Authers’ Note: Shanghai Surprise
Authers’ Note: Shanghai Surprise
| It was 10 years ago today. Traders in Europe and the US woke up to news of a huge fall in the Shanghai stock market. Then things got interesting. This is how I started that day's Short View column: | 10年前的那一天，欧洲和美国的交易员醒来听说了上海股市暴跌的新闻。之后事情变得很有意思。我那天的“短线观点”(Short View)是这样开头的： | |
| When did the much-expected wave of risk aversion of 2007 finally break? It can be timed with precision. At 2:57 on Tuesday afternoon in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 12,346.33 — off about 2 per cent for a day on which traders had been spooked by 9 per cent falls in Chinese stock indices overnight. By 3:02 it had dropped to 12,089.02 — off more than 540 points for one of the worst days in history. | 2007年这股意想之中的避险浪潮最终何时袭来？其时间点可以被精确推断。纽约周二（2007年2月27日）下午2:57，道琼斯工业平均指数(Dow Jones Industrial Average)处在12346.33点，比开盘时——这一天交易员受到了隔夜中国股指暴跌9%的惊吓——低2%左右。到3:02，该指数跌至12089.02点——下跌逾540点，当天成了史上最糟糕的交易日之一。 | |
| Here is that day’s Short View: | 这是那天的短线观点： | |
| And here is our front page reporting on the Surprise. It was not difficult to predict that there were more dominoes to fall: | 这是我们那天的意外冲击的头版报道。不难预测还有更多的多米诺骨牌即将倒下： | |
| In hindsight February 27, 2007, was plainly the day that world financial markets woke up to the dangers created by falling US house prices and the bubble in subprime credit. Most importantly, volatility as measured by the Vix index had been at historic lows only a few days before. It almost doubled that February day, and was not to return to its opening level of that day until long into the current decade. Just as might have been predicted by the late economist Hyman Minsky, who was about to become very much more influential, a long period of calm had created complacency, and with it the conditions for a banking crisis and disaster. | 事后来看，正是在2007年2月27日全球金融市场开始意识到了美国房价下跌和次贷泡沫会造成的危险。最重要的是，就在几天前，衡量股市波动性的波动率指数(Vix index)还处于历史低点。而在2月27日该指数几乎上涨了一倍，而且直到进入2010年代很久才回到了当天开盘时的水平。已故经济学家海曼?明斯基(Hyman Minsky)——他后来影响力大了许多——本来可能会做出这样的预测：长时间的平静造成了自满，而这种情绪正是孕育银行业危机和灾难的温床。 | |
| What parallels can we draw with today? First, volatility is very low, once more. Having taken almost a decade to return to its lows, the current market action is about as calm as it gets. The S&P 500 has not suffered a daily fall of as much as 1 per cent since October. This is how volatility has moved: | 如今和当初有哪些相似之处？首先，波动性再次处于非常低的水平。用了将近10年的时间波动率重返低点，当前的市场行为已经相当冷静了。自从去年10月以来，标普500指数(S&P 500)单日跌幅从未达到过1%。下图显示了波动性的变化： | |
| Does this suggest we are due another horror show like 2008? That would be a consistent outcome, but note that the Vix is very unlikely to move to 80 overnight. That would take an almost unimaginable black swan event. The beginning of the rise in volatility a decade ago predated the market top (which infamously came on Halloween) by eight months, and predated the Lehman bankruptcy, when a steady decline turned into an all-out crash, by 18 months. | 这是否意味着我们又将经历一幅与2008年类似的恐怖情景？得出这个结果并不矛盾，但需要注意的是波动率指数一夜间升至80的可能性非常低。除非发生难以想象的“黑天鹅事件”。10年前波动性开始上升的时间比市场见顶（在万圣节那天不光彩地到来）的时间早8个月，比雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)破产——当股市稳步下跌变成了全面崩盘——早了18个月。 | |
| As for the lessons on market timing, they are surprising. Yes, of course it would have been good to get out of the stock market altogether on the eve of the Shanghai Surprise, and sink money into bonds. But there were still a few more opportunities to get out. And it would still have been helpful to have a good idea when to come back into the market: | 至于有关市场时点的教训，它们是出其不意的。没错，如果能在“上海惊情”(Shanghai Surprise)前夜从股市全身而退、并且把钱投到债券上，这当然很好。但之后仍然有一些机会退出市场。而且，懂得何时重返市场仍然有用。 | |
