Time to Worry: Stocks and Bonds Are Moving Together
Wall Street traders and fund managers returning from the summer break are likely to focus on the obvious: a series of central-bank meetings in coming weeks and the imminent U.S. election.
They also should be paying close attention to some unusual behavior in the market, where the changing relationship between bonds and stocks may be a sign of trouble ahead.
A generation of traders have grown up with the idea that stock prices and bond yields tend to rise and fall together, as what is good for stocks is bad for bonds (pushing the price down and yield up), and vice versa.
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This summer, the relationship seems to have broken down in the U.S. Share prices and bond yields moved in the same direction in just 11 of the past 30 trading days, close to the lowest since the start of 2007.
This is far from unprecedented. But since Lehman Brothers failed in 2008, such a swing in the relationship has been unusual and suggests prices are being driven by something other than the balance of hope and fear about the economy. It has tended to coincide with times of deep discontent in markets, notably the 2013 “taper tantrum,” when bond yields briefly surged after Federal Reserve officials signaled they would soon end stimulus, and last year’s brief bubble in German bunds.
The simplest explanation is that expectations of interest rates being lower for longer—some central bankers have suggested lower forever—pushes the price of everything up, and yields down. When the focus is on the discount rate used to value all assets, bond and stock prices rise and fall together, creating the inverse relationship between bond yields and shares.
Such a focus on monetary policy isn’t healthy. It leaves markets more exposed to sudden shocks, both from changes in policy and from an economy to which less attention is being paid.
“It’s a somewhat mercurial thing, but there are big shifts [in correlations], and being on the right side of those big shifts is important,” said Philip Saunders, co-head of the multiasset team at Investec Asset Management. “You do see some brutal price action at these correlation inflection points.”
This summer provides just such an example in Japan. The supposedly safe 40-year Japanese bond has plunged in price by 20% since early July, amid expectations of fiscal stimulus and worries about the central bank’s ability to ease policy.
There is an alternative explanation for the breakdown in the U.S. equity-bond correlations. It could be that shares are tracking improving economic developments, while Treasurys are being driven by British, Japanese and European money fleeing super-easy monetary policy.
Such an explanation leaves investors vulnerable to a snapback in prices if either global growth improves, prompting foreign money to leave again, or global growth worsens, hurting U.S. corporate profits.
Daily and weekly correlations between stocks and bonds provide useful signals, but the deeper question is what will happen when things next go wrong. Will stocks and bonds sell off together? The past few times correlations broke down, they returned to something like normal in the next equity selloff. That is, bonds still provided a cushion for investment portfolios.
Jan Loeys, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan, thinks government bonds will offer protection in the next downturn in the U.S., as Treasury yields could fall another percentage point or so in a recession, but perhaps not in Europe or Japan. The near-term implication is that investors who don’t expect bonds to protect them in a crisis “have to reduce equity allocation because bonds might not save the day,” he said.
Much depends on what is behind a selloff. For stocks and bonds to fall together needs rising interest rates combined with weak growth. Stagflation as in the 1970s could be one cause; a central-bank mistake could be another.
Or, as Alasdair Macdonald, head of U.K. advisory portfolio management at Willis Towers Watson says, such a breakdown could be caused by a loss of faith in central banks. “Investors might realize that the central banks have run out of ammunition, and they can’t keep pushing up asset prices further,” he said.
It could be that this summer’s price moves were just noise while traders were on the beach, and stock prices and bond yields will start moving together again soon. But keep an eye on those correlations, as shifts often mean tough times ahead for investors.
Write to James Mackintosh at
James.Mackintosh@wsj.com