周期的本质是均值回归。而这种均值回归的思路,必然会导致三类短板。对这些风险和短板的了解,一定程度上也可以消弭他们对这种操作思路造成的不可逆伤害。 第一,放过冲浪型企业。 很多企业可以长盛不衰,或者说,其超额收益可以延续十余年甚至数十年,而周期的思路会导致抓不住这类企业,造成昂贵的“机会成本”。对于这一点,我是选择主动放弃的。 尽管我听过很多了不起的抓住长牛的故事,比如李国飞总先是万科再是腾讯几百倍的回报,但客观地说,我现在看到的是他在阿里和平安上的严重误判。如果他那样洞若观火的投资人都不能集中投资连续抓住长跑冠军,我凭什么觉得我可以?我选择“守拙”,用笨办法,帮我的投资人,赚我看得懂的钱。 第二,均值不回归,即林奇所谓的“一片漆黑之前,总是最黑暗的"(It's always the darkest before pitch black)。 利用周期本质是逆向的(contrarian),而集中逆向+自信的错误就可能毁掉一个投资人的一生,我们见过很多类似的案例。 菲利普费雪曾经对此说,逆向的时候最好有很高的正确的置信度,而不是为了逆向而逆向。汽车出现时马车股都很便宜,但后来,他们(马车公司)都消失了。 因此,逆向之前要非常清楚均值回归的底层逻辑,比如天然气未来十年需求还会增长,中国的经济还会增长,美国还会需要银行体系且该体系目前看不可能被分布式金融(DeFi)颠覆等等。没有办法比你的对手盘更好地驳斥自己的观点,就不配拥有这个观点。 第三,介入过早/对周期长度的误判。 我介入能源行业,就早了两年。所幸后来等到了一个超级周期,同时那时本金小不断有资金补入,因此最后的收益非常可观,但未来在基数很难不断被补充的情况下,集中性地过早介入,就意味着极大的机会成本。就像卡拉曼所说的,“在这个行业,早就是错”。 目前我想到的应对方式,尤其是从资管角度,首先是仓位上限的控制,可以给一个更高的集中度(比起市场指数的比例)但一般不超过市场的3x,比如金融行业占比10%,集中度再高也不超过30%,没有什么比活下来更重要,尤其是对于长期主义的选手;其次是行业的分散和对冲,这对于做多空的选手来说并不难,放弃一部分收益,为了追求更小的风险; 最后是对资产结构的运用——一般而言在大下行周期里即便是做资产结构中保守的部分,也可以取得很好的回报,比如Antero Resources的三年到期债券曾经卖到过30c/dollar(票面价值的30%),SRG-PA和WAL-PA都是很好的例子(目前金融行业仍有一些不错性价比的类似资产)。 以上一些思考,权作抛砖引玉式的分享,愿对读者有些许启发。(作者:黑色面包) 附录:周期一直是我在研究的一个方向,我也读了大量的学术领域的文献,这些文献给我提供了很好的数据,逻辑,和统计意义上的支撑。虽然和实操的关联有限,仍是我感兴趣的方向,将一些综述成果放在附录,供有需要的读者参考:Cycles are certain to happen, although less predictable at times. Despite its less of predictability, cycles, in my view, are easier to take advantage of than predicting sustainable growth. Some of the best investment opportunities I have encountered have been cyclical plays, and the best of the best are those with resonating cycles – namely multiple cyclical patterns creating a resonating trough. To better understand cycles is to better prepare oneself for the inevitable, and to better take advantage of such inevitabilities.GranularityTable 1: The Granularity of Cycles and the Type of Cycles Involved.Global Financial CyclesThe importance of the Global Financial Cycle to countries (especially emerging ones) have been argued by scholars. For instance, Rey (2013) argues that “there is a global financial cycle in capital flows, asset prices, and in credit growth. This cycle co-moves with the VIX, a measure of uncertainty and risk aversion of the markets”.[1] Passari and Rey (2015) wrote: “large gross cross-border flows are moving in tandem across countries regardless of the exchange rate regime, they tend to rise in periods of low volatility and risk aversion and decrease in periods of high volatility and risk aversion, as measured by the VIX… There is a global financial cycle”. [2]Nevertheless, by analyzing foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio equity investment, portfolio debt investments, and bank credit as capital flows and VIX, VSTOXX, IVI, and VDAX as proxies for global financial cycles, Cerutti et.al (2017) failed to find a correlation. Without considering endogenous domestic responses to global financial cycles, their results suggest that the global financial cycles explains only a small fraction of the variation in capital flows, then more idiosyncratic phenomena necessarily explain capital flows. [3] My guess is domestic responses partially mitigate such global capital flows, but more research needs to be done to tease out the effect of standalone global financial cycles. In addition, the authors did not investigate the impact of global financial cycles on domestic asset prices or credit, which are critical subjects of capital allocators -- these directions need further analyses as well. Based on existing literature, we know relatively little about the true impact of global financial cycles on domestic.As a practitioner, based on my personal experience, I believe global capital cycles exist, although they can oftentimes be overwhelmed by country-specific idiosyncratic development. It would be interesting to conduct statistical tests on this subject.Financial Cycles & Business CyclesMinsky (1982) and Kindleberger (2000) define financial cycles as the self-reinforcing interactions between asset prices, risk, risk taking, and financing constraints. Some authors go as far as arguing that all recessions in the US since 1985 had financial origins. [4] Financial cycles can be proxied by using bandpass filters with frequencies from 8-32 years to extract medium-term cyclical fluctuations in real (inflation-adjusted) credit, the credit-to-GDP ratio, and real property prices, which are averaged to derive a composite measure of the financial cycle. [5] In addition, another powerful predictor of recession risk is the debt service ratio (DSR), defined as interest payments plus amortization divided by GDP. Drehmann et al (2021) find a strong link between debt accumulation and subsequent debt service, which in turn has a large negative effect on growth. Financial cycles can be described by the joint behavior of leverage and the DSR. [6] More importantly, scholars have found that for a panel of advanced and emerging market economies, financial cycle measures have significant forecasting power both in and out of sample, even for a three-year horizon, outperforming the term spread in nearly all specifications.