Finance

Skittish investors may feel it’s better to bail on the stock market than stay invested during volatile periods.
However, investors generally lose out on significant returns by doing so, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.
Markets are unpredictable. Plus, the best and worst days tend to cluster, making it nearly impossible to time the market.

Konstantin Trubavin | Cavan | Getty Images

Investor psychology can be fickle. Consider this common scenario: The stock market hits a rough patch, and skittish investors bail and park their money on the sidelines, thinking it a “safer” way to ride out the storm.
However, the math suggests — quite convincingly — that this is usually the wrong strategy.

“Getting in and out of the market, it’s a loser’s game,” said Lee Baker, a certified financial planner and founder of Apex Financial Services in Atlanta.
Why? Pulling out during volatile periods may cause investors to miss the market’s biggest trading days — thereby sacrificing significant earnings.

Over the past 30 years, the S&P 500 stock index had an 8% average annual return, according to a recent Wells Fargo Investment Institute analysis. Investors who missed the market’s 10 best days over that period would have earned 5.26%, a much lower return, it found.
Further, missing the 30 best days would have reduced average gains to 1.83%. Returns would have been worse still — 0.44%, or nearly flat — for those who missed the market’s 40 best days, and -0.86% for investors who missed the 50 best days, according to Wells Fargo.
Those returns wouldn’t have kept pace with the cost of living: Inflation averaged 2.5% from Feb. 1, 1994 through Jan. 31, 2024, the time period in question.

Markets are quick and unpredictable

In short: Stocks saw most of their gains “over just a few trading days,” according to the Wells Fargo report.
“Missing a handful of the best days in the market over long time periods can drastically reduce the average annual return an investor could gain just by holding on to their equity investments during sell-offs,” it said.
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Unfortunately for investors, it’s almost impossible to time the market by staying invested for the winning days and bailing ahead of losing days.
Markets can react unpredictably — and speedily — to unknowable factors like the strength or weakness of a monthly jobs report or inflation reading, or the breakout of a geopolitical conflict or war.
“The markets not only are unpredictable, but when you have these moves, they happen very quickly,” said Baker, a member of CNBC’s Advisor Council.

The best and worst days tend to ‘cluster’

Part of what also makes this so tricky: The S&P 500’s best days tend to “cluster” in recessions and bear markets, when markets are “at their most volatile,” according to Wells Fargo. And some of the worst days occurred during bull markets, periods when the stock market is on a winning streak.
For example, all of the 10 best trading days by percentage gain in the past three decades occurred during recessions, Wells Fargo found. (Six also coincided with a bear market.)

Some of the worst and best days followed in rapid succession: Three of the 30 best days and five of the 30 worst days occurred in the eight trading days between March 9 and March 18, 2020, according to Wells Fargo.
“Disentangling the best and worst days can be quite difficult, history suggests, since they have often occurred in a very tight time frame, sometimes even on consecutive trading days,” its report said.
The math argues strongly in favor of people staying invested amid high volatility, experts said.

Getting in and out of the market, it’s a loser’s game.

certified financial planner and founder of Apex Financial Services in Atlanta

For further proof, look no further than actual investor profits versus the S&P 500.
The average stock fund investor earned a 6.81% return in the three decades from 1993 to 2022 — about three percentage points less than the 9.65% average return of the S&P 500 over that period, according to a DALBAR analysis cited by Wells Fargo.
This suggests investors often guess wrong, and that their profits dip as a result.
“The best advice, quite frankly, is to make a strategic allocation across multiple asset classes and effectively stay the course,” Baker said. More

New York Community Bank said Thursday it lost 7% of its deposits in the turbulent month before announcing a $1 billion-plus capital injection from investors led by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital.
The bank had $77.2 billion in deposits as of March 5, NYCB said in an investor presentation tied to the capital raise, down from $83 billion it had as of Feb. 5.
NYCB also said it’s slashing its quarterly dividend for the second time this year, to 1 cent per share from 5 cents, an 80% drop.

New York Community Bank said Thursday it lost 7% of its deposits in the turbulent month before announcing a $1 billion-plus capital injection from investors led by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital.
The bank had $77.2 billion in deposits as of March 5, NYCB said in an investor presentation tied to the capital raise. That was down from $83 billion it had as of Feb. 5, the day before Moody’s Investors Service cut the bank’s credit ratings to junk.

