17/2/16: Markets Do Come Back... But Not ISEQ

Back in 2008, when the Irish markets were tanking, one of the managing partners in a large Irish stock brokerage issued an infamous research note, telling clients that while things were bad, things will be good again.  The main point of the note was that "markets do come back" no matter what.

As evidence of such "comebacks", the author of the note offered an anecdote of his relative trying to sell property prior to the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the 1999. The sale, having fallen through due to the crisis hitting hard, was completed at 2/3rds of the original offered price some 8 years ago. This was the analyst's evidence for the 'inevitability of recovery'.

Back at the time the note was issued, I pointed out to the said analyst that he missed a major problem: inflation. By the time his relative did conclude the sale, the price he/she got for the property was down 80% or more, not 33%, because 8 years of inflation chewed through his/her returns.

Ever since then, I have been tracking (occasionally - usually once a year) Irish stock exchange broadest index, ISEQ, for the signs that "markets do come back". Here is the latest update: we are still waiting for when they "come back".

In nominal terms, things are dire:

Even though ISEQ no longer contains the hardest hit, by the crisis, equities - a little cheat trick used by Irish Stuffbrokers to sell ISEQ 'returns' is never correcting them for survivourship bias, but let us indulge them on this - ISEQ is still massively below pre-crisis peak. It has not 'come back', but instead, on its peak-to-trough way, in nominal terms, it was falling 972.6 points per month on average and on its 'coming back' way from the trough it has been averaging gains of just 46.2 points per month. Which means the market drop rate was 20 times faster than the market's 'coming back' rate.

However, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, ISEQ is in a horrific shape. even though inflation has been extremely low, it has been present nonetheless. And chart below shows ISEQ in inflation-adjusted terms:

The freak show of Irish stocks is self-evidently not in a rude health. The 'coming back' of the Irish markets is so bad, that if you invested in them during October 1997-December 1999 period, today you would have lost, on average 10% of your investment, and if you invested in ISEQ back in 1Q 1998, you would be down 15.8% once inflation is factored in.

Worse, compared to pre-crisis peak, we are nowhere near that 'come back' territory, some 8 years and 9 months after reaching the peak, the index is still 41.4% down in real terms. Current level (using last 3 months average) of the index is below all period averages for the index, save for the period of post-dot.com crash, but using latest ISEQ reading (instead of a 3mo average), the market now is below even that abysmal period average.

Thus, overall, at current position, ISEQ offers us not the lesson of a market that "comes back", but a market that goes nowhere over the last 18 years. And that, folks, is the combined power of inflation and nonsense that is Irish Stuffbrokerage research... err... marketing.

5/4/2014: Markets do come back… some faster others slower…

A very neat summary table showing equity markets responses to major past shocks, starting with 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.

Most interesting is the recovery duration: median 14 days to pre-shock levels, with maximum of 285 days in the case of Lehman Bankruptcy for the US markets. Now, put this against Irish 'recovery' with Iseq (note the above figures are not adjusted to control for survivorship bias) still deeply below pre-crisis valuations, some 2,200 days and counting…

5/11/2012: Lehman Bros & Irish ISEQ - II

And a bit more on indices dynamics:

Some interesting longer term trends from the major indices and VIX revealing the underlying structure of the Irish and the euro area crises. Note: data covers period through September 2012.

Starting from the top, here are indices of major stock prices, normalized back to February 2005 for comparative purposes. Relative to the peak, currently, CAC40 stands at around -41.9%, while FTSE MIB is at -62.5%, FTSE Eurotop 100 at -31.7%, FTSE ALL Shares at -11.22%, DAX at -8.41%, S&P500 at -6.15% and IBEX35 at -48.5%. Meanwhile, 'special' Ireland's ISEQ is at -66.9%.

Chart Index 1.0 and Index 1.1.

Clearly, Ireland is the poorest performer in the class.

Now, it is worth noting that Ireland's stock market is also 'distinguished' by a very 'special' characteristic of being the riskiest of all markets compared, with STDev of returns at 36.45 (on normalized index). Compared to the French market (STDev=22.34 for the period from the start of 2005 through today), Italian market (STDev = 28.95), FTSE Eurotop 100 (STDev = 18.90), FTSE All Shares (STDev = 13.70), German DAX (STDev = 23.05), S&P500 (STDev =14.55) and Spanish market (IBEX STDev = 23.70), Ireland is a risky gamble. Given that the direction of this bet, in the case of Ireland has been down from May 2007, virtually uninterrupted, the proposition of 'patriotic investment' in Ireland's stocks is an extremely risky gamble.

Normalizing the indices at their peak values (set peak at 100), chart below clearly shows the constant, persistent underperformance of the ISEQ.

