Odd Lots - How to Listen to What the Market Is Trying to Tell You

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

For years, it was pretty quiet in markets. Stocks kept making new highs and volatility drifted to fresh lows. That's changed in recent months and there's now plenty to keep investors busy, including f...ears of a trade war and signs that the economy be nearing the end of its cycle. On this week's episode of the podcast, we speak with Peter Borish, a veteran investor and trader (and former Odd Lots guest), who is currently chief strategist at the Quad Group. He talks about how he approaches trading in the current environment and the indicators that he tracks in order to understand what the market is trying to tell us.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:37 And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm here watching 12. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, remember like last year when we used to start off episodes of our show complaining about all the lack of volatility in markets? Yeah, that's kind of a classic, beware of what you wish for kind of thing, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:01:33 Because now, of course, we've had too much volatility at various times this year. Well, I'm not really complaining. I mean, from the perspective of what you and I do, and probably from the perspective, a lot of market practitioners, it has been a very different year. But yeah, absolutely. A lot of those intros, they just don't apply anymore. No, it's true. We have been blessed by newsflow when it comes to markets this year. Of course, we had the big volpocalypse in February that we spoke about. And since then, we've had some more interesting moves in markets most recently caused by. some of the trade tensions, which we've also talked about on the show.
Starting point is 00:02:12 Well, I think it's interesting that you say caused by the trade tensions because I think one of the fascinating aspects of this year has been the difficulty sort of disentangling news stories from the actual results. So sometimes I think it looks like trade stories are weighing on markets and then other times not so much. Or sometimes it looks like the president's tweets are hitting markets. And then you see the companies, he's, he's saying, tweeting about hitting a new highs. So it's been a really tricky market environment to navigate. And so we've had all this volatility, all this news flow, and we just haven't really gone anywhere. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, in markets, to some extent, it's always a bit
Starting point is 00:02:54 difficult to disentangle the narrative from the price action that you're seeing, right? Like, sometimes it's tempting for us as journalists to just say there are more buyers than sellers or more sellers than buyers. And that's really the explanation. But I think you're right that this year has been trickier than a lot of other years because not only do we have volatility coming back, we also have a really complicated political narrative. And it's difficult for investors to price in the unpredictability of someone like the U.S. President, Donald Trump. That's exactly right. So today we're going to do something a little bit different that we don't normally do on the show, which is sort of really talk about markets right now. Obviously, listeners know. We like to find
Starting point is 00:03:36 the odd lot stories that, you know, some obsoles. old bubble or financial regulatory thing or something arcane about market structure. Today we're sort of going to try to really keep it present tense and actually talk with an active market practitioner who's seen a lot of different environments to gain some understanding of what's going on right now in markets. I will do my best to keep it present tense. But I think we're having someone on that we've actually had on before, right, to talk about essentially the opposite of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, that's right. So without further ado, we will be speaking to Peter Borish. He's a chief strategist at the Quad Group, a real market veteran. He was on one of our
Starting point is 00:04:20 very early episodes, and we talked about some of the history in markets and some of the patterns that historically repeat throughout markets. And so hopefully he'll be able to walk us through what he's seeing right now and apply some of that experience. Peter, thank you very much for joining us. Always a pleasure, and I do very much enjoy being on the show so we can drill deeper. Great. Before we talk about what's going on right now, as Tracy and I mentioned, there are a lot of threads to pull on these days. For those who may not have listened to our older episode with you, and they really should go back and listen to it,
Starting point is 00:05:04 tell us a little bit about your background and sort of your general approach that you've devised over the years in trading market. Well, thanks. I've been very fortunate and lucky. I finished graduate school and, wow, a long time ago. 1982. I went to the New York Fed. I happened to start the first month that S&P futures began trading and then some young guy out of the floor of the Cotton Exchange by the name of Paul Tudor Jones recruited me out of there in 1985, the first month of crude oil futures trading. So I've been in the industry. history really since the beginning of the financial futures derivative markets and have had a long arc. And it's a perfect segue to today because if you think about the late 1980s, November 9th, 1989,
Starting point is 00:05:56 the Berlin Wall came down. If you think about our president today and you think about the fan of all Republicans, President Reagan, his role was tearing down walls. That led to, an era of the free flow of capital, people, and ideas. And it didn't start right away on November 10th, 1989. It markets and meaningful change take place slowly over time. Turns out, November 9th, 2016, we elect a new president of the United States who is now building walls, and that is preventing the free flow of markets, capitals, and ideas, and that is likely to usher in a much longer cycle, just as President Reagan's did in terms of growth and opportunity in the 90s, we're going to have a much different cycle today. So if you just start from that perspective of the beginning of my
Starting point is 00:06:59 career in the late 80s to really sort of, I hate to say more towards the end of my career now, These two presidents bookend the best of what America can be to demonstrating to the rest of the world some of the risks that happens when you move in a direction all by yourself. So, Peter, before we, I'm very conscious that I promise Joe, I would try to keep this present tense. No, it's okay. It's okay. Before we get into what's been happening now, can you just give us a snapshot of your approach to thinking about financial markets? Because I know you're very much into cycles and you're very much into looking at financial market history. And I think that's going to be key to the conversation we have. Well, with all that I just said, I think, and I mentioned this when I was on, what did you miss?
