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Oil market’s small fry become big fish
Gregory Meyer in New York
A school of sea bream swim in a sea pen at a fish farm in Limassol, Cyprus, on Thursday, March 27 2014
©Bloomberg
Like the old cartoon showing a school of small fish organised to form a big one, retail investors have become a whale in the oil market.
Uniting as buyers of exchange traded funds, these investors held 180m barrels equivalent of West Texas Intermediate crude futures last week — 30 per cent of the most active futures market.
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The resurfacing of oil ETFs is a sign some investors are again warming to commodities as an asset class after years of poor performance.
But analysts and some fund managers warn that the fat returns of the previous decade are over and the “supercycle”, the long period of tightness in markets from oil to copper that drove these returns, has rumbled to a halt.
“We had the supercycle. And then a couple of years ago the supercycle died,” says Mihir Worah, chief investment officer of real return and asset allocation at Pimco, which manages about $19bn in commodities.
After withdrawing $50bn from commodities in 2013 and another $28bn in 2014, passive investors pumped a net $9.5bn into commodities through mid-March, according to Citigroup.
A big recipient of these inflows has been ETFs tracking oil as prices slumped towards $40 a barrel. The biggest, the US Oil Fund, has absorbed a net $2bn this year.
Investors adding commodities to their portfolios are bucking mainstream opinion. Goldman Sachs, once a prominent commodities bull, says “the trough is yet to come” and favours equities over commodities. Barclays, which has long tracked commodity investment, does not expect a return to consistent inflows this year.
“The environment for investing in commodities has changed. Things are different,” says Kevin Norrish, Barclays’ head of commodities research. “We’ve not got the strong Chinese demand growth we’ve had in the last decade; we’ve not got the supply constraints; we’ve not got the trend of dollar weakening” which tends to support dollar-denominated commodities.
The Bloomberg Commodity Index returned more than 10 per cent in several of the boom years. In each of the past four years it has recorded losses. In 2015 the index is down another 3.9 per cent.
Mr Worah of Pimco says the double-digit returns of years past are “not sustainable”. Instead, he sees “modestly positive” real returns that keep up with inflation and provide insurance against a price shock — say, from oil in the Middle East or wheat from Russia.
Commodities traders once enhanced returns by trading around the money flows that accompanied the monthly rolling of futures-based index products such as ETFs.
“During the days it was being rolled, it was clear the spreads were moving. Everyone knew it was coming. It was a big source of revenue for the banks — massive,” says a former Wall Street commodities executive.
Now that easy money has been arbitraged away, fund managers say.
A commodities selling point was that they generated equity-like returns but moved out of step with stock markets, while keeping up with inflation. This proposition was tarnished during the financial crisis, when all asset classes plunged together. And inflation is not a worry in developed economies.
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The $36.4bn Harvard university endowment, a cynosure of the fund management world, this year cut commodities’ piece of its target portfolio to zero, down from 8 per cent in 2008.
“In prior years, this asset class served as a diversifier in our portfolio, given its negative correlation to publicly traded equity and significant market inefficiencies,” the endowment says in its annual report. “In recent years, we have seen publicly traded commodities become more correlated to emerging markets equity and more populated with speculative investors. As a result, we now consider this area less valuable as a method of diversification.”
The exit of Harvard comes just as correlations between commodities and equities and among commodities themselves again break down.
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That does not mean commodities will necessarily bring strong returns again. Oil inventories are bulging in the US and global grain stocks are the highest in more than a decade. China’s growth is slowing. While other countries and regions such as India and the Middle East will need more energy, food and materials, “no large emerging market is likely to rise up to the point where China has now come to a landing”, Citi argues.
One barometer of the commodity doldrums is the lack of public outcry over the “speculative investors” Harvard describes. During the supercycle, consumers and their political allies blamed speculators and commodity index investors for rising prices. Now producers such as Rosneft, the Russian oil company, and Saudi Arabia say speculators are moving the market.
“I believe the price fall can be put down to expectation and speculation. It was not about fundamentals,” Ibrahim Al-Muhanna, a top Saudi oil adviser, said in a recent speech.
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发表于 2015-4-15 01:15:17
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