| Until a few weeks ago, bonds were indeed ahead of stocks in the US. But the latest leg-up for the S&P 500 has put stocks ahead by a fraction. More to the point, failing to get back into stocks at some stage from the spring to the autumn of 2009 would have hurt. And if anyone missed that opportunity, there was another chance to get back into stocks, almost as good, in late 2011 after the debt ceiling crisis. | 直到几周前，美国债券市场的表现的确还领先于股市。但标普500最近一轮涨幅使得股市行情稍稍领先于债市。说得更确切点，没能在2009年春天至秋天之间的某一时点重返股市会是一大憾事。如果有人错过了那个时机，还有一次几乎同样好的机会重返股市，即2011年末债务上限危机后。 | |
| So, even if you correctly timed to the day the beginning of the greatest financial crisis in human memory, over 10 years you would have been no better off than if you had stayed in stocks throughout. For your dramatic exit from stocks to make a difference, you also need to time your re-entrance correctly. | 因此，即使你准确地把握了人类史上最严重金融危机开始的那一天，接下来10年里，你的境遇也不会比你始终留在股市里好。为了让你骤然退出股市能有所不同，你还需要准确把握重返股市的时点。 | |
| Finally, there was indeed a bubble in financials. This did not show up in their conventional valuations so much as in their earnings, which looked wildly over-extended, thanks to unsustainably cheap credit. Getting out of the bubble before it burst would have saved a lot of money. And interestingly, when judged by S&P 500 points, the stock that has lost its investors the most wealth over the past decade is Citigroup. Remember this had been an investor darling. Because it was so much bigger than the companies that went bust altogether, such as Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, the total and enduring losses incurred by Citigroup investors who never sold are even greater in absolute terms. | 最后，当时金融市场确实存在泡沫。由于不可持续的廉价贷款，泡沫并未明显表现在其传统的估值上，而盈利指标看起来就被严重高估。在泡沫破裂前退出会少损失很多钱。有意思的是，以标普500的点数判断，过去10年让投资者损失最大的股票是花旗集团(Citigroup)。要记住它曾是投资者的宠儿。因为它的规模远远超过那些破产公司——比如雷曼兄弟和华盛顿互惠银行(Washington Mutual)——加起来的市值，因此，按绝对值计算，那些始终未卖掉花旗股票的投资者承受的源源不断的总损失要大得多。 | |
| Spotting a bubble and avoiding it can be worth the effort; but amazingly, trying to time the market, even in these extreme circumstances, might not have been worth the trouble. I am surprised by this outcome, but there it is. | 发现并避开泡沫可能值得付出努力；但令人惊讶的是，试图把握市场变化时点——即使是在这些极端情况下——可能不值得大费周章。这一结论令我惊讶，但事实就是这样。 | |
| Market timing | 市场时机 | |
| Some more thoughts on market timing. Saturday's Long View was more controversial than I expected. Some take it as obvious that a 40 per cent sell-off is imminent; others impugn any idea of trying to time the market; and others suggest that we are only now beginning to enter the final speculative phase of a long rally. There is something to all these arguments. | 关于市场时机的更多看法。近期的“长线观点”(Long View)比我预料的更有争议。有些人认为显然很快就要发生幅度可能高达40%的大跌，有人则质疑任何试图捕捉市场时点的想法，还有人认为我们现在刚进入一波长期反弹的最后投机阶段。这些观点都有一定道理。 | |
| But just for now, let us take a quick look at some of the more anecdotal signs of a sellable high. First, insider selling is running at its fastest rate in six years, according to TrimTabs. This shows what insiders have been up to over the past year: | 但暂时，让我们看看关于现在到了“宜卖出的高点”的一些坊间迹象。首先，根据TrimTabs的数据，内部人出售股票的速度达到6年来最高水平。下图显示了过去一年的内部人售股情况： | |
| That is very worrying, but it could conceivably show that corporate insiders want to take some profits while they have the chance. | 这十分令人担忧，但可想而知，它表明企业内部人员希望趁自己有机会时让利润落袋为安。 | |
| As for other signs, the forthcoming Snap IPO brings back memories of past IPOs that signalled market turns. The Blackstone and Glencore IPOS almost perfectly coincided with the top of the credit market in 2007, and the top of the metals market in 2011. But against that look at the Yahoo IPO in early 2006, four years before the internet bubble peaked. This is what the FT's much missed Peter Martin said about it at the time: | 至于其他迹象，Snap的首次公开发行(IPO)让人想起了以前的一些IPO，它们标志了市场转向。黑石(Blackstone)和嘉能可(Glencore)的IPO几乎正逢2007年信贷市场的高点和2011年金属市场的高点。相比之下，雅虎(Yahoo!)在2006年初的IPO却不同，雅虎上市四年后互联网泡沫达到峰值。以下是深受怀念的英国《金融时报》专栏作家彼得?马丁(Peter Martin)当时对此发表的看法： | |