Starting point is 00:07:54 If I can give a shameful plug for that. I need to be very mindful and separate my first. fundamental political thoughts from the actual work that one needs to do to participate in the markets. And the combination of the markets of the analysis of data and combining that with the technical analysis. So the key for us in terms of trading and risk, and this is a very difficult point to get across, is that you want to vary your trading. size with respect to the opportunity. When things line up fundamentally, technically, then you can take a bigger position. There's no shame to having a smaller position or not participating when there's a lot of
Starting point is 00:08:48 conflicts. So if we go to our central theme, we've been saying we look at two stocks in particular Visa MasterCard as the strength of the consumer. So if you're shopping on the couch or you're going to a store, they are benefiting. Just yesterday, they made, both of them made new all-time highs. So that's in the back of our mind saying, hey, you can listen to what I just said and say, wow, things aren't going to be going well, but that's not today. So you have to separate that from the cycle of going forward. When there's confirmation of things not going well from a technical and fundamental, then we will be getting much larger on the short side.
Starting point is 00:09:32 It's not now. Do I think it's going to be sometime soon? I do. But the weight of the evidence has to tell us that. So two things real quickly. Just for listeners' sake, we are recording this on Wednesday, July 11th. So you made that reference to Visa and MasterCard hitting all-time highs yesterday, just so people want to. to go back and line that up with the episode. But I think this is really key the point you made here,
Starting point is 00:10:00 which is that you can simultaneously hold two ideas in your head. One is that we are perhaps on the cusp of a fundamental change to the economy and markets, as you say, due to the sort of book-ending of the opening of the world and the fact that we're building walls again. But the other thing you can hold in your mind is that even while seeing that if the market is not confirming that, You can't just jump on that. If you see stocks that you consider to be Bellwether's, hitting all-time highs, you really need to wait for that to break down before this idea that things are changing becomes actionable. No question.
Starting point is 00:10:38 Our job is to try to make money. It's not to try to be right. And part of this difficult process for me as a strategist is to try to think rationally when a lot of the activities are irrational. So as a perfect example of where we had a bad trade, so the president comes back from North Korea, all gung ho about, you know, we're going to have a deal and so forth and so on. And we think, okay, that means that he's going to need China support.
Starting point is 00:11:18 And therefore, he's not going to say anything negative about China. for a few weeks. Our time horizon is, you know, a few weeks to a few months. That's how we look at things and say, this is a good opportunity to go in that direction. If you look at sort of where the Shanghai index was, where the EEM was, this is an interesting time to put on that kind of spread. So we get along those particular markets. And guess what happens? It's almost like they're out to get me and you always have to be very defensive in this business because they are out to get you. We put on all these positions, and then he comes out and says, hey, I think we're going to raise the tariffs on China from $50 billion to $200 billion.
Starting point is 00:12:02 So for me as a strategist, I am totally wrong. I try as hard as I can to find other people to blame, but in this case, I could not do that. And what do we have to do? Risk management is paramount, the information, the story, and the markets. So if all these markets had gone up on this negative news, that would have been fine because, again, I'm more interested in making money than being right. But they did not. They hit our stop levels. We get out.
