Mi piacerebbe avere l'opinione di gipa sull'articolo che riporto qui sotto,
dove un importante gestore di fondi (hedge) ci comunica le sue perplessità
sulla validità operativa di vari strumenti come il put/call ratio, il vix o
ancora il breakout/down di livelli..., tutti falsati dai potenti hedge funds !
Cosa ci rimane allora ?
Friend and hedge fund manager Ike Iosiff employs short sales and options to carry out conservative options strategies as one tool for his fund. He says:
"Imagine the impact on the financial markets from thousands of hedge funds employing similar approaches on a much larger scale in order to accommodate multi-million dollar portfolios."
"First of all, raw put/call ratios are irrelevant. A large number of puts/calls are bought/sold not because of conviction with regard to the directional move of a stock/index, but because of the very lack of it!"
"Second, when everything is already pre-sold or pre-bought, there is very little urgency to sell/buy, which reduces volatility, and volatility premiums."
"Third, the existence of this type of hedging strategies results in plenty of "uncompleted" break-outs or breakdowns. As soon as a stock/index appears to break-out or break-down, the hedge strategy kicks in, and the "break" gets negated. This has been much more prevalent in the indices, where funds can make multi-million dollar bets due to the available liquidity."
"In an environment like this, the chances for success are precious few for individual investors who do not know how or can't play the same game. In my view, those few chances for success -for individual investors- can be found in ETFs/stocks that have little following by hedge funds."
Hedge funds are making indicators such as the put/call ratio and the VIX - volatility index - more difficult to use when trying to gauge market sentiment. However, when you have a lot of people in the stock market all doing the same thing it usually becomes more difficult for everyone to make money.
Individual stocks are also being affected. For the past few years, I have been following gold stocks very closely. I've seen them go through several corrections. Each time a bottom is made there is usually massive selling volume in Newmont mining, while many of the smaller junior mining companies I follow won't see same amount of selling volume. What is happening is that these stocks - even if they have market caps of $500 million or $1 billion - are too small for the larger hedge fund players to buy.