Dylan Grice über die Zeitenwende an den Märkten
Ich habe Dylan Grice vor Jahren persönlich getroffen. Ein ausgesprochen geistreicher Gesprächspartner mit starkem schottischem Akzent. Lange Jahre hat er mit Albert Edwards im legendären SocGen-Team gearbeitet und immer wieder fällt er mit seinem anderen Blickwinkel auf die Märkte auf. Das finde ich spannend, weshalb wir heute auf ein Interview blicken, was er vor einigen Wochen mit the market geführt hat:
- “I like to feel that if I’m underwriting risk, I’m getting well paid for it. And right now I don’t think that’s the case. It doesn’t really matter which segment of the market you look at, risk premia are almost universally tight. Risk premia are back to where they were pre-Covid, in some cases even tighter, and they were already unattractive before.” – bto: Das waren sie und zwar weil die Notenbanken genau das wollten.
- “As an investor you must not blind yourself with what you think policy makers should do. You must look at what policy makers are doing, and instead of making a moral judgement on whether that’s good or bad, you have to understand what the consequences of those policy actions are. This anger clouded the judgement of many investors. So, I was happy to be bullish throughout this period.” – bto. Womit er erklärt, weshalb er im letzten Jahr ab März bei der Rallye mit dabei war.
- Aber jetzt geht es um die Zukunft: “There are signs of excess, and yet we are still in the middle of a pandemic, we haven’t even started the economic recovery yet. I think that this GameStop fiasco is kind of an indication of wider problems. Also when I look at the exuberance in hot sectors like electric vehicles, which investors seem to forget is a very capital intensive business. Valuations there are crazy, this is getting demonstrably insane. I would completely avoid that. This is not the kind of market which a fundamentally value driven investor should be bullish of.” – bto. Das ist natürlich ein Sakrileg, infrage zu stellen, dass Tesla so viel wert ist … Im Kern richtig, denn wir haben es mit den Exzessen zu tun, die vor dem Hintergrund billigen Geldes besonders gut funktionieren.
- “The SPAC sector has the potential to become an enormous bubble, even if it isn’t one at the moment.” – bto: Es ist doch nur in einem absolut optimistischen Umfeld überhaupt denkbar. Es ist wie 1720 in der Südseeblase, als man Geld aufnehmen konnte mit dieser Aussage: “An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
- Trotzdem ist Grice optimistisch: “Because I think central banks are going to overcook the economy. Ever since Jackson Hole in August, Fed chairman Jerome Powell has made it very clear that they are going to push the economy harder than they have in the past. (…) I can’t imagine a clearer setup for an overheating economy and financial market bubbles. During the GameStop fiasco, Powell was asked repeatedly what he thought of this kind of froth. He said this has nothing to do with the Fed. So, in terms of monetary policy, everything is set for a few years of overstimulation.” – bto: was dafür spricht, weiter mitzutanzen.
- Während auch die Fiskalpolitik Gas gibt: “Joe Biden is talking about $1.9 trillion worth of stimulus, after we already had $3 trillion last year, which makes it $5 trillion in total. That’s an insane number, about 25% of GDP. There already is an enormous amount of pent-up demand, money that is waiting to be spent. Normally, when you get an overcooked economy and you get inflation, the Fed would step on the brakes. But this time, the Fed has said repeatedly that they will not step on the brakes. So I think the risks here are on the right tail, not on the left tail. This is not a market to be short of.” – bto: Und jetzt sitzt man hier in Deutschland, verfolgt die Diskussion über höhere Steuern und schwarze Null und das in einer Währungsunion, die doch nur mit höherer Inflation und Schuldenschnittorgien überhaupt eine Chance hat.
- “This is incredibly dangerous, because inevitably these bubbles burst, and the bandage on the societal cracks rips open again, with the fragmentation, polarization and distrust within our society deepening further. (…) Right now people’s faith in the system is in decline. Trust in institutions – the media, politicians, the ‘elites’ – is in decline, and it seems like distrust is just going to deepen further. What I worry about is what kind of trigger will be necessary to snap us out of this long social panic we’re in, and to start building trust again. I hope it’s not something as extreme as a war.” – bto: Das hoffen wir wohl alle. Ich denke aber, dass es vor allem die politischen Prioritäten sind, die letztlich zu den zunehmenden Spannungen führen. Wenn wir Nebenthemen in den Vordergrund stellen und außerdem mit dem Klimathema so ineffizient umgehen, kann es nicht verwundern, dass die Stimmung kippt.