Starting point is 00:12:33 When you're wrong, you have to reevaluate. And you're seeing this across the board because that means a greater uncertainty, which translates naturally and you have to trade smaller. So we're seeing less volume. So these things have impacts on the entire. entire business and the nature of the markets. So you're thinking to yourself, huh, we're trading smaller. I'm going to talk to other people. They're trading smaller. There's more uncertainty. Wow, I'm going to be looking at the trading firms that benefit from this activity because remember, volume is fully levered. You need the same staff, basically, if you're trading 100 shares or 1,000
Starting point is 00:13:12 shares. Hmm. All right. I'm not going to be as favorable towards the larger money center banks. maybe that's an opportunity to be short the XLF and belong to regional banks, KRE. So you're always, every single action one takes, you need to think about it from an analytical framework as how's that going to translate into your trading of the markets. And one of the things I'm fond of saying is trading is a little bit like, you know, you play the wheel of fortune. And somebody's there turning over the pictures. If you try to put your risk on too early, you're likely to lose.
Starting point is 00:13:52 If you wait until you can see everything clearly, then it's too late. So we see that all the time. I mean, for somebody to coming in today and going, wow, these tech stocks have been doing great, I should buy them. There's no risk reward. You can't buy it because where do you put your stop? That's very far away. You can't short it because why should one be sitting there trying to, get in front of a speeding bullet. Now, you may think they're coming down, but trading is about
Starting point is 00:14:21 risk, reward, and opportunity. So you have to stay on the sidelines. That means there's going to be less trading. Oh, by the way, Amazon at 1700, anyone that's trading that is trading less than they're trading when it was trading a thousand, just by the definition of risk, reward, and money available to you. Huh? Okay, so how does that translate into volume on the national? We look at the February case of volatility in the breakdown of XIV. Huh. Okay, what does that do to the CBOOE futures contract because that was arbitraised? So every action, forget the political ramifications.
Starting point is 00:15:05 You need to be thinking in terms of where is a trading opportunity for me. Peter, I want to press you on this point because I think it's really important. you're talking about time horizons and you're talking about how do you balance fear and greed, right? You know, you want to make money clearly. So you might be tempted into a crowded trade where everyone else is making money. But at the same time, you don't want to be caught out and you don't want to be last to the exit. So what are your actual like concrete suggestions for people trying to gauge how much longer those things are going to continue? People trying to follow those sorts of trends. I suggest everybody that they put a big sign on their wall which says, what is the definition
Starting point is 00:15:49 of a quandary? Do I stay out of a market and watch everyone else make money, or do I get in and thereby cause it to immediately crash? And that is the conundrum of participating in markets. So you need to make your own independent decisions, but you have to have a framework and a discipline associated with that of what happens if I'm wrong. This is a business where if you survive, you win, you want to live for another day. You can't listen to other people and make decisions based on that. It's all inputs into your own decision making. And as I said at the very beginning, when there are opportunities that seem to work or line up from a technical fundamental perspective, then you can go for it. The test of an experienced trader is when they don't understand anything,
Starting point is 00:16:54 they don't participate. That's hard to do. It's very, very hard to do. And we always have risk management. Every time I buy something, I only buy it because I don't think we're ever going to see that price again. And in theory, I buy it and I'm going to hold it for 50 years. And that lasts about 40 minutes. And the same thing, I wouldn't sell it if I thought the price was going up. You have to know your own personality. I'm not one of these guys that averages things. If it's sell it and if it goes up, sell a little more or vice versa, buy it if it goes down, buy a little more. I was grown up in the Paul Tudor Jones philosophy. of trading. Discipline before vision and losers average losers because averaging down works
Starting point is 00:17:51 until the one time when it doesn't and then you're out of business. I'm June Grosso inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete analysis of the big court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets, from corporate law to constitutional law and from state courts to the Supreme Court. At Bloomberg Law, we go beyond the day's headlines. We speak with top attorneys, judges, scholars, and policy experts to break down what the rulings really mean. We do this every weekday, then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg
Starting point is 00:18:38 Law on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen as you start your day. And on the West Coast, catch up in the evening. That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me, June Grosso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. You mentioned that definition of a quandary where you're watching everyone make money and you feel sort of intuitively that the moment you jump onto the trend, that that's got to be the end of it.
