Could you just use normal calls instead? Calls on the S&P500 a year out, at the current price, are on the order of $100, which seems like enough to get plenty leverage for most of us. If you think that the market is too afraid of the downside, then you can sell the corresponding put.
I thought there was some evidence that out of the money call options tend to underperform on average. It’s covered in “expected returns” by Ilmanen. He thinks it’s due to lottery-ticket biases, causing OTM calls to be systematically overvalued.
That would be suprising as many income strategies (invest in high dividend yield stocks) run covered call strategies (effectively selling out-of-the-money calls) because their investors prefer downside protection. These strategies do this in a largely price-inelastic manner so I would expect their to be positive expected value in buying these options.
I’ll re-read Ilmanen on the subject when I get a chance.
Buying calls is what this book advises, but I’m very skeptical because of all the studies suggesting that call-option returns deviate heavily from theoretical predictions. Maybe it’s different for one-year calls than shorter-term calls, but I’m still nervous. Glad to hear your thoughts.
They deviate heavily in the thinly-traded, far-out-of-the-money regime. I don’t see such evidence in the normal regime. I don’t expect big divergences because they would lead to arbitrage opportunities. And what’s more, if there is such a disparity, then you can personally make a lot of money from it.
(They are worse 1 year out than over shorter time periods.)
The easy way to verify this is just buying a call at $X and selling a put at $X. You will lose 1-2% of the value of the underlying asset (if you go a year out on the S&P500; the loss is mostly in the dividends you won’t receive), and then receive a payoff equal to the change in that asset’s price. So you are basically borrowing at 1-2% interest. If you are more careful about the analysis and the procedure, you can get quite close to market interest rates.
This loss is the sticker price, it doesn’t depend on any not-immediately-verifiable claims about option pricing.
They deviate heavily in the thinly-traded, far-out-of-the-money regime. I don’t see such evidence in the normal regime.
Do you mean in my “Do Call Options Have High Expected Returns?” piece or elsewhere?
(They are worse 1 year out than over shorter time periods.)
What are worse? Theoretical predictions?
I don’t recommend investing in the S&P 500
Why not? Shouldn’t all capital markets have about equal expected returns? Or do you mean that some markets have higher returns due to higher systemic risk?
Do you mean in my “Do Call Options Have High Expected Returns?” piece or elsewhere?
I haven’t seen such evidence anywhere.
Shouldn’t all capital markets have about equal expected returns? Or do you mean that some markets have higher returns due to higher systemic risk?
On the efficient market story it doesn’t matter for returns whether you invest in the US or abroad. But (1) the non-capital investments of philanthropists with your values are particularly tied up in the US, and so if it make no difference it seems bad to take on the extra correlation, (2) prices really do look high right now in the US, and there are plausible stories about how that could happen in the existing financial system, so even if you only assign those stories a modest probability, it seems worth moving in that direction.
prices really do look high right now in the US, and there are plausible stories about how that could happen in the existing financial system
Do you have a short summary? I could probably fill in the details from even a one line description. I know of several such stories but would be interested in hearing which you find plausible. Certainly there are also several popular but false ones (e.g. Schiller PE)
My main reason for pessimism is the comparison between US equities and international equities; I guess that forward P/E’s are higher in the US than elsewhere. This is largely based on the high Schiller PE / current profit margins in the US though (along with comparable P/E and high P/B ratios), so it would be good to know if you think this is a bad basis for extrapolation.
The “plausible stories” I was referring to were about how mispricings could persist. My understanding is that many investors’ allocations between US and international equities isn’t very flexible. Such investors could make up a large enough majority and short-selling could be unattractive enough that a moderate mispricing could persist. There are also principal-agent problems related to benchmarking, and well-documented market optimism about continuing growth vs. regression to the mean, that seem to point in the same direction.
But I haven’t thought about this angle very much either, so it would be good to know if you think these mispricings would get fixed.
My understanding is that many investors’ allocations between US and international equities isn’t very flexible
Do you know why not? I moved my 401k to all international equities, and I assume many retirement investors have this option.
