Using Supply and Demand to Beat the Market: An Interview with Fund Manager Charles Biderman

By Dan Steinhart, Managing Editor, The Casey Report

It’s an investing strategy so simple, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it. Like any other market, the stock market obeys the laws of supply and demand. Reduce supply, and prices should rise. Therefore, companies that reduce their outstanding shares by buying back their own stock should outperform the market.

That’s the basic theory that Charles Biderman, who was recently featured in Forbes and is chairman and founder of TrimTabs Investment Research, follows to manage his ETF, TrimTabs Float Shrink (TTFS).
And it works. Since its inception in October 2011, TTFS has beaten the S&P 500 by 15 percentage points. That’s no small feat, especially during a bull market. Most hedge fund managers would sacrifice their firstborns for such stellar performance.

There are, of course, nuances to the strategy, which Charles explains in an interview with Casey Research’s managing editor Dan Steinhart below. For example, companies must use their own money to buy back shares. Borrowing for buybacks is a no no.

It’s also worth mentioning, you can meet and learn all about Charles’ strategy in person. He’ll be available at  Casey Research’s Summit: Thriving in a Crisis Economy in San Antonio, TX from September 19-21 where he’ll be working with attendees to teach them how to beat the market using supply and demand analysis.

And Charles is just one of many all stars on the faculty for this summit—click here to browse the others, which include Alex Jones, Jim Rickards, and, of course, Doug Casey.

Also, you can still sign up for this Summit and meet some of the world’s brightest financial minds and receive a special early bird discount. You’ll save $400 if you sign up by July 15^th. Click here to register now.
Now for the complete Charles Biderman interview. Enjoy!

Using Supply and Demand to Beat the Market: An Interview with Fund Manager Charles Biderman

Dan: Thanks for joining us today, Charles. Could you start by telling us a little bit about your unique approach to stock market research?

Charles: Sure. I’ve been following the markets for 40 years. Everybody talks about earnings and interest rates and growth rates and what the government is doing. But here’s the thing: the stock market is made up of shares of stock. That’s it. There is nothing else in the stock market.

So my firm tracks the supply and demand of the stock market. The number of shares outstanding is the supply. Money is the demand. We discovered when more money chases fewer shares, the market goes up. Isn’t that shocking?

Dan: [Laughs] Not very, when you put it that way.

Charles: Whenever I talk with individual investors, I tell them that there’s only one reason for them to listen to me: that they think I can help them beat the market. I’ve spent 40 some years looking at markets in a different way than other people. I’ve found that the market is like a casino: it has a house and players. You know the house has an edge, because if it didn’t, the stock market wouldn’t exist.

Who is the house in the stock market? Not brokers, or even high frequency traders. Companies are the house. As investors, we’re playing with their shares, and the companies know more about them than we do.
I’ve discovered that companies buy back their own shares because they think the price is heading higher. So when a company buys back its own shares using its own money, you should buy that stock too. But only if the company uses its own money. Borrowing money to buy shares is a no-no.

Conversely, when companies are growing their shares outstanding by selling stock to raise money, they don’t like where their stock price is headed. If they don’t want to own their own stock, you shouldn’t either.
My basic philosophy is to follow supply and demand of stocks and money, and you can’t go wrong.

Dan: Your theory has worked very well in practice. Your TrimTabs Float Shrink ETF (TTFS) beat the S&P 500 by an impressive 12 percentage points in 2013. And that’s really saying something, considering how well the S&P 500 performed.

Charles: Yes, and we’ve outperformed the S&P 500 over the past year as well.

Dan: What specific investment strategies did you use to generate that return?

Charles: Our fund invests in 100 companies that are growing free cash flow—which is the money left over after taxes, R & D, capital expenditures, and dividends—and using it to buy back their own shares.
We modify our holdings every month because we’ve discovered that the positive effects of buybacks only last for a short time. So when a company stops shrinking its float, we kick it out. Our turnover is about 20 stocks per month.

Dan: The supply side of the equation seems pretty straightforward. What do you use to approximate demand? Money supply numbers?

Charles: Sort of. Institutions own around 80% of the shares of the Russell 1000, so we track the money that flows through them into and out of the stock market.