Starting point is 00:19:10 like everyone probably in trading feels that to some extent. Nonetheless, I am thinking about sort of of this incredible multi-year tech stock run that we've had. And so you could certainly say, oh yeah, if I buy Netflix here, it's got to be the top because that's when I'm capitulating and buying. But on the other hand, you could have just as easily felt that at the beginning of 2016 and it looked just as extreme perhaps then, but if you had bought that, you would have made a fortune. So what is a better way to answer the question? I mean, this is what everyone's sort of wrestling with. Okay, Netflix, it's going up or whatever it is, rather than just sort of being in this mindset where I'm going to jinx myself or I'm going to jinx the market if I jump in,
Starting point is 00:19:54 is there a better question to ask at the beginning or a better way to think about that? Because, you know, sometimes it pays to get on top of, or jump on a shooting rocket. You have to trade your own personality. Sometimes you miss it. It's a market of stocks. It's not a stock market. Hey, I missed it. Congratulations to them. They're all going to make money. But I can assure you, I don't have any idea from what level, but Netflix will have a 40 or 50% decline, just as it's had before in Amazon and Microsoft. Is it today? Is it from 2000 on Amazon? I have no idea. The discipline is saying, okay, I've missed it. What happens when it goes back down? Am I willing to buy it? So let's take a recent example of a stock that's in the news and everybody loves to trade, which is Tesla.
Starting point is 00:20:53 So, you know, at 250, you were an idiot if you weren't short. And at 360, you were an idiot if you weren't long. Which is fine because I'm a natural idiot. so I was probably short dead and long up there. But no, if you don't understand it, it's okay not to participate. The trading world and the purchasing of stocks and even in our business. So if we have a hedge fund, which we do, of course, and we're up, you know, mid-teens three years in a row. And then I'm wrong this year, as I said earlier, about some of the strategic stuff and we're down five or six percent.
Starting point is 00:21:29 Everybody freaks out where if it's an individual stock, they'll say, huh, okay, it's down a little bit, I'm going to buy it. But the funny thing is, buyers are higher in this business and sellers are lower. So if a stock's down 30%, everybody's a seller. If it's up 30%, everybody wants to buy it. I don't see that in any other business. If I go into a store, and I'm like, hey, you know what, Joe, I really like that tie. And you go, ah, it's, you know, it's 105 bucks. But you look wealthy. I'm going to charge you. I'm going to charge you. you 150, I'm going to be like, I'm not buying that. And if it's at 75, I'm like, what a great deal. I might get two. We don't do that in the stock market world. There's a different mentality. There's
Starting point is 00:22:17 a different approach. As an individual and as a participant in the markets, that's where you want to take that approach. And that's why I refer to the combination of both tactical and fundamental. You don't want to be the one that sits there and try to catch as the falling knife because if it misses you from a risk management point of view, it might land in your heart, which puts you out of business. So be patient. Wait for it to stabilize, wait for it to bounce. And you don't have to jump on board that exponential rise because it will pull back, i.e. our friendly neighborhood cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Oh, gosh, I could ask some questions on Bitcoin. But I'm kind of keeping.
Starting point is 00:23:03 keen to get back to some of the political discussion that we started out with. I feel like markets historically or investors historically have had difficulty when it comes to pricing in political developments. And I feel like maybe that's become even trickier now that we have an unpredictable president, let's say, in office. Maybe you'll disagree with me on that one. How do you think investors have been approaching the Trump administration and how do you think they should be approaching him. So I tend to disagree. I think the president has been very predictable.
Starting point is 00:23:39 He's made these campaign promises, and one by one, he's ticking them off. He has no interest in expanding his base. He feels that he needs to coddle his base. I do think that every time there's an external force on him that is potentially negative, he goes back and then tries to rev up his base. I also feel that he's a master at deflecting. So we have this basic crash in soybeans, which I've been talking about for a long time.
Starting point is 00:24:15 Literally, if you want to plug Twitter, you can see that he tweeted this morning at the conference blaming the crash on soybeans for 15 years of bad economic policy where just not that long ago we had beans in the teens. And so when you think about the politics, now you get back into the longer cycle of where we are. Now, I am an outlier. So this morning, again, we're talking current markets.
Starting point is 00:24:47 The PPI number was strong. Joe was on there at 833, tweeting about trucking and its largest increase. And it goes to show you, Joe is a lot like me and spending too much time thinking about esoteric things into markets rather than trying to have a real life. And that could be a whole other odd lots cast. But Tracy, Tracy thinks about those too, except she's actually doing her job and doing the management and editing responsibilities she's supposed to be. I have those responsibilities too,
Starting point is 00:25:19 but I'm wasting my time tweeting charts on the cost of trucking. No, you're not. So that is a very sort of short term. But what the president it is doing here in terms of building, these are massive deflationary pressures that are building up across the system. And that is the biggest risk that we have. And the change of technology, so if we start from this notion that the internet is the greatest deflationary machine ever built, and we're just learning to use it. And technology enhances the ability to produce at any level. and we also, and people tend not to focus on this enough, we also use it much more efficiently. So at any given level, there's less demand, and at any given level, there's more supply.