That said, it does seem that US investors don’t invest enough internationally: 27% of US mutual-fund equity is international, while international equity accounts for 51% of the total market.
The US market is slightly more expensive on a forward PE basis. However, Schiller PE is nonsense. For example, buybacks have become much more commonplace since the early 1980s, which increase the secular EPS growth rate (by reducing the dividend yield). The schiller PE does not adjust for this however; it assumes EPS will revert to their previous level, rather than profits reverting to their previous level. It also ignores the effects of dilution. Many companies issued a lot of equity during the crisis (especially banks). These companies now have much lower EPS as a result, even if profits returned, yet schiller PE implicitly assumes that their EPS will magically revert to their previous level. Hopefully this is clear; if not I can explain when we skype.
(There are several other problems with schiller PE).
Yes many investors can’t re-allocate between markets but there are some whose entire job is this. I’m not sure about the end result of this.
1) If the EPS growth rate is higher but dividend yield has been lowered a corresponding amount, then aren’t expected returns unchanged?
2) If you make the adjustment you propose, is that enough to show normal valuations? My understanding is that according to Shiller PE valuations are about 2x historical norms.
3) Also, there’s many other alternative valuation models that currently give similar results to Shiller PE e.g. P/R, Tobins Q ratio, P/E with normalized profit margins.
4) These models are all correlated ~0.8 with 10yr returns, so you’d need to think something pretty substantial had changed for them to break down. [1yr forward P/E, by contrast, has much less correlation with long-run returns]
1) Yes but the Shiller PE will be higher, thereby (incorrectly) reducing its estimate of forward returns.
2) No, I agree the market is at above average valuation, just less extremely so than shiller PE would suggest. Though it looks cheap on Equity Risk Premium measures.
3) Yeah my objection is to the methodology not the conclusion. However I think many of those other methodologies are silly as well; for example, P/R does not make sense from an accounting standpoint (it should be EV/R). Changes in the structure of the economy have made book value metrics less relevant than historically, but I agree they are somewhat concerning.
4) Looking at historical correlations with returns introduces lookahead bias. If the market valuation doubled from here, and then remained flat for 100 years while earnings grew at their historic rate, schiller PE would remain correlated with returns, except it would retrospectively advise us to buy here.
Also, I’m having trouble replicating your numbers. Using the schiller data, I get correlations of −0.54 for CAPE vs 10yr return (real or nominal), and −0.49, −0.47 for PE vs 10yr return (real and nominal respectively). This is a small enough difference that we should prefer to use the more theoretically justified measure.
Also forward earnings estimates are not available that far back so I am sceptical of any research into their ability to forecast long-run returns! For 1-year holding periods they do about as well as trailing earnings though.
However, if we use a lookahead bias free measure, and instead of using the absolute level of PE / CAPE, we instead use the percentile of that metric, relative to its own history, the results basically reverse. Using this better measure I get −0.54 and −0.51 for PE vs −0.48 and −0.43 for CAPE. (in both cases I started the correlation in 1900 so we had a few decades of data for the percentiles to stabilize in.)
Interesting. My worry with credit-spread metrics is no-one cared about them pre-2008, so their performance is all in-sample basically. People always add new explanatory variables that explain the last crisis. However I am not an expert on this.
Very interesting. For the correlations I was just going with Hussman’s analysis. I know it’s simple, but it’s the best I’m aware of.
This post has a summary of a couple of methods which he says have 84% correlation with long-run returns, and currently predict returns of just a couple of percent for the next decade.
Philosophical economics has a some critical discussion of this and similar graphs, e.g. here and more directly here. There is also a lot of discussion of current elevation of profit margins and CAPE, which I found useful.
Larks, what do you think of Hussman’s analysis? He combines valuation with a model of risk aversion, based on credit spreads, market breadth, and bull-bear ratio.
Who do you think publishes the best analysis of expected stock returns?
Could you just use normal calls instead? Calls on the S&P500 a year out, at the current price, are on the order of $100, which seems like enough to get plenty leverage for most of us. If you think that the market is too afraid of the downside, then you can sell the corresponding put.