We also track wage and salary growth. We’re not interested in income generated by government actions, but rather by the wages of the 137 million Americans who have jobs subject to withholding. Money for investment comes from income. People can only invest the money they have left over after they cover expenses.

Income in the U.S. is currently around $7.5 trillion per year. That’s an increase of around $300 million over last year, or a little under 3% after inflation. That’s not sufficient to generate money for investment.

However, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has showered companies with plenty of cash to improve their operations. As a result, many industries have record high profit margins. But at the same time, most management teams are still afraid to reinvest their profits into expanding their businesses because they don’t see final consumption demand growing. So these companies have been buying back their shares instead. The total number of shares in the market has declined pretty much consistently since 2010.

An investment institution typically targets a specific percentage of cash to hold, say 5%. So when a company buys back its own stock from these institutions, the institutions now have more money and fewer shares. To meet their cash allocation target, they have to go out and buy more shares. So the end result is more money chasing fewer shares.

This is why we’ve been experiencing a “melt-up” in the market. It has nothing to do with the economy—it’s solely due to supply and demand. And as buybacks continue, stock prices will continue to rise.

The caveat is that unless the economy recovers in earnest, the gap between stock prices and the real-world economy will continue to grow. At some point, it will get too wide, and we’ll get a bang moment similar to the housing crisis, when everyone realized that housing prices were too far above their underlying value in 2007.

Dan: Do you monitor macroeconomic issues as well?

Charles: Yes, but as I like to say, all macro issues manifest as supply and demand eventually. Supply and demand is what’s happening right now. All of those other inputs get us to “now.”

Dan: I understand. So you’re more concerned with the effects of supply and demand than the causes.

Charles: Right. Price is a function of the world as it exists right now. If you don’t have cash, it doesn’t matter how fantastic stock market fundamentals look. Without cash, you can’t buy, no matter how compelling the value.

Dan: Could you share a preview of what you’ll be talking about at the Casey Research Summit in San Antonio?

Charles: I’ll be giving specific advice to individual investors on how to beat the market. Outperforming the overall market is very difficult to do, and earnings analysis and graphic analysis has never been proven to do it over a long period. Supply and demand analysis has. So I will work with attendees and show them how to apply those strategies to beat the market going forward.

Dan: Great; I look forward to that. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Charles: The phrase “disruptive technology” is popular today. I think investing on the basis of supply and demand is a disruptive technology compared with other investing strategies, most of which have never really worked. Cheap, broad-based index funds are so popular because very few investing strategies offer any real edge. I believe supply and demand investing gives me an edge.

Dan: Thanks very much for sharing your insights today. I’m excited to hear what else you’ll have to say at our Thriving in a Crisis Economy Summit in San Antonio.

Charles: I’m looking forward to the Summit as well. I hope the aura of the San Antonio Spurs’ victory will rub off on all of us.

Dan: Me too. Thanks again.

The article Using Supply and Demand to Beat the Market: An Interview with Fund Manager Charles Biderman was originally published at Casey Research

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You Can’t Shoot Fish in a Barrel Without Ammunition

By Dan Steinhart, Managing Editor, The Casey Report

"FOMO"


I heard this acronym on a podcast last week. Having no clue what it meant, I consulted Google. Turns out it stands for “Fear of Missing Out.” Kids use it to describe their anxiety about missing a social event that all of their friends are attending. It struck me that investors experience FOMO too. And it usually leads to bad decisions.

From Prudent to FOMO

 

In the comfort of your home office, investing rationally is pretty easy. You think a bull market might be emerging, so you invest in the S&P 500.

But you’re not stupid. No one really knows where the stock market is headed, so you keep a healthy allocation of cash on the side to deploy the next time stocks trade at bargain prices. A prudent, rational plan.
But leave the house and things start to change. You notice that others seem to be making more money than you. First it’s the “smart money” raking in the dough—those who had the foresight and fortitude to buy during the last panic, when everyone else was retreating. You’re OK with that. Investing is their full-time job.

You can’t expect to compete with them.

But as the bull market charges higher, the caliber of people making more money than you sinks lower. The mailman starts giving you stock tips. And your gardener’s brand new Mustang, parked in your driveway just behind your sensible, 2011 Toyota Corolla, starts to irritate you.