NYCB also said it’s slashing its quarterly dividend for the second time this year, to 1 cent per share from 5 cents, an 80% drop. The bank paid a 17-cent dividend until reporting a surprise fourth-quarter loss that kicked off a negative news cycle for the Long Island-based lender.
Before announcing a crucial lifeline Wednesday from a group of private equity investors led by Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital, NYCB’s stock was in a tailspin over concerns about the bank’s loan book and deposit base. In a little more than a month, the bank changed its CEO twice, saw two rounds of rating agency downgrades and announced deepening losses.
At its nadir, NYCB’s stock sank below $2 per share Wednesday, down more than 40%, before ultimately rebounding and ending the day higher. The shares climbed 10% in Thursday morning trading.
The capital injection announced Wednesday has raised hopes that the bank now has enough time to resolve lingering questions about its exposure to New York-area multifamily apartment loans, as well as the “material weaknesses” around loan review that the bank disclosed last week.

‘Very attractive’ bank

Mnuchin told CNBC in an interview Thursday that he started looking at NYCB “a long time ago.”

“The issue was really around perceived risks in the loans, and with putting billion dollars of capital into the balance sheet, it really strengthens the franchise and whatever issues there are in the loans we’ll be able to work through,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
“I think there’s a great opportunity to turn this into a very attractive regional commercial bank,” he added.
Mnuchin said that he did “extensive diligence” on NYCB’s loan portfolio and that the “biggest problem” he found was its New York office loans, though he expected the bank to build reserves over time.
“I don’t see the New York office working out or getting better in the future,” Mnuchin said.

Shrinking lender?

Incoming CEO Joseph Otting, a former comptroller of the currency, told analysts Thursday that the bank would look to strengthen its capital and liquidity levels and reduce its concentration in commercial real estate loans.
NYCB will likely have to sell assets as well as build reserves and take write-downs, according to Piper Sander analysts led by Mark Fitzgibbon.
The bank, which has $116 billion in assets, is evaluating whether it should reduce assets to below the key $100 billion threshold that brings added regulatory scrutiny on capital and risk management, executives said Thursday.
When asked by an analyst about the feared exit of deposits after ratings agency downgrades, NYCB Chairman Alessandro DiNello said the bank got “waivers” that allowed it to keep custodial accounts that otherwise may have fled.
“Now I think given this capital raise, we’re hopeful that that relationship continues to be the way it is,” DiNello said.
While news of the Mnuchin investment is good for regional banks overall, Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo cautioned that the cycle for commercial real estate losses was just beginning as loans come due this year and next, which will probably cause more problems for lenders.
— CNBC’s Laya Neelakandan and Ritika Shah contributed to this report.
Correction: New York Community Bank announced an investment from a group of private equity investors on Wednesday. An earlier version of this story misstated the day.

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European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde is giving a press conference following the bank’s latest monetary policy decision.

It comes after the bank’s policymakers lowered their annual growth forecast, as they confirmed a widely expected hold of interest rates.
ECB staff projections now see economic growth of 0.6% in 2024, from a prior forecast of 0.8%. Their inflation forecast for the year was brought to 2.3% from 2.7%.
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The S&P 500 has climbed for 16 of the last 18 weeks and closed at a new all-time high on Friday, but the gains have been heavily concentrated amongst the so-called “Magnificent 7.”
Despite comparisons with the market conditions of the late 90s, before the burst of the dotcom bubble, UBS strategists say “there’s no bubble ready to go pop.”
TS Lombard, meanwhile, says the current bull market is missing one crucial ingredient required to be deemed a bubble.

Traders work on the floor during morning trading at the New York Stock Exchange on March 6, 2024.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Despite the heavy concentration of the U.S. market rally in expensive, AI-focused tech stocks, analysts say Wall Street is not yet in bubble territory.
The S&P 500 has climbed for 16 of the last 18 weeks and notched a new all-time closing high on Friday, but the gains have been heavily concentrated among the so-called “Magnificent 7” tech behemoths, led by skyrocketing Nvidia.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, meanwhile, is expected to begin cutting interest rates in June, potentially supplying a further boon to high-growth tech stocks.
The sheer scale and narrow nature of the bull run have evoked some concern about a market bubble, and UBS strategists on Wednesday drew comparisons with the late 1990s.
In January 1995, when the Fed finished a cycle of interest rate hikes that took the Fed funds rate to 6%, the S&P 500 started on a bull run that delivered over 27% in annualized returns over the next five-plus years.
Until the bubble burst spectacularly in March 2000.
“The 90s bull run saw two phases: a broad, steady climb from early ’95 to mid ’98, and then a narrower, more explosive phase from late ’98 to early ’00,” UBS Chief Strategist Bhanu Baweja and his team said in the research note.

