News Doesn't Move The Markets, It Just Follows Their Cycle
A month ago everyone was sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting for the Fed chairman’s speech at Jackson Hole. Memories of Jackson Hole 2010 were resounding for investors. Were they going to leverage themselves to the hilt to buy as many risk assets as they possibly could (with hints of QE3), or were they going to have to liquidate all their holdings with no mention of QE3?
Well, Bernanke did not give the market what it wanted, and even went so far as suggesting that there would be no more QE at this time. Based on this statement, one would have thought people would be out selling. Yet, the market rallied from that point, causing some to scratch their heads.
Prior Government Interventions
This past week, we all did it again. This time, Bernanke gave the market exactly what it was expecting, with $400 billion in Operation Twist. One would have thought the market would rally when it got what it expected. Yet the market sold off hard, causing more head-scratching.
If we take an honest look at the timing of all of the government easing action from the start of the financial crisis in 2008 until today, you will see that these actions were not nearly as effective as the public is led to believe. If you simply take a cursory look at all the actions of the government during the decline in 2008, you would almost have to come to the conclusion that the government action of bailing out Fannie, Freddie and the financial institutions, as well as the Fed’s announcement of QE1, caused the resulting decline in the stock market. In fact, one can argue that the announcement of QE1 caused the largest and fastest part of the decline that shaved off 400+ points in the S&P 500 within a period of several weeks. All these actions were initiated at the beginning of, or during, one of the largest declines in history.
If all these government actions seemed to have caused these massive market declines, can we, from an intellectually honest perspective, deem further and similar government action as the cause of the market rally in 2010? Can the same action by the government honestly cause one of the largest market declines in history, but yet also be the cause of the more recent rally in 2010?
Of course, this is not what I believe. Rather, I believe that the government was ineffectual at changing public perception, no matter what it did, during a period of negative social mood.
As I personally view the news as following the cycles, any seemingly good news that is announced during a negative sentiment period seems to be discounted, as was the case with QE1 during the 2008 decline. In the same way, since the announcement of QE2 was made during a period of a social mood upswing (albeit in a counter-trend upswing), it would seem to have caused the rally, when it in fact had no such causal effect. It was simply announced at the proper time during the cycle, which made it seem as having caused the rally, while QE1 was announced at a time when it can be viewed, in the same manner, as having caused the decline.
The only conclusion that we can derive from these facts, based upon an intellectually honest approach, is that neither QE1 nor QE2 had any causal effect upon the markets, since the same action will not have opposite results.
Rather, it is public sentiment and mood that is the primary driver of markets and not some exogenous news or event.
Market Studies and Observations
Bernard Baruch, an exceptionally successful American financier and stock market speculator who lived between 1870 -1965, identified the following long ago:
All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology. Without due recognition of crowd-thinking ... our theories of economics leave much to be desired. ... It has always seemed to me that the periodic madness which afflict mankind must reflect some deeply rooted trait in human nature – a trait akin to the force that motivates the migration of birds or the rush of lemmings to the sea ... It is a force wholly impalpable ... yet, knowledge of it is necessary to right judgments on passing events.
During his tenure, and in several hearings in front of the Joint Economic Committee, Mr. Greenspan noted that the idea that the Fed can prevent recessions is a "puzzling notion.” Rather, he postulated that the stock market is driven by human psychology and waves of optimism and pessimism.
Social experiments have actually been conducted which resulted in price patterns that mirror those found in the stock market. In 1997, the Europhysics Letters published a study conducted by Caldarelli, Marsili and Zhang, in which subjects simulated trading currencies, however, there were no exogenous factors that were involved in potentially affecting the trading pattern. Their specific goal was to observe financial market psychology “in the absence of external factors.
One of the noted findings was that the trading behavior of the participants were “very similar to that observed in the real economy,“ wherein the price distributions were based on Phi (.618).
Their ultimate conclusion would surprise the most avid trader today:
In spite of the simplicity of our model and of the strategies of the single participants, and the outright exclusion of economic external factors, we find a market which behaves surprisingly realistically. These results suggest that a stock market can be considered as a self-organized critical system: The system reaches dynamically an equilibrium state characterized by fluctuations of any size, without the need of any parameter fine tuning or external driving.
