It didn’t take much to end the optimism of the past few days and turn the market at least mildly pessimistic today.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNBC this morning that Huawei Technologies isn’t the only Chinese company that poses security risks to the United States.
Well, duh! Not so far back the White House said it was considering slapping restrictions on Chinese facial recognition companies similar to those now pending (delayed for another 90 days as of yesterday) against Huawei that will require that company to get special permission to buy U.S. technology products ranging from chips to software used in its smart phones and telecom networking gear.
And on that the yield on the 10-year Treasury slumped as buyers sought safety in the Treasury market. The yield on the 10-year fell 5 basis points to 1.55%. The yield on the 2-year Treasury dropped to 1.50%. The dollar fell with the Dollar Spot Index losing 0.16%.
As of 12:30 p.m. New York time the Standard & Poor’s 500 was off 0.28% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.21%. The NASDAQ Composite was lower by 0.20% and the small cap Russell 2000 declined 0.47%.
What’s most interesting to me about today’s market action is that the relatively minor slide in the indexes has been accompanied by big gains in assets to hedge risk. Gold miner Barrick Gold (GOLD) was up 1.85% and silver miner First Majestic (AG) gained 5.11%. The VanEck senior gold miners ETF (GDX) was higher by 2.86% and the VanEck junior gold miners ETF (GDXJ) rose 3.59%.
This came, importantly as the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) slipped 1.30% to just 16.66. In other words the same investors buying gold to hedge risk, think the S&P 500 justifies less hedging against risk than yesterday.
My conclusion is that investors and traders who are hedging the risk in this market aren’t using products linked to the S&P 500, but are instead seeking protection in gold and other hard assets. If that’s the case, then you want to be in those hard assets (and in Treasury ETFs where the iShares 7-10 Year Treasury ETF (IEF) is up 0.40% today) rather than in hedging products linked to a major index such as the S&P 500. Assuming you’d like to not just hedge risk but would also like to make a profit. (You can find a list of those asset hedges in my Special Report on getting your portfolio ready for the Next Big One,) Investors and traders are currently trying to have their cake and eat it too by hedging risk with gold, for example, but keeping their stock exposure steady so that they can profit if the Federal Reserve and other central banks come through and cut interest rates as swiftly as Wall Street hopes.
