US Markets Vulnerable: Hedging The Risk Trade

The risk trade is pretty simple. Long US Stocks, Long Commodities, Long Euro's. The problem with this trade is that everyone has it on in some form or another and when it reverses there will be a run for the door. Many market watchers think the new part of this risk trade is to buy Volatility as a hedge, which is why the VIX measure of Volatility rose disproportionaltely.

For 10 long years, market rallies have ended badly for investors. Now, with stocks up 15.6% in four months, strategists are beginning to suggest that ordinary investors start dialing back on risk. That doesn't mean dumping shares willy-nilly. With the Federal Reserve committed to flooding markets with liquidity, it still makes sense to be in equities. But "if you've ridden the market up, you might want to do some trimming," says Steven Shueh, managing partner at Roundview Capital. Some investors may already be starting. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has given up 2.2% from its Nov. 5 high.

The first step is to disabuse yourself of the notion that it's impossible to time the market. It turns out that sometimes you can. When markets are stuck in a trading range for an extended period, selling into strength and buying into weakness can outperform buy-and-hold investing. If that sounds like sacrilege, it may be because mutual-fund firms have spent decades persuading you to keep your money in their stock funds through thick and thin so they could collect bigger profits.

Consider an investor with a $1 million portfolio on Dec. 24, 1998, the first time the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was at its current level. But if the investor had merely held on, he would have seen essentially zero appreciation through Nov. 11 of this year. If that same investor instead had sold one-tenth of his portfolio every time the stock market gained 20% and allocated one-fifth of his cash to the market when stocks fell more than 10%, he would have gained about $140,000, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

An approach using broad valuation measures performed even better. One metric, the ratio of stock-market capitalization to gross domestic product, tracks the market's value versus that of the underlying economy. An investor with $1 million on Dec. 24, 1998, who sold 10% at the end of each month when the ratio was above 115% and bought stocks with 20% of his cash when the ratio was below 75%, produced a gain of around $365,000. (The average has been about 91%). Of course, investing success depends greatly on when you start. If you had tried the strategy at the market low of October 2002, for example, you would have come out about the same as if you had bought and held.

Throughout this year the market has traded in a band of about 20%—far away from both its 2007 high and its 2009 low. Stocks gained 15% from Feb. 8 to April 23 on hopes that a robust economic recovery in the U.S. would sustain global growth. By July 2, it had dropped 16% to 1022.58, as disappointing economic data fueled fears of a double-dip recession. xcNow stocks are up again—but for how long?