| The last of the century's great real estate booms is now under way and to make sense of the expanding electronic universe you need a reliable guide. | 这是本世纪最后一次房地产大繁荣，为了搞清楚这个正在扩张的电子世界，你需要一本靠谱的指南。 | |
| Definitive proof of the scale of the internet craze comes in the $1.1bn market capitalisation briefly accorded last Friday to Yahoo!, an electronic catalogue of the World Wide Web. | 最近，雅虎——一个万维网电子目录——市值一度达到11亿美元，显然证明了这股互联网热潮的规模。 | |
| So egregious is the overvaluation — Yahoo!'s midday market capitalisation yesterday was $681m — that it is hard to convey in the FT's sober prose. This is a company with total revenues of around $3m since its launch in March 1995, giving it a price/revenue multiple of 340. There is no price/earnings ratio: Yahoo! has achieved an operating profit ($62,000) in only one of its four quarters. It is run by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who until two years ago were graduate students at Stanford University; they have no previous business experience. | 估值之畸高到了异乎寻常的程度——雅虎昨天的盘中市值是6.81亿美元——以英国《金融时报》严肃的行文很难表述。这家公司自1995年3月创立以来，其总收入约为300万美元左右，这使其市销率达到340倍。没法算市盈率：雅虎一个财年里只有一季度实现了营业利润——6.2万美元。雅虎掌门人杨致远(Jerry Yang)和大卫?费罗(David Filo)两年前才从斯坦福大学(Stanford University)毕业，此前没有商业经验。 | |
| It is not surprising that there is a flourishing internet discussion (in the alt.investments.misc newsgroup) headed 'Yahoo!: how to short', in which eager participants examine the best ways to sell the stock short and profit from its expected precipitous decline in price. | 难怪互联网上出现了以“雅虎：如何做空”为标题的火爆讨论，参与者热切地探讨如何做空该股并从其料将出现的急跌中获利。 | |
| Peter was a brilliant columnist and his complaints about valuation were wholly justified. This did not stop the internet bubble from inflating for another four years before it popped. Even the absurdity of the 900 per cent gain in the first day’s trading for the now forgotten theglobe.com came when the bubble would keep inflating for more than a year longer. | 彼得是一位出色的专栏作家，他对估值的抱怨完全站得住脚。这并未阻止互联网泡沫膨胀，直至4年后泡沫破裂。如今已被遗忘的theglobe.com在上市首日荒谬大涨900%，之后泡沫继续膨胀了一年多。 | |
| As for merger activity, the hubristic proposal that Kraft Heinz might take over Unilever brought back memories of the disastrous combination of AOL and TimeWarner in January 2000, at the almost exact top of the bubble. That was a great indicator of forthcoming disaster. But so was the equally doomed and hubristic combination of Citicorp and Travelers, announced in April 2008, two years before the top. Daimler’s takeover of Chrysler, another unmitigated disaster, also happened in the spring of 2008. Look at these big moments in the context of the overall market over the last quarter-century: | 至于并购活动，卡夫亨氏(Kraft Heinz)原本要收购联合利华(Unilever)的自大提议，让人回想起2000年1月美国在线(AOL)与时代华纳(TimeWarner)的灾难性合并——几乎是在泡沫最盛的时候。这是灾难即将到来的一个重要迹象。2008年4月宣布的花旗集团与旅行者集团(Travelers)同样自大且注定失败的合并也是如此，那时距离见顶还有两年。另一场彻头彻尾的灾难——戴姆勒(Daimler)收购克莱斯勒(Chrysler)，也发生在2008年的春天。在整体市场的背景下来看看过去25年里的这些重要时刻： | |
| What are the conclusions? Recent developments are consistent with an imminent sell-off. They are also consistent with a long-delayed final speculative stage to the bull market that started in 2009, and could have a matter of years left to run. What I find beyond doubt is that US stocks are overvalued, and a bad buy over a longer term. Rather than attempt to time the market, those with the luxury of time on their side should hedge themselves accordingly — but maintain enough of a foothold in US stocks to benefit if we really do go mad again. | 可以得出什么结论？近期的发展符合市场即将出现抛售的前景，它们也符合始于2009年、可能还会延续几年的牛市终于进入了最后投机阶段的情景。我发现毋庸置疑的是，美国股市估值过高，长期来看买入不划算。与其尝试捕捉市场时点，时间充裕的投资者应该相应地进行对冲——但如果市场真的再次发疯的话，在美国股市里站住脚以便获益。 |
