The Principle of Bubble Rotation

In the book Business cycles: history, theory and investment reality, the author Lars Tvede talks briefly about a cycle phenomenon he calls The Principle of Bubble Rotation. He writes:

There is one further common aspect of all these asset classes. We have seen that business cycles from time to time create monetary environments that are conductive to asset bubbles. However, people will recall past crashes for a while, and this means that whatever asset people bought in the last bubble will rarely be chosen for the next. This leads to a systematic bubble rotation. There was a bubble in precious metals/diamonds in 1980, for instance, and then in collectibles (and Japanese land) in 1990, and then in equities in 2000.

Essentially, what Lars is saying boils down to, “what outperformed in the last cycle will not outperform in the next.”

Since trading and investing is a game of comparisons, we evaluate all assets on a relative basis and then choose to buy one thing over another. Using The Principle of Bubble Rotation we can underweight assets/sectors/industries that may look attractive at first glance but are unlikely to outperform for the simple reason that they did so in the prior cycle.

Let’s look at the outperformers from the last cycle and see how they’ve done in the current one.

The top-performing assets/sectors/industries in the 02’ to 08’ cycle were:

  • Emerging markets
  • Homebuilders
  • Financials
  • Commodities

So far each of these assets/sectors/industries have adhered to The Principle of Bubble Rotation.

The reasons why this cycle skip exists are threefold:

  1. Psychological: Investors who were burned buying into a bubble in the previous cycle are likely to be hesitant to buy into those same assets in the next. We call these “event echoes” where the psychological scarring from a jarring market event affects investor behavior well into the future. This usually takes two cycles to reset because most investing careers don’t last much longer than that.
  2. Capital Cycle: Asset bubbles are born from overoptimism. This optimism attracts capital and competition which leads to large amounts of capital expenditure into future supply. This leads to over-capacity which takes the subsequent cycle to clear.
  3. Regulatory: There’s a regulatory cycle that is always fighting the last war and which typically goes into motion following the bust process where many investors were hurt or financial instability occurred. Take banks following the GFC or cryptos following the current bust process as an example. These regulations typically take the completion of another cycle before deregulation occurs.

The Principle of Bubble Rotation isn’t a hard and fast rule. There’s examples where it didn’t hold true and certain industries are susceptible to their own unique capital cycles which affect the length of their boom/bust process.

Still, it’s a useful heuristic to use for filtering down your universe of potential trades. It would have kept you from buying financials this cycle, which has been a popular but dead money trade. Also, it would have alerted you to areas of the market that were more likely to outperform since they underperformed in the previous cycle; the technology sector being a perfect example.

 

 

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Brandon Beylo

Value Investor

Brandon has been a professional investor focusing on value for over 13 years, spending his time in small to micro-cap companies, spin-offs, SPACs, and deep value liquidation situations. Over time, he’s developed a deeper understanding for what deep-value investing actually means, and refined his philosophy to include any business trading at a wild discount to what he thinks its worth in 3-5 years.

Brandon has a tenacious passion for investing, broad-based learning, and business. He previously worked for several leading investment firms before joining the team at Macro Ops. He lives by the famous Munger mantra of trying to get a little smarter each day.

AK

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He started out in corporate economics for a Fortune 50 company before moving to a long/short equity investment firm.

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Tyler Kling

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Former trade desk manager at $100+ million family office where he oversaw multiple traders and helped develop cutting edge quantitative strategies in the derivatives market.

He worked as a consultant to the family office’s in-house fund of funds in the areas of portfolio manager evaluation and capital allocation.

Certified in Quantitative Finance from the Fitch Learning Center in London, England where he studied under famous quants such as Paul Wilmott.

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Founder and head macro trader at Macro Ops. Alex joined the US Marine Corps on his 18th birthday just one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He subsequently spent a decade in the military. Serving in various capacities from scout sniper to interrogator and counterintelligence specialist. Following his military service, he worked as a contract intelligence professional for a number of US agencies (from the DIA to FBI) with a focus on counterintelligence and terrorist financing. He also spent time consulting for a tech company that specialized in building analytic software for finance and intelligence analysis.

After leaving the field of intelligence he went to work at a global macro hedge fund. He’s been professionally involved in markets since 2005, has consulted with a number of the leading names in the hedge fund space, and now manages his own family office while running Macro Ops. He’s published over 300 white papers on complex financial and macroeconomic topics, writes regularly about investment/market trends, and frequently speaks at conferences on trading and investing.

Macro Ops is a market research firm geared toward professional and experienced retail traders and investors. Macro Ops’ research has been featured in Forbes, Marketwatch, Business Insider, and Real Vision as well as a number of other leading publications.

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