We are again, having another satisfactory month in November, despite the fact that we took no positions at all for 10 days to complete an account restructuring that enables us to manage our clients’ money more efficiently and at a lower cost, through a complete order management system facilitated by IG Markets. NOZ macro fund, in November, up 7.67% net of all fees and expenses, beating all the indexes that we are benchmarked to, albeit less than in Oct.
For the AUM, we are pleased to announce that we have doubled our fund size in 2 months with both new fund flow and our intrinsic NAV growth.
Year end melt up, or just a melt through?
Since 3rd Quarter this year, there has been a lot of talks regarding a year end market melt up, possibly as a result of money managers herding behavior in terms of performance chasing, as well as the year end seasonality effect, which shows a strong tendency of market out-performance in 4Q and 1Q. However, in our humble opinion we think it might well be the case that this is going to be a year end of melt through within the current range, rather than an melt up.
Simply put, yes there may be a group of funds that underperformed the investment community and more importantly, their benchmarks; and also yes, that seasonality is working really well in 4Q. However, what is different this time is that we had already an unprecedented rally from March and the extent of rally makes it more prevailing a case, for those who are already in and deep in the money, to wrap their books up, and to take some good sleep, which they have not yet been able to since summer 2007(Provided they are dedicated enough to the money that they manage); And this will be so reasonably prevailing to make the effort of performance chasing and year end seasonality, relatively less impactful this time.
Please be noted, by saying that a melt up is less likely an outcome does not necessarily mean anything bearish; Contrarily, most likely we will see more of a high level rangy market from now till year end, which is the very pattern we are going to follow and to trade accordingly. To buy into the weakness caused by those who are not willing to suffer any potential pain of losing their winning stake, and to sell into those who are eager to put their cash to work, to get their feet wet so to prove to their investors of their existence.
For our investment strategies, we are still holding the view that Core Rate (Fed Fund, ECB and BOJ) are going to be kept at lower level, for a period longer than those who are calling an imminent exit but possibly shorter than the Economist’ consensus. Therefore, we will still be keen to find a better risk adjusted way to express our bearishness of both USD and JPY, even though we would like to be as patient as we can on the later one, not to go against the current strong up trend in Yen; meanwhile be as cautious as we could on the former one , by our thorough work of position sizing and trading, since it is so one-way and so crowded a trade this year.
Stock wise, we are still looking at building up our positions in growth consumption names in HK/China, very patiently since we do not have to rely on those names to be our main performance contributors. On the other hand, we are seeing this theme as the ONLY sustainable growth trend globally in the stock world so we would not be hesitant to pick them up once it shows its hand.
Fixed income front, we are relatively light since FX is really our bread and butter and we never forget for a second what Mr. David Einhorn told us, that to start from where you are having the edge, and we will stick to it. But we do want to point out to those who that are claiming JGB rates are not going to rise this time, as it did for the past two decades, that “GO Check out where Japan’s Household SAVING rate is now and used to be, first”.