“Today’s sectoral patterns, narrowness, correlations, are similar to the second phase of the market; valuations are not far off either.”
Yet despite the surface-level similarities, Baweja argued that “there’s no bubble ready to go pop,” and pointed to notable differences in earnings, realized margins, free cash flow, IPO and M&A activity, as well as signals from options markets.
While sector-specific enthusiasm is evident today, UBS highlighted that it is not based solely on hype as was the case for much of the dotcom bubble, but on actual shareholder returns.
The missing ingredient
The top 10 companies in the S&P 500 account for around 34% of the index’s total market cap, TS Lombard highlighted in a research note Monday.
The research firm argued this concentration is warranted given the stellar earnings of these firms.
“However, it does mean that it is hard for the overall index to rally significantly without the participation of the Tech sector, and it also means that the index is vulnerable to the risks idiosyncratic to these companies,” said Skylar Montgomery Koning, senior global macro strategist at TS Lombard.
Yet the Fed’s dovish pivot and resilient economic growth in recent months have enabled stock market breadth to improve, both in terms of sectors and geography, with both European and Japanese indexes hitting all-time highs over recent weeks.
What’s more, Montgomery Koning argued that the equity gains thus far are justified by fundamentals, namely the policy and growth outlook, along with a strong fourth-quarter earnings season.

She said that every stock market bubble needs three ingredients to inflate: a solid fundamental story, a compelling narrative for future growth, and liquidity, leverage or both. While the AI-driven bull run meets the first two criteria, Montgomery Koning said the third appears to be lacking.
“Liquidity is still ample, but leverage is not yet at worrying levels. QT has not resulted in shrinking liquidity in the US so far, as reverse repos (which absorb reserves) declined faster than the balance sheet. In fact, liquidity has been increasing somewhat since the start of last year (there is a risk that 2024 Fed cuts will add to the froth),” she said.
“But leverage doesn’t look worrying; margin debt and options open interest suggest that it’s not speculation driving the rally. There has been a small rise in margin debt but nowhere near the highs of 2020.”
The bad news?
The absence of a bubble does not necessarily imply that the market will continue to rise, UBS pointed out, with Baweja noting that productivity growth looks “nothing like it did in the 1990s.”
“Sure, this can change, but data today on electronics and info tech orders, capex intentions and actual capex doesn’t at all suggest the capital deepening associated with a productivity boost,” he said.
“Our metric of globalisation shows it is stalled (weakening, actually) compared to the late 1990s, when it grew the fastest. The economy is late cycle today.”
The current configuration of the economy is closest to that seen at the end of the 90s bull run and into early 2000, UBS believes, with real disposable income growth “weak and likely to get weaker. Baweja suggested that these variables need to start looking rosier in order for the bull run to persist sustainably. More

You could spot a fake a mile off. The plasticky “Prado” wallets arranged on bedsheets on the pavements lining Canal Street in New York bore only a passing resemblance to the ones for sale in the Prada store in Soho. The fake Chanel bags they lay next to were lumpy, misshapen and smelled a little like petrol. An attempt to make a quick buck by buying one and passing it off as genuine—perhaps by taking it to a small local consignment store—would have been met with raised eyebrows and a chuckle.What an innocent time. Now booming demand, technological improvements and sheer opportunism have transformed the market for buying and selling luxury bags. lvmh, a luxury conglomerate, sold about €10bn-worth ($13bn) of leather goods in 2013. By 2023 it was selling €42bn-worth—a 320% increase in just ten years. (The global economy, by contrast, grew by only 30%.) Dedicated reselling platforms, such as the RealReal and Vestiaire Collective, have expanded rapidly. Revenues from reselling luxury bags and clothing now add up to around $200bn a year. So producers of counterfeits have upped their game, too. Women now gather in Reddit groups to “QC” (quality check) bags they order from China via WeChat. Called “superfakes” by the New York Times, such dupes are often spot on—down to having the correct number of stitches on each side of the classic Chanel quilted diamond (up to 11, apparently). They cost about a tenth of the regular price. More