Chart Index2.0

Now, let's take a look at the core driver of global fundamentals: risk aversion as reflected in VIX index. In general, rising VIX signals rising risk aversion and should be associated with falling stock valuations. Once again, for comparative reasons, we use indexed series of weekly returns for 1999-September 2012. Up until the crisis, Irish stock prices behaved broadly in line with the same relationship to VIX that holds for all other major indices. Chart below illustrates this for FTSE Eurotop 100, but the same holds for other major indices. VIX up, risk-aversion up, stock indices, including ISEQ, down.

Chart VIX1.1

Around Q1 2009 something changed. ISEQ lost any connection with 'reality' of the global markets and acquired life of its own. Or rather - a zombie life of it own. No matter what the global appetite for risk was doing, Irish stocks did not have much of a link with global investment fundamentals.

Another interesting point of the above chart is that Lehman Brothers were not a trigger for Irish crisis (as many of us have been saying for ages, despite the Government's continued assertions to the contrary). Irish market peaked in the week of May 21st, 2007, Lehman Brothers folded on September 15th, 2008, with most of the impact in terms of our indices occurring at September 15th-October 6, 2008, some 16 months after Irish markets began crashing. Prior to Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, ISEQ dropped from a peak of 147.3 to 61.6, while following the Lehman Brothers and until the global stock market trough of March 2, 2009, ISEQ fell to roughly 31.9 reading. So even in theory, Lehman bankruptcy could have accounted for no more than 29.7 point drop on the normalized ISEQ, while pre-Lehman drivers collapsed ISEQ by 85.7 points. 

More revealingly, ISEQ steep sell-offs through out the entire crisis have led, not followed, sell-offs in major indices. In other words, if Lehman caused the global market meltdown, then ISEQ 'caused' Lehman bankruptcy. Which, of course, is absurd.

There are many other stories that can be told looking at the Irish Stock Exchange performance, especially once higher moments to returns distribution are factored in, but I shall leave it to MSc students to explore.

5/11/2012: Lehman Bros & Irish ISEQ

Here's an interesting little factoid. The theory - usually advanced by the Irish Government - goes that Lehman Brothers bankruptcy has been a major driver of the Irish crisis. I have disputed this for ages now and more and more evidence turns up contrary to that when more and more data is considered.

Now, here's a new bit.

Suppose Lehman Bros did contribute significantly to the Irish crisis gravity. In that case, given Lehman Brothers bankruptcy contributed adversely to the global markets, we can expect a dramatic contagion from the global markets panic to Irish markets. One way to gauge this is to look at the changes in correlations between the measure of overall 'panic' in the international markets and the behaviour of the returns to Irish stock market indices.

Let's take ISEQ index for Irish markets and VIX for a measure of the panic sentiment in the global markets. Let's take weekly returns in ISEQ and correlate them to weekly changes in VIX. I use log-differencing in that exercise and 52 weeks rolling correlations.

What should we expect to see? If the 'Lehmans caused Irish crisis or worsened it' theory holds, we should expect correlation between ISEQ weekly returns and changes in weekly VIX readings to be negative (VIX rising during the crisis signals rising risk aversion in the markets). For Irish markets to be influenced significantly, or differently from other markets around the world, such negative correlations should be larger in absolute value than for other countries.

What do we see? Here is a table of averages:

Contrary to the hypothesis of 'Lehmans caused Irish crisis', we see that throughout the period of the crisis, ISEQ suffered shallower, not deeper, spillover from global risk aversion to equity valuations, save for Spanish IBEX index. In other words, evidence suggests that Irish 'disease', like Spanish 'disease' was driven more by idiosyncratic - own market-specific - factors rather than by global panic.

Here's the chart, showing just how consistently closer to zero ISEQ correlation to VIX was during the post-Lehman panic period:

And here is a chart showing skew in the distribution of weekly returns which shows that during the crisis, Ireland's ISEQ suffered less from global markets 'bad news' spillovers (at the point of immediate global markets panics, such as Lehmans episode), but exhibited  a much worse negative skew than other peers in the period from June 2010 through Q1 2012.

Economics 23/12/2009: Ending 2009 in Red

As 2009 is drawing to a close, let's take a quick look at the broad shares performance in Ireland. starting with a 10-year picture for ISEQ, S&P500 and Nasdaq:
This clearly shows just how dreadful the crisis has been for Ireland - in terms of total decline on the peak valuations. A five-year view confirms this:
But it also shows that 2008 was much worse for Ireland Inc than it was for the benchmarks. And despite the deceptive nature of statistics (remember - we started 2009 at a much lower valuation than other indices, so we could have expected a much stronger bounce from the bottom over 2009 bear rally), we remain heavy underperformers over 5 year horizon.
Ditto over the two year horizon although much closer/tighter view on the 2009 alone:
And if you were swayed by the 'buy' signals from our ever-optimistic brokers in the H2 2009, here is what you've been aiming for:
Yeeeks... At the beginning of the year, I predicted that the markets will continue discounting Ireland throughout 2009 on the back of the adverse news flow (deeper recession, failures in fiscal governance and collapse of banking) relative to the broader global indices. Clearly, they did.

