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LivestreamMenuToday’s stock-market market conversation is dominated by structural dynamics, index machinations and mechanical flows the way World Cup chatter fixates on officiating decisions and bracket construction. This can happen, perhaps, when the game on the field reaches such a level of information saturation and competitive parity that external factors seem to be the decisive elements in determining outcomes. And so, we hear a lot about SpaceX entering the Nasdaq 100 index in expedited fashion a few weeks after its IPO — even though the move resulted in only modest buying pressure in the shares relative to its huge daily trading volumes. (This is a lesson that investors seem to learn repeatedly: Tesla shares jumped 70% in the month before entering the S & P 500 in December 2020. They have lagged the index since and are below where the price peaked in November 2021.) Elsewhere, we note Wells Fargo equity strategist Ohsung Kwon remarking on a potential $20 billion inflows from “Trump accounts” created for children as a bullish input for the market this summer — despite this volume representing less than 3% of year-to-date equity-ETF intake. We can’t escape the reports of OpenAI and perhaps other AI developers handing an equity stake to the U.S. government as a way to ensure political favor and ostensibly allow the public to benefit from future appreciation — never mind concerns over how it might skew the market’s effort to handicap the AI leadership race. And then there’s online-broker Robinhood and others concentrating their new-product efforts on perpetual crypto futures, “tokenized” trading in U.S. stocks and prediction-markets betting – new ways to play existing or ephemeral assets rather than a means to capitalize and own productive enterprises. In case you’re wondering, yes, an ETF sponsor has already filed to offer “income” funds that track each OpenAI and Anthropic while overlaying a covered-call strategy, months before either company is public. Finally, the amount of focus on “key levels” of indexes at which Wall Street dealers will exacerbate or restrain further moves due to their preset options-hedging maneuvers far outstrips the role such activity plays in steering prices beyond a one-day time frame. So why all the focus on the packaging rather than the contents of the market? Drawdowns ‘faster and more severe’ For one thing, there has always been a popular fascination with mechanical, forced or price-agnostic sources of supply and demand for stocks. I go back to the days when “program trading” was a catch-all excuse for sudden market moves in the decade after the 1987 crash, which gave way to overheated focus on high-frequency trading and “algos.” In an inherently inscrutable market full of noise and unclear causation investors love to look for the ghost in the machine. The mixture of genuine technical triggers, rules-based systematic strategies, late-bull-market performance-chasing, proliferation of leveraged instruments and sheer suspicion amplify the focus on this sort of thing. Goldman Sachs head of hedge fund coverage Tony Pasquariello notes the extremes the momentum race reached recently as partly a matter of the tools employed: “As a marker of risk appetite, volume in US-listed levered ETFs is running multiples of what it was in recent years (which you can certainly feel in day-to-day price action).” Here’s Morgan Stanley’s equity trading desk on Monday, in a typical framing of the relevant tactical propellants: “Just as the pace of change is accelerating, momentum drawdowns are becoming both faster and more severe… Last week featured a dramatic pull forward of seasonal headwinds with TMT momentum on track for the worst month since the early 2000s after putting up one of its worst days in history on Friday. Moreover, Thursday ranked as the largest day of active net reduction in AI tech beneficiaries, leaving the [long/short] ratio in broad AI at a 5-year low. Levered ETFs remain a key risk with short gamma near historical highs of -$16B / 1% move (most of that benchmarked to semis and NDX). Buffering that dynamic, systematic strategies will be buyers of +$6-8B of global equities in the next week assuming SPX realized vol stays near 15%.” Gamers are going to game no matter what. Yet, the current market set-up, in which a hyper-concentrated S & P 500 regularly goes the opposite direction of a majority of its components, an understanding of sub-surface influences has become almost a necessity. Never before has the performance and volatility of individual S & P 500 stocks (VIXEQ) been so high relative to the subdued readings for the index itself (VIX) , according to CBOE. The core U.S. equity-market benchmark and entire investing strategies (momentum, earnings-revision, even value) have been overtaken by one corporate mega-trend (AI capex), with daily moves of the S & P 500 bearing scant relationship to the experience of the majority of its membership or the cadence of economic fundamentals. Chip stock volatility The crowding into the high-momentum memory-chip subsector in the second quarter was both extreme and widely acknowledged. The group consumed a majority of the oxygen within tech, with shares of the hyperscalers that pay for all the hardware struggling in opposition. The suspense heading into July has centered on whether the semis could cool off and reset without a messy liquidation that destabilized the rest of the tape. So far, things have gone about as well as one could hope, but nothing is truly settled. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index shed 15% in about ten days before bouncing a bit Monday, while a somewhat willful rotation into non-tech sectors got many investors excited about the longed-for “broadening” of the market. Micron Technology shares remain well below where they peaked before last month’s stupendous earnings beat, while Samsung shares overnight similarly sold off on fabulous results. The notion that a consequential interim top in semis has been reached is, at minimum, not disprovable yet. MU YTD mountain Micron, YTD The equal-weight S & P 500 gained 2% and reached a new high while semis sustained that 15% drop, as many market observers cheered loudly and claimed to have been bullish on healthcare and insurance stocks all along. Monday, we saw a reversal again – a “backlash to the backlash,” as New York magazine might put it – as the Nasdaq 100 rebounded 1.5% and the equal-weight S & P was flat. This to-and-fro is staticky action but helps keep the market in its uptrend as it rebalances. Because of index composition, it’s tough to see how the capex spenders vs. the vendors tension can be eased to the benefit of passive investors. Semis represent 18% of the S & P 500, while the four hyperscalers (Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta) together account for 16%. Quite macro Part of the fixation on non-fundamental flow and structural drivers reflects a fairly quiet macro backdrop, with near-term economic trends not acting as the prime driver of investor attitudes or even corporate profits. Real U.S. GDP continues to trend near 2%. The Fed has been on hold all year and looks likely to stay put for months to come. The 10-year Treasury yield has been in a narrow range for two years. Oil surged at the outbreak of the U.S.-Iran conflict but essentially round-tripped within five months. Meantime, earnings forecasts have soared, largely but not exclusively on the back of the AI-equipment bottleneck, providing plenty of fundamental cover for the tape. When oil has fallen 40%, inflation gauges are likely peaking and the Federal government is still running a deficit of 6% of GDP, there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit for a bear to feast on. None of which precludes some of the erratic flows and structural fragilities that everyone is watching so closely from generating a bit of turbulence over the course of the summer.
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