Marsili was quoted as saying that “the understanding that we got is that the statistics of price histories in financial markets can be understood as the result of internal interaction and not the fundamental interaction with the external world.
In August 1998, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article by Tom Walker, who conducted his own study of 42 years’ worth of “surprise” news events and the stock market’s corresponding reactions. His conclusion, which will be surprising to most, was that it was exceptionally difficult to identify a connection between market trading and dramatic surprise news.
Based upon Walkers study and conclusions, even if you had the news beforehand, you would still not be able to determine the direction of the market only based upon such news.
Robert Prechter Jr., in his book The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, in which he cites many of these instances, concludes “once you realize that even if you got [the news] in advance, you could not forecast the stock market. Though these facts are counter-intuitive, it does not take a dedicated market student long to observe the acausality of news to the stock market.”
Conclusion
Many investors/traders, until now, view this issue as another form of the “chicken or the egg” argument. Most even believe that the market is driven by the news. However, in truth, when you take an honest look at the facts, you should come to one conclusion: Social mood is what drives markets and not the news. In fact, it is negative social mood that usually is the cause of negative events later reported in the news. Furthermore, since the best barometer of social mood is the stock market, when we see the market action suggesting negative social mood, we should actually expect negative news, and vice versa.
R.N. Elliott, in his 1946 publication of Nature’s Law, probably puts it best when he said “At best, news is the tardy recognition of forces that have already been at work for some time and is startling only to those unaware of the trend.”
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
This article was written by
Avi is an accountant and a lawyer by training. His education background includes his graduating college with dual accounting and economics majors, and he then passed all four parts of the CPA exam at once right after he graduated college. He then earned his Juris Doctorate in an advanced two and a half year program at the St. John’s School of Law in New York, where he graduated cumlaude, and in the top 5% of his class. He then went onto the NYU School of Law for his masters of law in taxation (LL.M.).
Before retiring from his legal career, Avi was a partner and National Director at a major national firm. During his legal career, he spearheaded a number of acquisition transactions worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in value. So, clearly, Mr. Gilburt has a detailed understanding how businesses work and are valued.Yet, when it came to learning how to accurately analyze the financial markets, Avi had to unlearn everything he learned in economics in order to maintain on the correct side of the market the great majority of the time. In fact, once he came to the realization that economics and geopolitics fail to assist in understanding how the market works, it allowed him to view financial markets from a more accurate perspective.
For those interested in how Avi went from a successful lawyer and accountant to become the founder of Elliottwavetrader.net, his detailed story is linked here.Since Avi began providing his analysis to the public, he has made some spectacular market calls which has earned him the reputation of being one of the best technical analysts in the world.
As an example of some of his most notable astounding market calls, in July of 2011, he called for the USD to begin a multi-year rally from the 74 region to an ideal target of 103.53. In January of 2017, the DXY struck 103.82 and began a pullback expected by Avi.
As another example of one of his astounding calls, Avi called the top in the gold market during its parabolic phase in 2011, with an ideal target of $1,915. As we all know, gold hit a high of $1,921, and pulled back for over 4 years since that time. The night that gold hit its lows in December of 2015, Avi was telling his subscribers that he was on the phone with his broker buying a large order of physical gold, while he had been accumulating individual miner stocks that month, and had just opened the EWT Miners Portfolio to begin buying individual miners stocks due to his expectation of an impending low in the complex.One of his most shocking calls in the stock market was his call in 2015 for the S&P500 to rally from the 1800SPX region to the 2600SPX region, whereas it would coincide with a “global melt-up” in many other assets. Moreover, he was banging on the table in November of 2016 that we were about to enter the most powerful phase of the rally to 2600SPX, and he strongly noted that it did not matter who won the 2016 election in the US, despite many believing that the market would “crash” if Trump would win the election. This was indeed a testament to the accuracy of the Fibonacci Pinball method that Avi developed.