In the aftermath of a stock market selloff, we're often left wondering too late whether we could have protected our wealth. So, in this video, we'll look at what would have worked this time around and how to use this market wobble to reassess our risk management and asset allocation. If I was to characterize 2024 until August, that is, I'd say it was in a state of complacency. Returns have been very good, and we were expecting that to continue. However, what we actually got was a bit of a nasty shock. And of course, people have been warning about this coming for some time. If you look at the Magnificent 7, they've become very dominant in the US stock market, particularly the NASDAQ index, but even in the S&P 500. And if you own a global index fund, again, they're very dominant in that too. And the returns that we've been seeing for some of the Magnificent Seven stocks, pushed up by the AI narrative, had been spectacular. So, if we annualize the returns, and this is since

2020, you can see that some of these stocks, like Nvidia, are up by 100% per year, and Tesla was up by over 50% per year, and even the worst-performing of The Magnificent 7, Amazon, was up 16% per year. So inevitably, something went wrong, and surprisingly, it came out of Japan, at least initially. The Bank of Japan, which has had negative and then zero interest rates while every other bank around the world has been raising interest rates to combat inflation, finally got around to raising interest rates, and it did so by more than people expected. So it increased rates to 0.25%. Now, the reason why that spread into a global selloff was because many investors have been doing something called the carry trade. You could borrow very cheaply in Yen, convert the Yen to another currency which has a higher interest rate. Mexico is one example where the interest rate is above 11%, or you could buy US dollars and buy US Mega cap tech stocks at the same time. You lock in the currency conversion rate with

something called a currency forward. Now everything's fine until currency volatility starts to pick up because then this leverage trade might suffer margin calls, and you have to unwind the trade and unwind other trades in order to get yen to pay off the margin. Nobody knows exactly how much was in carry trades globally. One estimate puts it at about half a trillion dollars, but it was a very crowded trade, and when you have to unwind a very crowded trade very rapidly, it causes volatility. Now as I make this video, some analysts think that the worst is over, that the carry trade has been largely unwound. Others say that we still have further to go, but if we look at the effect on the epicenter, which was of course the Japanese market, and we look at the topics, which is the Japanese stock index, you can see that they suffered their worst fall ever in one day. Markets fell by over 12%. Now it's worthwhile mentioning that the following day, the topics index had its second-best ever return. So this is another example of why it's usually not

a good idea to sell after markets have fallen. Often, these very large positive and negative returns go hand in hand. Now investors who'd done the carry trade, investing in mega-cap tech stocks in the US, would have had to unwind that and sell those stocks, and that pushed down prices. Then we had another shock when the Federal Reserve, the US Central Bank, didn't do anything to its interest rates, and it painted a pretty rosy picture for the US economy, a soft landing, and everything seemed fine. That was on July the 31st, and then on August the 2nd, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US published its employment situation summary, and that painted a picture which wasn't quite as rosy. Unemployment had picked up sufficiently to trigger the S rule, which often signals a US recession, although Claudia Arm says not in this case, but it did show a weakening in the US jobs market, and many investors felt that the Fed was behind the curve, and this just exacerbated the feeling of panic in markets. So if we look at

returns for the Magnificent 7. As I make this video, you can see that some of them have sold off very significantly since July the 26th, which is just before all this kafuffle kicked off. Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, all three of those stocks are down by over 10%. And because global index investors such as myself are so heavily concentrated in those mega-cap tech stocks, we've all suffered a drawdown as a result of this destabilization of equity markets. The worst peak-to-trough fall was around 6%, but still, it was a rude awakening because we'd grown accustomed to markets that just steadily rise. Now, if you are wondering how you can make sense of all this macroeconomic data, central bank policy changes, and how it affects markets, it's something we publish for free, and you can have this delivered to your inbox every Friday. We also try to make it amusing. People tell us that we succeed here. For example, we're talking about what the Bank of Japan did, but also the Bank of England.

and its effect on markets. So, if you do want to learn more about that, it's very easy. Just go to our website, pensioncraft.com, SL newsletter, and you'll find a link so you can subscribe in the description below. But what is useful is we can use this little market wobble to give us a sense of what was safe. In other words, what kind of investments would have mitigated our losses and presumably would mitigate losses if we get an even bigger selloff, which will happen eventually. Now, starting with the safest investment, the money market funds have been particularly resilient when it comes to this big selloff, and that's because they're very cash-like. They're not exactly the same as cash; they don't have the same protections, but they are very low-volatility investments. So, the red line you can see at the top of this graph, that's a money market fund in the UK. It's an accumulation money market fund. I've talked about it before, and you can see how low the volatility is.