I thought there was some evidence that out of the money call options tend to underperform on average. It’s covered in “expected returns” by Ilmanen. He thinks it’s due to lottery-ticket biases, causing OTM calls to be systematically overvalued.
That would be suprising as many income strategies (invest in high dividend yield stocks) run covered call strategies (effectively selling out-of-the-money calls) because their investors prefer downside protection. These strategies do this in a largely price-inelastic manner so I would expect their to be positive expected value in buying these options.
I’ll re-read Ilmanen on the subject when I get a chance.
Selling calls benefits from OTM calls being overvalued. I’m talking about going long OTM calls. Am I missing something?
Right, I’m saying there is a conflict between these two facts that I don’t know how to resolve.
Ah, you’re saying that because a lot of funds sell OTM calls no matter the price, you’d expect the returns to be positive.
I think the explanation is just that there’s an even larger group of people who buy OTM calls due to lottery-ticket biases, and this effect wins.
Hmm, maybe. Do you know who does this? Is this retail investors?
See also “Do Call Options Have High Expected Returns?”
Buying calls is what this book advises, but I’m very skeptical because of all the studies suggesting that call-option returns deviate heavily from theoretical predictions. Maybe it’s different for one-year calls than shorter-term calls, but I’m still nervous. Glad to hear your thoughts.
They deviate heavily in the thinly-traded, far-out-of-the-money regime. I don’t see such evidence in the normal regime. I don’t expect big divergences because they would lead to arbitrage opportunities. And what’s more, if there is such a disparity, then you can personally make a lot of money from it.
(They are worse 1 year out than over shorter time periods.)
The easy way to verify this is just buying a call at $X and selling a put at $X. You will lose 1-2% of the value of the underlying asset (if you go a year out on the S&P500; the loss is mostly in the dividends you won’t receive), and then receive a payoff equal to the change in that asset’s price. So you are basically borrowing at 1-2% interest. If you are more careful about the analysis and the procedure, you can get quite close to market interest rates.
This loss is the sticker price, it doesn’t depend on any not-immediately-verifiable claims about option pricing.
(I don’t recommend investing in the S&P 500).
Do you mean in my “Do Call Options Have High Expected Returns?” piece or elsewhere?
What are worse? Theoretical predictions?
Why not? Shouldn’t all capital markets have about equal expected returns? Or do you mean that some markets have higher returns due to higher systemic risk?
I haven’t seen such evidence anywhere.
On the efficient market story it doesn’t matter for returns whether you invest in the US or abroad. But (1) the non-capital investments of philanthropists with your values are particularly tied up in the US, and so if it make no difference it seems bad to take on the extra correlation, (2) prices really do look high right now in the US, and there are plausible stories about how that could happen in the existing financial system, so even if you only assign those stories a modest probability, it seems worth moving in that direction.
Do you have a short summary? I could probably fill in the details from even a one line description. I know of several such stories but would be interested in hearing which you find plausible. Certainly there are also several popular but false ones (e.g. Schiller PE)
My main reason for pessimism is the comparison between US equities and international equities; I guess that forward P/E’s are higher in the US than elsewhere. This is largely based on the high Schiller PE / current profit margins in the US though (along with comparable P/E and high P/B ratios), so it would be good to know if you think this is a bad basis for extrapolation.
The “plausible stories” I was referring to were about how mispricings could persist. My understanding is that many investors’ allocations between US and international equities isn’t very flexible. Such investors could make up a large enough majority and short-selling could be unattractive enough that a moderate mispricing could persist. There are also principal-agent problems related to benchmarking, and well-documented market optimism about continuing growth vs. regression to the mean, that seem to point in the same direction.
But I haven’t thought about this angle very much either, so it would be good to know if you think these mispricings would get fixed.
Do you know why not? I moved my 401k to all international equities, and I assume many retirement investors have this option.
That said, it does seem that US investors don’t invest enough internationally: 27% of US mutual-fund equity is international, while international equity accounts for 51% of the total market.