Starting point is 00:26:10 That puts downward pressure on these prices. Again, yesterday, that was the chart of the century that... Yeah, the chart of the century. I should have copyrighted this, but what I like to say is the things that you... don't really need have gone down in price, and the things that you do need have gone up in price. People tend to think that price increases by themselves are inflationary. They're not because there's substitutable effects associated with them. The other favorite economist of going back into the 70s of 80s, Milton Friedman,
Starting point is 00:26:50 they talked about monetary policy being inflationary. We don't have an inflationary monetary policy. The real crux of the matter is going to be on this deflationary side is what happens to energy prices. And to me, they are heading towards that also deflationary cliff. It's the unintended consequences of some of these policies, which is we're going to push more and more supply on the market by lowering regulations, by making it easier. to pump energy. Now, of course, we have the international aspect associated with the question of Iran and Saudi Arabia in terms of pulling out of the nuclear agreement. But I could argue that the U.S. being such a large exporter now of energy, that some of these Iranian, they could
Starting point is 00:27:48 start pumping more and more oil to try to drive down the prices, and that would hurt Texas. It would hurt a lot of red states. So to try to really think about all these dynamics from a political perspective, to me, I always go back, what's the market, what's the trading opportunity? So I look at Exxon Mobile. I look at Chevron. They have not outperformed on this energy rally. I try to listen to the markets and have a discipline and they're telling me that there's definitely an issue with regard to some of these stocks. Look at Valero, which has come off significantly from its highs. So there's going to be a lot of opportunities, a lot of fun. But I, as a strategist, we are in the potential spreading of the deflationary camp. That's what's going on as we build these walls.
Starting point is 00:28:38 Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed that you brought up the Trump soybean tweet because I was about to ask you about that, because Peter is definitely the only guest we've ever had on TV. Right at 4 p.m., the market closes. Everyone wants to talk about the S&P and the NASDAQ and Peter comes on show and talks about what soybean prices did that day. But obviously, I think as long as we've been talking and we've, you know, done multiple interviews together now on this and TV, you have talked about soybeans probably more than anyone else. Why is you, why is that like a bellwether to you? It's bellwether because it encompasses everything that we just talked about. The ability to produce more, right? The American farmer is the most productive at supply. China has a very
Starting point is 00:29:23 large demand for soybeans. It's a very healthy product. In fact, part of the thought process is that the strong growth of the second quarter was front-loaded by Chinese purchasing a tremendous amount of beans before the implementation of tariffs. So now I'm thinking about this. We don't live in a closed society. So who's going to benefit from tariffs on U.S. soybeans? So China will go to Brazil and buy that. And that's why prices go down. So now if I produce something, I can't put it in a closet and store it. Yeah, there are storage bins, but there are limits to that.
Starting point is 00:30:08 I've got to go sell it on the open market. That's what the futures markets tells you. What's the forward price? Wow, there's going to be a lot more supply on these things because once you start growing, you have two choices. you harvest it, you sell it, or you plow it into the ground. Well, plowing it into the ground versus getting a non-zero price is not a very good option. So it's a very liquid, sensitive markets, and it's a good reflection of geopolitical.
Starting point is 00:30:40 Now, again, as a trader, so I'm thinking about, huh, what's going on with Qualcomm and NXPI? right, that's a big political issue. So today, right, with this, soybeans aren't down that much. I look at that spread between Qualcomm and NXPI, and I'm like, all right, I probably shouldn't be selling NXPI today because my favorite leading indicator is not that weak. Just for those who aren't familiar, Qualcomm is buying NXPI, but it needs approval from the Chinese government. That's correct.
Starting point is 00:31:12 And so one of the theoretical ways that China could retaliate for what it doesn't like Trump doing is it could block mergers, get more aggressive about preventing U.S. companies from buying Chinese ones. And what you're saying is there is an opportunity theoretically, if you're long NXPI and the deal goes through, that's a big win. And so the soybean market is telling you, in other words, that the risk to that deal may not be as big as what people think. Today.