when we set that alongside a developed market index fund, the one in my core portfolio, VHG, you can see the contrast there in terms of volatility. CSH2 just gradually increases by 3% over this short time period, whereas global markets are down by about 4%. Now, of course, the Bank of England has cut interest rates, so what was a 5.2% rate of growth of this money market fund and others will fall to 5%. But it's going to be a fairly slow process by which the Bank of England cuts rates, so it still remains the case that you get very good real return above inflation for money market funds in the UK and in the US. And if you want to shelter your capital from market pullbacks, that's a reasonable place to preserve your capital. Another safe investment which I've made a lot of videos about is UK guilts. These are UK government bonds where effectively you're buying slices of UK government debt in return for giving your money to the government and funding it. You're

paid a small interest rate, and it's very tax-efficient if you hold it outside an ISA or a SIP because you don't pay capital gains on UK Guild guilts. But another benefit of UK guilts for UK investors, at least, is that you don't have any currency risk; it's all denominated in Sterling. Plus, they're very safe. The UK government has not defaulted in living memory, and if you hold them to maturity, you don't have to worry about interest rate risk either because they always mature at 100. So, this is a hedge which you're paid to hold and where you take very little risk. So, I've shown here three UK guilts: one which matures in a year, that's T25; one which matures in a decade, that's T34; and one which matures in 40 years, that's TG65. And again, these are laid alongside a global Index Fund VHG for comparison. Now notice how when VHV sells off, these three bonds all rise in value, and the one with the longest maturity

increases the most. This is a classic risk-off reaction of government bonds. When people are scared, they sell their equity, they buy bonds, and that pushes up the prices and it pushes the yields down. And the bonds which usually gain the most are the ones with the longest duration. Those are also the ones which have the most volatility. As a bond matures, as it gets closer to maturity, its volatility falls to zero. But for very long-duration bonds like TG 65, the volatility is almost equity-like. But when people are scared, those are usually the bonds which increase in value the most. But you're probably thinking, Wait a minute, I've been told that bonds don't hedge equity anymore. Well, that's only if there's a factor which affects both of them negatively, like very high inflation, which is what we saw in 2022. If it's just run-of-the-mill fear of things like a carry trade being unwound, then bonds are actually a very good hedge for equity. So what we saw for all three of those bonds is as

Equity sold off, they rose in value, and then as equity you recovered, they fell back to where they were previously, so they offered a hedge. Now, as UK investors, we have something which is actually very useful built into our currency, which is that it's not seen as a safe haven; it's a risky currency. That means that when people are scared, when we have these risk-off moves in markets, Sterling weakens versus the dollar. And because most of our investments as global index investors are in dollars, the US market's huge, that weakening of Sterling means that you actually weaken less because when you convert back to Sterling, you get more Sterling for every dollar. So, by having a risky currency, we have a kind of built-in hedge when people are scared. To illustrate that, let's look at that VHG fund alongside another developed market tracker, but this one is currency hedged, so you've removed the effect of Sterling. Notice how for the Sterling hedge fund with ticker IG GWD, the selloff was much larger, and that's

because of the weakening of Sterling, which was about 2% over the course of this selloff. Now, of course, on the upside, Sterling pulls in the opposite direction, and it reduces our return as it strengthens. But overall, the effect is to reduce or dampen the volatility of our Global index Investments. How about if we look across all asset classes, and we do it all in dollars? Well, in this case, you can see that for the US as well, treasury funds, US Government bond funds perform the best, and they gained the most in value during the sell-off. The funds which have the greatest maturity, like TLT, which is 20-year plus maturity US treasuries, that gained in value the most. It rose by just under 2%. Intermediate bonds gained a little bit less, and short-duration US government bonds even less than that. But all three of those were very effective hedges against the selloff. There were no surprises about the things which sold off the most. Bitcoin was down about 15%. It behaves very much like a leveraged NASDAQ index.

tracker the NASDAQ, also the QQQ tracker, tracks NASDAQ that was down by 12%, and the S&P was down by 8%. What's kind of interesting is that gold, which is usually a safe haven, sold off by about 3%, so it didn't gain in value as equity markets were selling off. And while emerging market stocks certainly sold off, you can see that the Vanguard emerging markets ETF was down by over 6%. Hard currency emerging market bonds, however, which are denominated in dollars, didn't sell off much at all. What's also interesting is that junk bonds in the US, which show that there's some kind of credit problem, didn't sell off because there wasn't really a deterioration of credit quality for US companies. Now for our PensionCraft Tocom website premium members, we offer these trackers, one of which is a US valuation tool. What this does is it shows you the forecast earnings for the US over the next year, and it multiplies it by various numbers, and that's to show you what the price of