[7] Business cycles become more fragile when financial booms develop, and typically one financial cycle entails two to three business cycles. However, even this study which employs global panel data focuses only from 1985 on. The authors noted structural differences for the 40 years before 1985 and after, and as practitioners we know a continuous easing of interest rate has been a structural theme for the last 40 years – are we entering a new paradigm with inflation and rates both stepping higher? Will the results produced by this study stand in the new paradigm? How would DSR, financial cycle, and business cycle interact before 1985? These questions remain unanswered by extant literature.Industrial Cycle and Sentiment CycleScholars have found that firms tend to compete more aggressively in financial distress; the intensified competition in turn reduces profit margins, pushing themselves further into distress and adversely affect other firms. The feedback imposes an additional source of financial distress costs incurred for raising leverage, which helps explain the negative profitability-leverage relation across industries. Owing to the contagion effect, in a decentralized equilibrium, leverage is excessively high from an industry perspective, compromising industry’s financial stability.[8] This is particularly true for the shale gas industry pre-pandemic – the producers were levered, and when gas price was under pressure, they produced more natural gas to ride down the cost curve, further depressing gas price, reducing free cashflow, and resulting in greater leverage. This model perfectly describes the down-leg of the last natural gas (and oil) cycle – the mechanism behind the evolution of that industry closely follows Chen’s prescription.Table 2: S&P Ratings, Rating Changes, and Outlook for various natural gas producers at the trough of the last cycle.However, the model does not address the upcycle. Despite the prevailing contagion which culminated in a near-death experience for the natural gas patch in the US, the producers ultimately dropped enough rigs on a concerted effort, and natural gas price rebounded after Covid hits. In other words, with the contagion reaching a certain degree, from an industrial cycle point of view, the cycle cannot march any lower. Firms start to collaborate tacitly, and the tides start to turn, leading to remarkable upside potential. A more complete model wants to capture the entirety of the industry cycle under a single parsimonious framework.Picture 1: Performance of public, standalone natural gas producers after they hit the low on Feb 11th, 2020.Much of the price volatility is also driven by the sentiment cycle, which vastly exaggerates the industrial cycle. This is where Ben Graham believes one can exploit market inefficiencies through mispricing resulted from excessive emotions. Stambaugh et al (2012) find that long-short strategies that exploit the anomalies exhibit profits consistent with this setting. First, each anomaly is stronger (its long-short strategy is more profitable) following high levels of sentiment. Second, the short leg of each strategy is more profitable following high sentiment. Finally, sentiment exhibits no relation to returns on the long legs of the strategies.[9] This confirms Jim Chanos’ practical observation that historically the alpha on the short side has been as high as 15% in the last two decades, and has been even higher prior to that. Recently, however, he observes that the alpha on the short side has substantially diminished as a result of excessive liquidity by the Federal Reserve. Therefore, it will be interesting to reexamine Stambaugh’s work and extend it to consider the interaction between the alpha of the long-short strategy and market liquidity. Corporate Cycles and Capital Structure CyclesIt has been well documented that there are arbitrage opportunity between a same company’s equity and debt given limited liquidity which results in limited arbitrage between equity and credit markets. Short horizon pricing discrepancies across firm’s equity and credit markets are common and that an economically significant proportion of these are anomalous, indicating a lack of integration of these two markets. [10] Even for the US market, scholars has found and documented a nontrivial but imperfect integration between its stock and corporate bond markets. [11] Chen et al. proposed a metric named the debt-equity spread defined as the difference between actual credit spread and equity-implied spread. The actual credit spread is calculated from observed bond prices, while the equity-implied credit spread is computed using equity market information through the lens of a standard structural credit risk model. When a firm’s equity is valued highly relative to its debt, the equity-implied credit spread tends to be low relative to the actual bond spread, resulting in a higher DES. High-DES firms tend to have more negative growth forecasting revisions (analysts being too optimistic in