Oh and one more reminder - back in July-August 2008 an MD of our top-5 stockbrokerage firms issued a fanfare-sounding Green Jersey note telling his clients that 'markets come back'.
Were we to listen - we would be buying ISEQ at 5,070 and valuing it today at under 3,000 - a 40.8% drop. Some price for a Green Jersey.

Oh, and it wasn't exactly a ride for the risk-averse, even compared to the scary trender like Nasdaq:
So markets do come back, don't take me wrong - except in their own time and at their own speed. Better luck in 2010, folks!

Daily Economics Update 21/03/2009

Weekly analysis: Irish shares

The volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange has topped the 50-day moving average on six of the seven days that the stock market has been up since March 6 (the day on which the S&P 500 touched its most recent low). The broad benchmark index has gained 15% since that low, sparking hopes of a recovery. The significant issue here is in the volume figure, not in the actual rise in the index, as stronger volumes on a rising trend tend to support more risk-taking and signal investors' support for the trend.

Interestingly, the same, but less pronounced, process has been starting on Friday in the Irish markets.
Chart above shows last week's movements in ISE Total Price Index (IETP), Irish Financials Index (IFIN), AIB, BofI and IL&P shares. Strong upward trajectories here, with significant volatility. But all underpinned by good (well above the average) volumes, as per chart below.This is less pronounced when we normalize daily volumes by historical average, as done in the chart below.
Less extraordinary change is underway above, because we are using moving averages as normalizing variable, implying that we actually capture the inherently rising volatility in volumes traded here. So the above chart actually suggests that while Friday up-tick in share prices (and pretty much the last three day's rally) was reasonably well underpinned, it will take some time to see if market establishes a solid floor under the share prices.

Monthly results so far remain weak. Only BofI was able, so far, to recover all monthly losses and post some gains. AIB is just hitting the point of return to late February valuations. Given that at the point of sale - at the end of February, beginning of March - the volumes traded were 5-7 times those of the current week's peak, it is hard to see the present recovery as being driven by pure psychology and the spillover from the broader global markets (US' momentary lapse of optimism).

Two more charts: recall that in mid February I argued that downgrades in all three financials will come to an end by February's expiration and all three will settle into a nice slow bear rally, running at virtually parallel rates of growth. Chart below shows that this is happening, indeed.Once we normalize prices and account for volumes traded, there is nothing surprising in the share prices movements since the beginning of March. And this is exactly where, as I argued before, the markets should be: awaiting news catalysts...

A sight of carnage: US

DJIA has fallen past the psychologically important 7,000 marker to trade at 6,763.29 at the time of writing this - well below its previous 52-week intraday low of 6,952.06. As it stands, the Dow is now at the levels last seen in April 1997. The chart below illustrates.The drivers for the latest slide are clearly the renewed pressure on financials and the fact that the Obama Honeymoon is over - the markets are now turning sceptical about the new administration's ability to push the economy out of a depression spiral. Concerns are mounting as to the inflationary effects of the current policies amidst a general conviction that there will be no upside to economic growth. The traditional partisan Democrat policies are now being seen as setting the stage for a return to the dark ages of Jimmy Carter in the near future.

The graph below (courtesy of Calculated Risk) illustrates:Notice that although the downgrades are much steeper today than in the 1970s, the trajectory of the most current downgrades (slope) is virtually identical to the 1973-1974 crisis. A fellow in the US investment community (thanks for the question HM) just asked me how this can happen, given oil is scrapping the bottom of the barrel in price terms while inflation is yet to rear its ugly face - the opposite of the stagflationary 1970s scenario. Here is an explanation.

The fiscal stimulus package unveiled by Obama is designed to increase inflation-inducing public spending by unprecedented amounts. At the same time, personal income is rising again, while propensity to consume is improving. These are the driving forces of the renewed inflation that can appear just as suddenly as deflation set in late last year.

On the other hand, today's energy in he economy is no longer oil. Instead it is credit and cash. Both are in short supply and near peak level of prices. The oil price is largely irrelevant lagging indicator of global demand, not of the productive capacity of economy. The flow of credit is the latter and not the former.

So the Obama-styled Carterism is going to manifest itself in higher inflation down the road and falling or stagnant real output, as price of the modern 'energy' - credit and money - is going to remain high.
Then again, the US has had it easy so far, compared to Ireland... Chart above illustrates.

May be Mr Cowen can bring some Irish bonds as a gift to the White House for the Paddy's Day? Cheaper than shamrocks and equally symbolically useless.

P.S. There is an excellent summary of the US Economic Conditions for February 2009 at Calculated Risk site (here).