Your brother-in-law is the last straw. He thinks he’s so smart, but he’s really just lucky to somehow always be in the right place at the right time. I mean, just last month you had to pick him up from a NASCAR tailgate after security kicked him out for lewd behavior—and now he’s taking the family to Europe with his stock market winnings?

If that guy can make $30,000 in the market in six months, you should be a millionaire. Now you feel like a sucker for holding so much cash. Why earn a pitiful 0.5% interest when you could be making… hang on, how much did the S&P 500 gain last year? 29.6%? Some quick extrapolation shows that if you invest all of your cash right now, you can retire by 2023. Factor in a couple family trips to Europe, and we’ll call it 2024 to be safe.

Cash Is Trash… Until It’s King

 

Such is the (slightly exaggerated) psychology of a bull market. FOMO is a powerful motivator and causes smart investors to do stupid things, like go all-in at the worst possible moment. Which is no small concern, since it undermines one of the most powerful investment strategies: keeping liquid cash in reserve to invest during market panics.

Take the roaring ‘20s as a long ago but pertinent example. The surging stock market of that era caused a whole lot of FOMO. Seeing their friends get rich, people who had never invested before piled into stocks.
Of course, we know how that ended. But there’s a fascinating angle that you may not have given much thought. I hadn’t until yesterday, when I finished reading The Great Depression: A Diary [click here to purchase on Amazon.com]. It’s a firsthand, anecdotal account written by attorney Benjamin Roth.

Roth emphasized that during the Great Depression, everyone knew financial assets were great bargains. The problem was hardly anyone had cash to take advantage of them.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

August 1931: I see now how very important it is for the professional man to build up a surplus in normal times. A surplus capital of $2,500 wisely invested during the depression might have meant financial security for the rest of his life. Without it he is at the mercy of the economic winds.

December 1931: It is generally believed that good stocks and bonds can now be bought at very attractive prices. The difficulty is that nobody has the cash to buy.

September 1932: I believe it can be truly said that the man who has money during this depression to invest in the highest grade investment stocks and can hold on for 2 or 3 years will be the rich man of 1935.

June 1933: I am afraid the opportunity to buy a fortune in stocks at about 10¢ on the dollar is past and so far I have been unable to take advantage of it.

July 1933: Again and again during this depression it is driven home to me that opportunity is a stern goddess who passes up those who are unprepared with liquid capital.

May 1937: The greatest chance in a lifetime to build a fortune has gone and will probably not come again soon. Very few people had any surplus to invest—it was a matter of earning enough to buy the necessaries of life.

In short, by succumbing to FOMO and investing all your cash, you might be giving up the opportunity to make a literal fortune. You can’t shoot fish in a barrel without ammunition.

Of course, the parallels from the Great Depression to present day crises aren’t exact. The U.S. was on the gold standard back then, meaning the Fed couldn’t conjure money out of thin air to reflate stock prices. Such a nationwide shortage of cash is unthinkable today, as Yellen & Friends would create however many dollars necessary to prevent stocks from plummeting 90%, as they did during the Great Depression.

That’s exactly what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, as you can see below. The Fed injected liquidity, and stocks rebounded rapidly. Compared to the Great Depression, the stock market crash of 2008 was short and sweet:

What does that mean for modern investors?

When the next crisis comes—and it will—there will be bargains. But because of the Fed’s quick trigger, investors will have to act decisively to get a piece of them.

What’s more, now that the US government has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that it will prop up the economy, bargains should dissipate even quicker next time around. After all, the hardest part of buying stocks in a crisis is overcoming fear. But that fear isn’t much of a detriment when Uncle Sam is standing by with his hand on the lever of the money-printing machine, ready to rescue the market.

Crises can creep up on you faster than you think. You may never know what hit you--unless you knew what to look for ahead of time. Watch Meltdown America, the eye opening 30-minute documentary on how to recognize (and survive) an economic crisis—with top experts including Sovereign Society Director Jeff Opdyke, investing legend Doug Casey, and Canadian National Security Council member Dr. Andre Gerolymatos.

Be prepared… it can (and will) happen here. Click here to watch Meltdown America now.

The article You Can’t Shoot Fish in a Barrel Without Ammunition was originally published at Casey Research.

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