- “Investors in traditional assets – public equity, private equity, venture, government bonds, corporate credit – are sitting on a time bomb. They have to keep their fingers crossed and hope that bomb doesn’t go off on their watch. If and when government bond yields rise, the traditional assets which have done so well will be smoked. I think at some point the Fed will just step in. They can’t afford to let yields rise too high, because the likelihood of some kind of liquidity event would increase massively. They can’t afford that. So the next stage in the logic of what the Fed is doing would be that they step in and control yields, to prevent them from rising too far, too fast.” – bto: Er macht den Punkt, dass alles, was ein Duration-Spiel ist, überproportional verlieren wird und das leuchtet natürlich ein. Pikettys Problem dürfte sich so schnell lösen.
- “Areas I still like are uranium, oil & gas plus some frontier markets like Bangladesh. Uranium is a scarce commodity, not really correlated with other commodities, because of its unique demand pattern. Nuclear power plant operators typically buy uranium through five to seven year contracts, which means its price does not swing around the economic cycle the way copper or oil do. The price cycle for uranium is driven by the usual, well-known mining cycle. It takes five to ten years to bring new mine supply to the market, and we have long cycles of overinvestment and underinvestment. So far, nothing new. We had a big bull market in uranium in the early 2000s, all the way to March 2011.” – bto: vor allem auch, weil die Welt erkennen wird, dass es eben ohne Atomkraft nicht gehen wird.
- “Fukushima changed everything. (…) The mining industry was cut off from any funding. When you see this pattern, a commodity where no one has invested for ten years, you have the setup for a new bull market. (…) That industry has a future. Japan is now using nuclear power again. Globally, the number of nuclear power stations in commission is higher than ever, the pipeline for new projects in North America, China and India is at record levels. The demand for nuclear power is growing, regardless of what the Germans, Swedes and Swiss are doing. (…) Nuclear is a perfect case study of the public misperception of risk.” – bto: Das stimmt. So sterben die an meisten Menschen an der Kohle wegen der Luftverschmutzung, während die Kernenergie die geringsten Todeszahlen zu vertreten hat.
- Bei Öl sieht es ähnlich aus: “Pretty much all the majors have cut their capex plans. One image perfectly encapsulates financial markets’ view of the energy sector: The market cap of Tesla today is roughly the same size as that of the entire S&P 500 oil sector, which includes the majors, the independents, the drillers, the service companies and the refiners. The equity market’s view seems clear: Oil has no future, the energy transition is here. The energy transition is real, but it’s moving at a glacial pace. The annual Electric Vehicle Outlook summary by Bloomberg projects that EVs will only make up around 8% of the total fleet of passenger cars by 2030. The number of cars is expected to rise from today’s 1.2 billion vehicles to 1.4 billion, but only about 110 million of them will be EVs. So the number of internal combustion engine vehicles by then will be around 1.3 billion, which implies a forecast rise of around 0.7% per year. Moreover, while passenger vehicles contribute around 60% of the global demand for crude oil, the rest comes from heavy duty vehicles, aviation and the petrochemicals industry for which there are, as yet, few alternatives. (…) Oil will continue to play a central role in the global economy for decades.” – bto: Ich finde, wenn man diese Zahlen liest, wird mehr deutlich, dass wir uns in Deutschland auf die falschen Wege begeben.
- “The market was behaving as if oil was dead. But it won’t be, not for a long time. A second important fact is that the energy transition is a risk which is widely recognized and understood. No manager in the oil business is under any delusion about the reality of the industry. Hence they are scaling down the ambitiousness of their investment projects. A squeeze is coming. (…) Oil has been starved of capital, the whole mantra of the industry is that they are not going to grow anymore, they preserve cash and return it to shareholders. (…) This is a bull market in the making.” – bto: Ich habe das auch an anderer Stelle gelesen und denke, dass es lohnt, in Öl zu bleiben.
- Und zum Abschluss noch Gold oder Bitcoin: “I don’t see them as mutually exclusive, but complementary. Gold doesn’t have the upside that Bitcoin has, but it doesn’t have the downside either. Many investors still can’t touch Bitcoin because it could get them fired if Bitcoin drops by 50% in a month – which it does, and which it will. But as Bitcoin becomes more institutionalized and more accepted, which is absolutely happening, its ownership gets more dispersed, and volatility will come down. So the narrative that seems quite reasonable to me is whatever your gold allocation is, have some of that in crypto.” – bto: Hier bin ich noch zurückhaltend.