extrapolation of high growth), are more likely to issue equity and retire debt (Confirming Ma (2019)), and have more insider equity selling. The results are also stronger among smaller, less liquid, and more difficult-to-short stocks and bonds. [12] This could lead to highly interesting opportunities to climb the capital structure ladder for the investors, and thereby selecting the best risk-reward among various types of financial instruments associated with the same company.Some of the most dangerous yet also most lucrative opportunities exist due to debt overhang, and a deeper understanding of the interaction between macroeconomic risks and agency problems is critical. Scholars have found that firstly, recessions are times of high marginal utilities, which means that the distortions caused by agency problems during such times will affect investors more than in booms; secondly, corporate spreads are strongly countercyclical, thus for a given investment opportunity, the transfer from equity holders to debt holders in a typical procyclical firm tends to concentrate in bad times. [13] In their benchmark case, the debt overhang costs for a low leverage firm peak at less than 0.5% of the total firm value without macroeconomic risk, while these costs peak at 2.7% or 3.6% in booms and recessions, respectively, in the presence of macroeconomic risk. For a high leverage firm, the debt overhang costs peak at 5.1% without macroeconomic risk, while these costs peak at 8.5% or 10.7% in boom and recessions, respectively, with macroeconomic risk. The impact of macroeconomic risk on debt overhang depends on the cyclicality of cash flows from assets-in-place and growth opportunities. More cyclical cash flows from the assets-in-place increase the probability that the firm will underinvest during recessions, when marginal utilities are higher, thus amplifying the impact of macroeconomic risk on the agency cost of debt. The effect of more cyclical cash flows from growth opportunities is ambiguous. On the one hand, more cyclical cash flows from growth opportunities increase the probability that firms will underinvest during recessions. On the other hand, the cost from delaying investment in recessions is lower. In our calibrated model, either of the two effects may dominate. What we can infer from this, is that light capital businesses have lower agency cost of debt.However, their result is not conclusive. Other researchers have found that compared with firms that are mainly composed of invested assets, firms with growth options have higher costs of debt because they are more volatile and have a greater tendency to default during recession when marginal utility is high and recovery rates are low. Their model matches empirical facts regarding credit spreads, default probabilities, leverage ratios, equity premiums, and investment clustering. Firms with growth options are more likely to default in recessions than those without growth options and thus should have higher credit spreads. [14]More work is clearly needed to reconcile such contradicting views.However, what an investor can learn from this is that macroeconomic risks provide high expected return for higher leverage firms that do not default. That is a big “if”, which leads to the necessity of understanding the interaction between liquidity, default, and macroeconomic cycles. In addition, an apt metaphor of investing in equity vs. bond is – investing in equity is investing in a call option that shares the upside of the business; investing in bond is shorting a put option on the assets and fundamentals of the business betting the business does not fail. The agency cost issue tells us that equity holders and bond holders are oftentimes pitted against each other with varying incentive structure that should be heeded when we invest in different layers of a company’s capital structure.Longstaff, Mithal, and Neis (2005) calculates liquidity risk by subtracting Credit Default Swap (CDS) swap yield from bond yield, because CDS prices mostly reflects the default risk because of their relatively liquid secondary market. [15] There are two types of interaction terms, namely the “liquidity-driven default” and the “default-driven liquidity” components, capturing the endogenous positive spiral between default and liquidity. While the latter is easier to understand, the former, namely “liquidity-driven-default”, is driven by the rollover risk mechanism in that firms rely on infinite-maturity debt financing will default earlier when facing worsening secondary market liquidity. [16] Chen et al. (2018) found that these interaction terms are quantitatively significant across all ratings. They account for 25-30% of the total credit spread of Aaa/Aa rated bonds and 35-40% of the total spread of Ba rated bonds across the two aggregate states. They account for 27% of the spread increase for Aaa/Aa rated bonds and 55% of the spread increase for Ba rated bonds as the economy switches from a normal state into a recession. [17]Picture 2: Structural liquidity-default