One Trading Strategy Is Winning Big in This Nasty Year for Stocks

(Bloomberg) — A strange thing keeps happening in this nightmare year on Wall Street: Seemingly surefire bets that outsize volatility will engulf equity indexes keep misfiring, even as those riding turmoil in single stocks pay off handsomely.

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That’s proving a boon for a niche strategy known as dispersion trading, with nimble money managers netting double-digit gains by taking advantage of quirks in the world of equity derivatives.

Take the Cboe Volatility Index, a gauge of market-wide fear. Even as the S&P 500 careens to fresh lows, it’s stuck below its March peak and actually declined in the aftermath of last week’s hot inflation report. At the same time the Federal Reserve’s disruptive policy-tightening campaign is fueling the wildest price swings for US large cap companies since the global financial crisis.

The thinking goes that the winners and losers in the S&P 500 have become more pronounced in a world where corporate fundamentals matter. But index volatility is proving less severe, as price moves of its constituents offset each other, while demand for hedges remains muted due to low investor positioning.

For whatever reason this short-index-long-single-stock-volatility trade is working and may prove particularly lucrative this earnings season. The likes of PepsiCo Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have been posting notable gains after better-than-expected reports while disappointments such as Morgan Stanley are getting punished.

“We haven’t seen any panic protection buying that will drive volatility much higher,” said Daniel Danon, managing director at Assenagon Asset Management, whose Assenagon Alpha Volatility fund is up 12% this year. “So your short leg is helping your long leg to perform.”

The VIX, which tracks the cost of S&P 500 options, has stayed at elevated levels relative to its five-year average, but it’s yet to revisit 2022 highs of above 35 points. At the same time individual members in the S&P 500 have been moving the most since the global financial crisis, according to Societe Generale SA.

While the Fed’s hike-at-all-costs policy stance has ignited fear and loathing for investors in bonds and currencies, the cost of one-month bearish put options on the equity benchmark versus bullish calls has slipped anew to the lowest since 2017. That suggests limited investor appetite to hedge at the index level.

Why that’s the case despite a prolonged drawdown has become a hot topic among market watchers of late. Some point out that money managers have slashed equity exposure to multi-year lows, itself a defensive stance that requires less protection. Others say a relatively orderly decline has made options hedging less rewarding than usual, prompting traders to short equity futures as an alternative way to buffer against losses.

A relatively well behaved VIX stands out at a time when the Fed’s resolve to crush inflation at decade highs with tighter policy is rocking the underbelly of of US equities. Some oil producers have doubled their share prices in this year’s supply-side mayhem while Big Tech names like Netflix Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have plunged big time in a rate-sensitive selloff that’s now casting a shadow over the business cycle.

“It’s about rotation between sectors at the moment,” said Stephen Crewe, whose Fulcrum Equity Dispersion Fund is up 10% this year. The London-based manager is positioning for continued volatility among companies in the technology and energy sectors. “No one really knows where the US economy is going to end up,” he said.

The strategy, which has cooled of late after notching outsize gains earlier in the year, is deployed mostly by volatility hedge funds and banks packaging it into systematic strategies. Versions of the trade may buy options on a basket of stocks while others, like those managed by Assenagon and Fulcrum, are more selective. Some are neutral to volatility, whereas others are buying more options than they sell.

With expected swings embedded in index-level option prices relatively contained, it’s been harder for typical derivatives hedges to make money, with the payoff hinging more on getting the strike price or market timing right. For instance, an S&P 500-tracking portfolio that’s added calls on the VIX — which is supposed to buffer portfolios against a sudden outbreak in price swings — has suffered a four-percentage-point drag on performance, a Cboe index shows.

Yet going forward, the big challenge for dispersion traders is hiding in plain sight: Supersized Fed rate hikes risk causing a sudden collapse in economic growth that may in turn spur a big jump in index volatility.

Still for now, institutions appear to have little appetite for adding market hedges, according to Michael Purves, founder of Tallbacken Capital Advisors. He recommends betting on the VIX to fall till the end of the year.

“Perhaps yields can creep higher, but not in a shocking way the way they did when they pierced 4% in September,” he wrote in a note. “Markets appear to have processed the notion that there is little doubt that a Fed pivot is not close at hand.”