grantham- style crash-test.
How would the investment plan look, and how would the investor feel, if the stock holdings were marked down by 35 percent or 40 percent? Given one's age and circumstances, how much time would the plan have to try to recoup the losses?
No bullish investor ought to shy away from such questions. At the very least, they help differentiate between reasoned optimism and reckless see-no-evil, hear-no-evil hope. |