decomposition for 5-year bonds across ratings.One of the best ways to adapt to various cycles is to pick the right capital allocator at the helm of the company that an investor is interested in. Since the financial crisis of 2008, scholars have found companies cut their investments and payouts in bad times and issues equity in good times even without mediate financing needs, underscoring their salience of the potentiality of financing-window closing as a result of a downward financial cycle. In addition, firms raise capital when their perceived probability of financial conditions worsening. [18] Nevertheless, the aforementioned study along with other studies produce results that challenge recent evidence of the importance of valuation cycles in driving financing waves. In other words, scholars found a positive correlation between equity issuance and stock repurchase waves. [19] An explanation of buy-back at high valuation is that improved financing conditions raise stock prices and lowers the precautionary demand for cash buffers, which in turn can result in more stock repurchases by cash-rich firms. A majority of firms do not seem to allocate capital optimally, and when companies raise cash for the near term, the primary motive is to prevent themselves from running out of cash. Actually, 62.6% of them would run out of cash in a year, and 81.8% have subnormal cash balances. These equity-issuers are primarily not growth firms, and those companies that fail to issue stocks exhibit poor future performance down the road.[20] These studies showcase the importance and the difficulty of becoming partners with great capital allocators given that it seems to be a rare talent. References:[1] H. Rey, “Dilemma not Trilemma: the Global Financial Cycle and Monetary Policy Independence,” Proceddings 2013 Fed. Reserv. Bank Kansas City Econ. Symp. Jackson Hole, pp. 285–333, 2013.[2] H. Rey and E. Passari, “Financial Flows and the International Monetary System,” Econ. J., vol. 125, pp. 675–698, 2015.[3] E. Cerutti, S. Claessens, and A. K. Rose, “How Important is the Global Financial Cycle? Evidence From Capital Flows,” BIS Work. Pap., 2017.[4] S. Ng and J. H. Wright, “Facts and Challenges from the Great Recession for Forecasting and Macroeconomic Modeling,” J. Econ. Lit., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 1120–54, 2013.[5] M. Drehmann, C. Borio, and K. Tsatsaronis, “Characterising the Financial Cycle: Don’t Lose Sight of the Medium Term!,” BIS Work. Pap., p. 284, 2012.[6] M. Drehmann, M. Juselius, and A. Korinek, “Going with the Flows: New Borrowing, Debt Service and the Transmission of Credit Booms,” SSRN Electron. J., vol. 24549, 2021, doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3168448.[7] C. Borio, M. Drehmann, and F. D. Xia, “Forecasting Recessions: the Importance of the Financial Cycle,” J. Macroecon., vol. 66, 2020.[8] H. Chen, W. W. Dou, H. Guo, and Y. Ji, “Feedback and Contagion through Distressed Competition,” NBER Work. Pap., 2023.[9] R. F. Stambaugh, J. Yu, and Y. Yuan, “The Short of It: Investor Sentiment and Anomalies,” J. financ. econ., vol. 104, no. 2, pp. 288–302, 2012.[10] N. Kapadia and X. Pu, “Limited Arbitrage Between Equity and Credit Markets,” J. financ. econ., vol. 105, no. 3, pp. 542–564, 2012.[11] M. Sandulescu, F. Trojani, and A. Vedolin, “Model-Free International Stochastic Discount Factors,” J. Finance, vol. 76, no. 2, pp. 935–976, 2021.[12] H. Chen, Z. Chen, and J. Li, “The Debt-Equity Spread,” SSRN, 2022.[13] H. Chen and G. Manso, “Macroeconomic Risk and Debt Overhang,” Rev. Corp. Financ. Stud., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–38, 2017.[14] M. Arnold, A. Wagner, and R. Westermann, “Growth Options, Macroeconomic Conditions, and the Cross Section of Credit Risk,” J. financ. econ., vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 350–385, 2013.[15] F. A. Longstaff, S. Mithal, and E. Neis, “Corporate Yield Spreads: Default Risk or Liquidity? New Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market,” J. Finance, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 2213–2253, 2005.[16] Z. He and W. Xiong, “Dynamic Debt Runs,” Rev. Financ. Stud., vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1799–1843, 2012.[17] H. Chen, R. Cui, Z. He, and K. Milbradt, “Quantifying Liquidity and Default Risks of Corporate Bonds over the Business Cycle,” Rev. Financ. Stud., vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 852–897, 2018.[18] P. Bolton, H. Chen, and N. Wang, “Market Timing, Investment, and Risk Management,” J. financ. econ., vol. 109, pp. 40–62, 2013.[19] A. K. Dittmar and R. F. Dittmar, “The Timing of Financing Decisions: An Examination of the Correlation in Financing Waves,” J. financ. econ., vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 59–83, 2008.[20] H. DeAngelo, L. DeAngelo, and R. Stulz, “Seasoned Equity Offering, Market Timing, and the Corporate Cycle,” J. financ. econ., vol. 95, no. 3, pp. 275–295, 2010. 来源:锦缎 黑色面包 版权声明:部分文章在推送时未能与原作者取得联系。若涉及版权问题,敬请原作者联系我们。联系方式:[email protected]。