Hire a wealth manager, and one of their first tasks will be to work out your attitude to risk. If you are not sure exactly what this means, the questions are unlikely to help. They range from the inane (“How do you think a friend who knows you well would describe your attitude to taking financial risks?”) to the baffling (“Many television programmes now have a welter of fast whizzing images. Do you find these a) interesting; b) irritating; or c) amusing but they distract from the message of the programme?”). This is not necessarily a sign that your new adviser is destined to annoy you. Instead, it hints at something fundamental. Risk sits at the heart of financial markets. But trying to pin down precisely what it is, let alone how much of it you want and which investment choices should follow, can be maddening.To get around this, most investors instead think about volatility, which has the advantage of being much easier to define and measure. Volatility describes the spread of outcomes in a bell-curve-like probability distribution. Outcomes close to the centre are always the most likely; volatility determines how wide a range counts as “close”. High volatility also raises the chances of getting an extreme result: in investment terms, an enormous gain or a crushing loss. You can gauge a stock’s volatility by looking at how wildly it has moved in the past or, alternatively, how expensive it is to insure it against big jumps in the future.All this feels pretty risk-like, even if a nagging doubt remains that real-life worries lack the symmetry of a bell curve: cross the road carelessly and you risk getting run over; there is no equally probable and correspondingly wonderful upside. But set such qualms aside, pretend volatility is risk and you can construct an entire theory of investment allowing everyone to build portfolios that maximise their returns according to their neuroticism. In 1952 Harry Markowitz did just this, and later won a Nobel prize for it. His Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is almost certainly the framework your new wealth manager is using to translate your attitude to risk into a set of investments. The trouble is that it is broken. For it turns out that a crucial tenet of MPT—that taking more risk rewards you with a higher expected return—is not true at all.Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, a trio of academics, demonstrate this in UBS’s Global Investment Returns Yearbook, an update to which has just been released. They examine the prices of American shares since 1963 and British ones since 1984, ordering them by volatility and then calculating how those in each part of the distribution actually performed. For medium and low volatilities, the results are disappointing for adherents of MPT: returns are clustered, with volatility having barely any discernible effect. Among the riskiest stocks, things are even worse. Far from offering outsized returns, they dramatically underperformed the rest.The Yearbook’s authors are too thorough to present such results without caveats. For both countries, the riskiest stocks tended to also be those of corporate minnows, accounting for just 7% of total market value on average. Conversely, the least risky companies were disproportionately likely to be giants, accounting for 41% and 58% of market value in America and Britain respectively. This scuppers the chances of pairing a big long position in low-volatility stocks with a matching short position in high-volatility ones, which would be the obvious trading strategy for profiting from the anomaly and arbitraging it away. In any case, short positions are inherently riskier than long ones, so shorting the market’s jumpiest stocks would be a tough sell to clients.Yet it is now clear that no rational investor ought to be buying such stocks, given they can expect to be punished, not rewarded, for taking more risk. Nor is the fact that they were risky only obvious in hindsight: it is unlikely that the illiquid shares of small firms vulnerable to competition and economic headwinds ever looked a great deal safer. Meanwhile, lower down the risk spectrum, the surprise is that more people do not realise that the least volatile stocks yield similar returns for less risk, and seek them out.Readers may not be flabbergasted by the conclusion—that investors are not entirely rational after all. They might still wish to take another look at the racier bits of their portfolios. Perhaps those are the positions that will lead to a gilded retirement. History, though, suggests that they might be speculation for speculation’s sake. Call it return-free risk.■Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets: Uranium prices are soaring. Investors should be careful (Feb 28th)Should you put all your savings into stocks? (Feb 19th)Investing in commodities has become nightmarishly difficult (Feb 16th)Also: How the Buttonwood column got its name More