The US market is slightly more expensive on a forward PE basis. However, Schiller PE is nonsense. For example, buybacks have become much more commonplace since the early 1980s, which increase the secular EPS growth rate (by reducing the dividend yield). The schiller PE does not adjust for this however; it assumes EPS will revert to their previous level, rather than profits reverting to their previous level. It also ignores the effects of dilution. Many companies issued a lot of equity during the crisis (especially banks). These companies now have much lower EPS as a result, even if profits returned, yet schiller PE implicitly assumes that their EPS will magically revert to their previous level. Hopefully this is clear; if not I can explain when we skype.
(There are several other problems with schiller PE).
Yes many investors can’t re-allocate between markets but there are some whose entire job is this. I’m not sure about the end result of this.
I agree with your other points.
Larks, could you explain a bit more?
1) If the EPS growth rate is higher but dividend yield has been lowered a corresponding amount, then aren’t expected returns unchanged?
2) If you make the adjustment you propose, is that enough to show normal valuations? My understanding is that according to Shiller PE valuations are about 2x historical norms.
3) Also, there’s many other alternative valuation models that currently give similar results to Shiller PE e.g. P/R, Tobins Q ratio, P/E with normalized profit margins.
4) These models are all correlated ~0.8 with 10yr returns, so you’d need to think something pretty substantial had changed for them to break down. [1yr forward P/E, by contrast, has much less correlation with long-run returns]
1) Yes but the Shiller PE will be higher, thereby (incorrectly) reducing its estimate of forward returns.
2) No, I agree the market is at above average valuation, just less extremely so than shiller PE would suggest. Though it looks cheap on Equity Risk Premium measures.
3) Yeah my objection is to the methodology not the conclusion. However I think many of those other methodologies are silly as well; for example, P/R does not make sense from an accounting standpoint (it should be EV/R). Changes in the structure of the economy have made book value metrics less relevant than historically, but I agree they are somewhat concerning.
4) Looking at historical correlations with returns introduces lookahead bias. If the market valuation doubled from here, and then remained flat for 100 years while earnings grew at their historic rate, schiller PE would remain correlated with returns, except it would retrospectively advise us to buy here.
Also, I’m having trouble replicating your numbers. Using the schiller data, I get correlations of −0.54 for CAPE vs 10yr return (real or nominal), and −0.49, −0.47 for PE vs 10yr return (real and nominal respectively). This is a small enough difference that we should prefer to use the more theoretically justified measure.
Also forward earnings estimates are not available that far back so I am sceptical of any research into their ability to forecast long-run returns! For 1-year holding periods they do about as well as trailing earnings though.
However, if we use a lookahead bias free measure, and instead of using the absolute level of PE / CAPE, we instead use the percentile of that metric, relative to its own history, the results basically reverse. Using this better measure I get −0.54 and −0.51 for PE vs −0.48 and −0.43 for CAPE. (in both cases I started the correlation in 1900 so we had a few decades of data for the percentiles to stabilize in.)
I will send you the excel spreadsheet.
Also see this for a summary of the ‘risk-aversion’ measure:
http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc150413.htm
Interesting. My worry with credit-spread metrics is no-one cared about them pre-2008, so their performance is all in-sample basically. People always add new explanatory variables that explain the last crisis. However I am not an expert on this.
Very interesting. For the correlations I was just going with Hussman’s analysis. I know it’s simple, but it’s the best I’m aware of.
This post has a summary of a couple of methods which he says have 84% correlation with long-run returns, and currently predict returns of just a couple of percent for the next decade.
http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc130318.htm
Why do these disagree with your figures?
Philosophical economics has a some critical discussion of this and similar graphs, e.g. here and more directly here. There is also a lot of discussion of current elevation of profit margins and CAPE, which I found useful.
Thanks, that looks like a great blog.
Not sure. Did you get the excel sheet I sent?
Larks, what do you think of Hussman’s analysis? He combines valuation with a model of risk aversion, based on credit spreads, market breadth, and bull-bear ratio.
Who do you think publishes the best analysis of expected stock returns?
I don’t know of anyone who does it well. I intend to work on it myself once I’m done with CFA.