Welcome to Burlap's gambles, I'm Burlap and this small opinionated article is the result of my observations throughout the year, I'm an amateur but motivated market participant and I usually concentrate my time into looking for small caps opportunities. I'll start by saying that I'm lacking a proper education in
macroeconomics and finance, so please take this essay for what it is, a simple thoughts exercise.
First, I'd like to share circumstantial observations that I made after participating in diverse discords, boards and Subreddits that are market oriented.
No matter how casual or serious these communities are, sentiment and commentaries are highly similar, lots of distress, bulls participants experiencing Max Pain, FUD spreading on the most speculative assets, lots of anger and name-calling from bulls to bear and vice-versa. Pretty easy to see that longs are getting their conviction tested and lots are actually forced into selling due to outside factors like tax loss harvesting, margin calls or relatives pressures.
As we see margins level that are currently unprecedented, with a record number of account with a negative balance. It can be expected to see Mr. Market punish the risks-takers eventually. This might have already started as in November margin debt was down 1.8% in still near record highs.
To note that these are lagging indicators and numbers from December should reflect the drop that happened in the small caps and general market.
This brings me to study the psychology of a market cycle, while this is not a certain art it certainly gives us insights on the common market participant.
Pretty obvious to me that we are in the downtrend of the market cycle, but it's been hidden by the returns from the major indexes (particularly the FAANG stocks)
What's happening: According to new research from Goldman Sachs, just five companies — Microsoft(MSFT), Apple(AAPL), Nvidia(NVDA), Tesla(TSLA) and Google parent Alphabet(GOOGL) — have contributed 51% of S&P 500 returns since April. Going back to the beginning of the year, they account for more than a third of the index's rise.
As we can see, we are heading back to where we were in the 1960s, when the top 5 companies accounted for more than 25% of the S&P 500!
Lots of stock pickers, that didn't come close to this year SP500/ Nasdaq returns, which adds to the pain (even if some of us had returns in 2020 -early 2021- that are equal to a decade of compounding in normal market conditions).
We can see here how forward P/E ratios are getting more affordable for smaller caps.
It's been easy for bulls to make returns since the Covid-19 recovery with all this FED support. Obviously low rates and QE was really good to growth oriented assets and as expected once the talks from the central banks started to point toward rates hikes and tapering to be accelerated (as inflation is running wild) we saw the markets leave debt heavy companies for companies with a decent Free Cash Flow.
Surprisingly usual assets that do well against inflationary pressures didn't move a lot in 2021, gold and silver did awfully as we saw markets fuel what seems to be a crypto and real estate bubble.
Commodities didn't particularly do as well as expected (except maybe energy that came from a long way down and food) in a year with almost double-digit inflation. Hopefully, supply chain issues and shortages should ease-off a bit in 2022, but I would expect another difficult year until the semiconductor production start ramping up. I'm expecting also a difficult year for metals and silicates, good opportunity in extraction and transformation but a risk for manufacturers. Finance/ banking oriented stocks should also benefit from higher rates, after an already good year for the sector, I could see them keep their momentum in 2022.
In my opinion, we could enter a multi-quarters bear market as the FED slow his support to the economy. In this case, I think most of the pain has already been felt in the small caps that retraced from February's highs, we can now resume to what makes us a successful stock-picker: Finding a company trading at reasonable multiples with strong fundamentals and a growth oriented strategy, the most important factor being to focus on information that isn't priced in the current company's financials.
Personally I'm looking into: Subsidized sectors/industries, companies currently expanding production capabilities (I'm buying if they invested in a plant/facility recently that will let them ramp up/start production in 2022/2023), strong backlog and growing orders on the delivery book, recent acquisitions that could strengthen the income statements and finally high quality management with proven track record.
I'm also wondering when will the inflection point be, where value oriented stocks are getting harder to find than growth oriented companies that are somewhat mispriced on a forward-looking perspective. I think it's going to get harder to find good trading multiples using screeners and participants will have to start to look for imponderables and valuation projections strategies. This led me to believe that the rotation from the FAANG stocks to smaller caps should come eventually in 2022 or 2023. If we have the best of both worlds I could see the indexes stay afloat as market movers start to rotate from one asset class to another, this could help keep the market valuations somewhat reasonable without penalizing the big Wall Streets funds (and the boomer's retirement plans). In the case of a year-long bear market for indexes, small caps might start moving a bit less in unison and we could start to see the most promising companies wider the gap from the Small caps with no clear growth trajectories.
In conclusion: Our conviction has been tested and people that weren't fully prepared to either hold a cash position or DCA thought the year got hurt the most, especially If you didn't take any profits back in February.
Holders weren't rewarded this year, but they always end up to be. Paytience is the word, I'm keeping the course even if it means bag holding positions for months/years. In any case, markets are slowly returning to a "new normal" and while the difficulty of coming ahead might start to take its psychological toll, good thing will come for the ones that picked the companies that will deliver growth at reasonable costs. You can't suppress quality assets forever.
Also, to end with a gut feeling of mine, be careful with crypto assets in 2022, the halving theory will be put to test and if we fail to keep the logarithmic chart going for Bitcoin, I clearly can't see how low the bottom can be... This time it might be different, don't end up with the tulip bulbs.
Hope everyone has a happy and successful new year.
- Burlap and his gambles
NB: My English is slowly getting better, please be indulgent.
2021-12-17 | Burlap's Gambles
By Burlap
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