Berkshire Hathaway is hoarding cash in a pattern seen before the financial crisis, but it has a new reason this time
4 min
When the world’s most-followed investor doesn’t feel comfortable investing, should the rest of us be worried?
Warren Buffett , who has quipped that his favourite holding period for a stock is “forever,” continues to have substantial money at work in American companies. But he has never taken this much off the table either—a whopping $325 billion in cash and equivalents, mostly in the form of Treasury bills.
To appreciate the immensity of that hoard, consider that it would allow Berkshire to write a check, with change left over, for all but the 25 or so most-valuable listed U.S. corporations—iconic ones such as Walt Disney, Goldman Sachs , Pfizer, General Electric or AT&T. In addition to letting the dividends and interest pile up on its balance sheet, the conglomerate has aggressively sold down two of its largest shareholdings, Apple and Bank of America, in the past several months. And, for the first time in six years, it has stopped buying more of the stock it knows best— Berkshire Hathaway.
Does that mean mere investing mortals should be cautious about the market? Maybe, but it tells us even more about Berkshire.
Buffett and his late business partner Charlie Munger didn’t outperform the stock market 140-fold by being market-timers. Probably Munger’s most famous quote is his first rule of compounding: “Never interrupt it unnecessarily.” Investors who follow Berkshire closely and hope for a bit of its magic to rub off on their portfolios pay very close attention to what it is buying and selling, but much less to when.
Yet the seemingly always optimistic and patient Buffett has turned cautious before, famously shutting his extremely successful partnership in 1969 when he said markets were too frothy and also building up substantial cash in the years leading up to the global financial crisis—money he deployed opportunistically.
“He’s cognisant of the fact that markets gyrate and go to extremes,” says Adam J. Mead, a New Hampshire money manager and Buffetologist who is the author of “The Complete Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway.”
Stock values being stretched doesn’t mean they are on the precipice of a crash or even a bear market. Instead, zoom out and look at what today’s valuations say about returns over the next several years, which will include both good and bad periods. Goldman Sachs strategist David Kostin predicted recently that the S&P 500’s return over the next decade would average just 3% a year—less than a third of the postwar pace.
Kostin’s report went over like a record scratch at a time of high investor optimism, but it is consistent with other forecasts. Giant asset manager Vanguard recently predicted an annual return range of 3% to 5% for large U.S. stocks and just 0.1% to 2.1% for growth stocks over a decade. And Prof. Robert Shiller ’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio is consistent with an average return of about 0.5% a year after inflation —similar to Kostin’s projection.
Then there is the even simpler “Buffett Indicator,” which the Oracle of Omaha once called “probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.” There are variants on the theme, but it is basically a ratio of all listed stocks to the size of the U.S. economy. Taking the Wilshire 5000 Index as a proxy it is now around 200%, which would leave it more stretched than at the peak of the tech bubble.
With T-bills now yielding more than the prospective return on stocks, it might seem that Buffett has taken as many chips off of the table as possible since there is no upside in risky stocks. But he is on record saying that he would love to spend it.
“What we’d really like to do is buy great businesses,” he said at Berkshire’s 2023 annual meeting. “If we could buy a company for $50 billion or $75 billion, $100 billion, we could do it.”
With Berkshire now worth $1 trillion, it would take a deal of that size to move the needle. Mead explains that a transaction matching acquisitions like 2010’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe deal or the 1998 acquisition of insurer General Re would be worth $100 billion scaled to today’s balance sheet.
Could it also mean that Buffett sees value in keeping dry powder ahead of the next crisis or general froth in the market? Yes, but he isn’t saying, and individual investors also have more options than he does. First of all, we don’t have to pay a 20% or more premium to the market price to invest in a business like Berkshire would in a takeover. We also can sail in much shallower waters and smaller ponds. For example, Vanguard’s 10-year projections range from 7% to 9% a year for non-U.S. developed market stocks and 5% to 7% for U.S. small capitalisation stocks. Other than a very profitable bet on Japanese trading companies in recent years, though, Buffett has kept his money mostly stateside and likely will continue to do so.
Changes at Berkshire are inevitable, though—and not just because the 94-year-old is nearing the end of his remarkable career. Buffett hasn’t hesitated to return cash to shareholders, almost exclusively through stock buybacks, yet he clearly deems even his own stock too pricey for that.
Berkshire also has reached a size at which it can’t replicate its long-run record of deploying its profits and handily beating the market. It is going to have to hand money back somehow—probably through a dividend, reckons Mead. Eventually it becomes necessary to interrupt compounding.
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Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.
3 min
Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.
For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.
The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.
Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.
Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.
Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.
Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.
“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.
Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.
“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”
Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.
Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”
The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.
The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.
These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.
Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.
Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.
Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.
And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.
“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”