Starting point is 00:31:41 Today, July 11th. Yeah, you know, my crystal ball gets foggy really quickly. And that's why we try to have risk management. So I can think in terms that we started at the very beginning of these long-term cycles and where we are and it's changing. And oh, by the way, we've been in a long-term bull market. Nobody lives forever. So the only definition is I don't know if it's ended today, ended January 26.
Starting point is 00:32:10 I can make a strong argument for that. But I just know that every day it's one day closer to the end by definition. So that's going to get my antenna up. That's going to get us more risk adverse on things that were on the long side. Peter, lots of people clearly concerned about the end of the cycle, the economic cycle, the bull market, as you just mentioned. What do you advise people to watch out for? And do you have a favorite leading indicator for late cycle signs?
Starting point is 00:32:40 Well, as I said very early on, one of our leading indicators is really we were looking at Visa and MasterCard as the strength of the consumer. It's still a consumer-driven economy. We look at each of the components of GDP, right? C plus I plus G plus X minus M. X minus M right now that exports? Wow. That's full of uncertainty, as we've spent a lot of the time discussing. investment is strange because there's far more uncertainty as you're doing your economic
Starting point is 00:33:14 forecasts that could really slow down as well government spending hmm we've got a fiscal year coming up at the end of October right into a midterm election I can really see Congress passing all those appropriation bills on time with no issues whatsoever probably not so that's going to be that's why I talk about deflation uncertainty there government spending x minus m so the only thing which is a majority is C which is consumption if we see that starting to slow then that would be the to us the sign that the cycle is right about at the end and as I was saying that the issue for investors is trying to look forward towards an
Starting point is 00:34:02 uncertain future and not saying, hey, the stock market's been up for the past 10 years, I'm going to be in an index. I will just say that at the beginning of a bull market, everybody wants to be a trader because there was a lot of volatility. And by the end, everybody wants to be an investor, because the worst thing that anyone can have in a bull market is risk management, because time bails you out. But when that changes, you win because you have that discipline. And you have that risk management. This is a business where it's all about surviving. It's not about being right all the time.
Starting point is 00:34:42 It's about being disciplined if I want to keep harping on that. Because as Joe was talking about Netflix, and we all like to do that. We want to go to the next event and say, hey, you know, I bought so-and-so at five, and now it's at 50. But nobody talks about the stocks that they bought at 50 and now are at 5. Peter Borish of the Quad Group, thank you very much for joining us. Always great to get your perspective. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:35:08 So Tracy, I thought that was really helpful in terms of understanding some of the different dynamics at play right now. I really liked Peter's answer to your question about Trump's unpredictability because I think the way he framed that, that there is a level of predictability, very base focused and very focused on ticking the boxes of his promises. Sort of has a clarity of characterization of this administration that I think is sort of often missing from the market's discussion. Well, I think I quite liked the more stepback philosophy, which was this idea of listening to what the market is actually telling you. Because a lot of people, when they approach investing, they're going to try to outsmart the market, right? They're going to be contrarian. They're going to look for opportunities that they think the majority of people are missing. And Peter's point is to not ignore the market.
Starting point is 00:36:16 You don't really want to fight it. You want to be listening to it. And then you want to try to be disciplined as he kept repeating at the same time. So following the market, but not in a completely stupid way. Yeah. And to his point, and he identified this directly, one of the big questions that we've seen is we've seen oil prices do very well. U.S. prices pretty close to $75 a barrel on West Texas Intermediate, but a lot of these oil stocks haven't done that well. And there is this sort of conundrum or people thinking there's an opportunity
Starting point is 00:36:51 because the market is mispricing them. And who knows maybe there is, but it's also worth sort of stepping back and saying, wait, could the market be telling us something about these companies and about what's about to happen that we should be listening to? Yeah. Some of the connections that he draws are really, really interesting. And I have to say, I really like the reading soybean prices idea in order to figure out the perspective for a cross-border merger. That's a really nice instance of the sort of old-fashioned connection. Yeah, soybean prices for merger arbitrage traders. I have to imagine there aren't a lot of people in that space for whom the first thing they do is check the price of soybeans. But you know, you got to get your edge where you can get it.
Starting point is 00:37:35 Yeah, maybe that will change. This is the odd lots value proposition. You find connections you never thought of before. Exactly. All right. Well, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.
Starting point is 00:37:51 And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And Peter is on Twitter. He tweets occasionally at Peter Borish. And you should follow our producer, Tofer Forges, at Forges. as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening. The news doesn't stop on the weekends.
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