the S&P 500 would be if it was say 19 times forward earnings. So, if the forward earnings are about $260, the 19 times that would be just over 5,000 for the S&P. Now, that's the average, the 5-year average price-to-earnings multiple for the S&P. So, when we're above that, you know that the S&P is relatively expensive compared to where we've been over the last 5 years. The reason why we use the forward price-to-earnings multiple is that it factors in a lot of the optimism about future earnings, and it's not backward-looking. Stocks typically are forward-looking, so this measure is as well. So, even factoring in that optimism about forward earnings, the US is still looking expensive right now, even after that selloff. It's above the 5E average, it's above the 10E average forward price-to-earnings multiple, and so that means that we could get further sell-offs. So, all of that begs a question: how much of our

portfolio should be safe, and how much should be risky. I think the key thing as investors is to combine three different factors when considering how much risky stocks to have in our portfolio. The first one is risk appetite. This is your emotional capacity to weather a loss. If markets fall by 30%, would you be an emotional wreck? Some people I know can just shrug it off; others get really upset because this is their life savings, and they get destroyed, understandably. The second factor is your risk capacity. What's your economic ability to weather a loss without suffering a change in your quality of life? If it's money you're not going to need for some time, then your portfolio could make a big loss, and as long as it recovers by the time you need the money, it won't materially affect your life, even in retirement. Some people have excess savings; they're in a very lucky position, and even if markets fall, it won't affect their quality of life. For the vast majority of us, however, we don't have

that kind of risk capacity, and that in turn reduces the amount of losses we can absorb and the amount of risk we can take in our portfolio. The final consideration is investment horizon. If you are going to be investing for a very long period of time before you need the money, then you can take more risk, 'cause it's very likely that stocks will recover by the time you actually need the money. So, the sweet spot for your asset allocation sits in the middle of that Venn diagram. What kind of losses can you absorb emotionally? What kind of losses can you absorb economically? And how long will you be invested for? In a video called Retirement Planning: Are You on Track? I analyze this using what's called the bucket approach. You'll find a link to that video, by the way, in the description below. But the idea here is you split up your portfolio according to when you'll need the money. Anything you need over a short period of time, then you put that into non-crashy investments, safe investments, things like cash, money market funds, short-duration

government bonds or single guilts that you hold to maturity, where the maturity, of course, is less than 5 years. Now, obviously, you don't want those things to crash before you need the money, so that's why you choose low-volatility investments. So, almost all of that will go into the safe bucket. At the other extreme, money that you're not going to touch for 10 years, more of that can go into equity. In fact, the vast majority of it probably would go into equity. It doesn't have to be complex; it can just be a global equity fund, or you can have more than one fund, regional funds, but equity will give you that good long-term return. Yes, it'll be volatile, but because it'll be there for a long period of time, you don't really care. Then, for the intermediate bucket between 5 and 10 years, you'd have some mix of the two: some in the safe bucket, some in a risky bucket, according to your risk appetite. However, there's a word of warning here, which is

don't let these sell-offs scare you so much that you become too cautious, too risk-averse, because that's going to hurt your long-term returns. Remember that stocks beat bonds by about four or 5% every year. If you look at this report which was published by Credit Suisse in 2023, the same report is now published by UBS. It showed the average long-term returns in the US and the UK, both before inflation subtracted and after. Here, I've shown the nominal returns which don't consider inflation. Notice how much more stocks have returned on average in both countries relative to bonds. It's 4% or more. So, if you do go too cautious and you end with too many bonds or even money market funds, you will on average underperform. So, you've got to learn to conquer your fear. So, I hope this video has allowed you to take this little bit of a market wobble, it wasn't huge, and reassess your risk appetite because the time when you want to rebuild your portfolio and change your allocation is

not just after a crash, or at least not after a big one. So, use this to learn what works, what's likely to preserve your capital, and reallocate accordingly if you need to. And don't forget, if you do enjoy our content, then you can sign up for our newsletter that's published every Friday, and it goes straight to your inbox. We won't spam you, or consider joining our community. Go to pensioncraft.com for listening.

August 2024 Stock Market Sell-off: Which Hedges Worked?

My name is Ramin Nakisa and I started PensionCraft in 2016 as I felt strongly that I wanted to teach people how to invest well for themselves so they could stop making costly mistakes and losing their money through having to pay unnecessarily high fees.

Before starting PensionCraft, I worked in investment banking as a strategist and I was a frequent contributor on CNBC and Bloomberg TV. I have written two books about finance and investment: one for professional investors and one that explains how to buy and sell volatility using exchange-traded products.

I publish a new video on YouTube every Saturday and you can join me for a live Q&A on the 1st Thursday of every month at 7pm UK time.

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