Africa’s tallest building is rising under empty skies. Beneath the Iconic Tower in northern Egypt sits a city that officials expect to one day house 6.5m people. For now, though, it is mostly empty—like the desert that came before it.Egypt’s “New Administrative Capital” is part of a rush of city-building. Firms and governments are planning more settlements than at any time in the post-war period, with many already under construction. Ninety-one cities have been announced in the past decade, with 15 in the past year alone. In addition to its new capital in the north, Egypt is building five other cities, with plans for dozens more. India is considering eight urban hubs. Outside Baghdad, Iraq, workers have just broken ground on the first of five settlements.And it is not just emerging economies that are building. Investors in America have spent years secretly buying land for a new city in California. To the east, the deserts of Arizona and Nevada have lured Bill Gates and Marc Lore, two billionaires, each with plans for their own metropolis. Even Donald Trump, in his bid for re-election, has proposed ten “freedom cities”. In their early stages, many of these projects will attract derision. History suggests that plenty will fail. But the number and diversity of settlements under construction suggests some will triumph.That is a great thing. Edward Glaeser of Harvard University has lauded cities as mankind’s greatest invention. He notes that agglomerations of money and talent make societies richer, smarter and greener. Since companies move closer to their customers and people closer to their jobs, growing cities beget economic growth. Economists think that doubling a city’s population provides a boost to productivity of 2-5%. Given both the pressing need for new urban areas and the constraints on physical growth in existing ones, starting afresh is sometimes a shrewd decision.In much of the poor world, land disputes, shantytowns and poor infrastructure choke development. The problem will worsen as urban areas swell by an extra 2.5bn inhabitants by 2050, according to projections by the United Nations, with the new urbanites appearing in regions where cities are already under extreme stress. Builders hope that new metropolises will help relieve the pressure. In Nairobi, near where Stephen Jennings, a former private-equity boss, is building a new city called Tatu, public-transport commutes run to over an hour for most jobs. Construction is progressing nicely in Kenya’s newest settlement, where 5,000 residents already live and work in a gated village. Mr Jennings is building seven other cities across five countries in the region.Rich-world cities have problems of their own. The push for a new town outside San Francisco—a project that goes by the label of “California Forever”—came from an “epic housing shortage” on America’s west coast, says Jan Sramek, who leads a group of Silicon Valley investors making it happen. The group, which includes Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow; Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn; and Sir Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist, will put their plans for “homes, jobs and clean energy” to a public vote in November. If approved, the city will house up to 400,000 residents on 60,000 acres of what is now farmland. Starting again is a necessary part of the solution to housing shortfalls, says Mr Sramek, citing the high costs of revamping existing infrastructure.California Forever is among a clutch of planned towns that also aim to improve urban living. The developer is promoting high-density neighbourhoods in which residents can reach schools, jobs and shops without a car. Today’s city-builders have decided that walkability—or what is sometimes called a “15-minute city”—is a crucial selling point. Some, like Dholera in India and Bill Gates’s Belmont in Arizona, are pitching so-called “smart cities”, which use sensors to direct residents away from traffic or tell them the most environmentally friendly time for a shower.A few projects double as social experiments. Mr Lore’s Telosa city (adapted from the Greek word for “highest purpose”) will do away with private ownership of land, which will instead be held in a communal trust, with money generated from leasing it spent on public services. Praxis (another Greek word, meaning “theory in practice”) has raised $19m and collected a waiting list of potential residents who want to “create a more vital future for humanity” in the Mediterranean. A private company is building Próspera, a cryptocurrency-accepting, libertarian special economic zone in the Honduras, with a mission to “maximise human prosperity”. Praxis and Próspera are funded in-part by Pronomos, a venture-capital fund established in 2019 to invest in new cities, which is run by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) and counts Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, two billionaire investors, among its supporters.Messrs Andreessen, Lore and Thiel are among a crop of wealthy folk with ideas about how to run cities. But governments also want to experiment. Abundant capital and low interest rates in the 2010s allowed politicians to borrow cheaply. Although rates are now higher, enthusiasm for building remains, as countries copy one another. Leaders are keen on using state finances to reshape domestic economies—and believe that new cities will help.Houses built on sandMuhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia hopes that several gleaming new metropolises will attract industries that his country lacks, such as financial services, manufacturing and tourism. NEOM, a city made up of a 170km-long building in the desert, is to be the jewel in the crown. Egypt’s New Administrative Capital is purpose-built for the state’s bureaucratic machinery; the government hopes it will reduce congestion in Cairo. The city already includes the Ministry of Defence’s imposing Octagon—not to be confused with America’s Pentagon—which spreads over a square kilometre. In Indonesia workers are clearing forests for a new capital, Nusantara. For leaders such as Joko Widodo of Indonesia and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, a new capital promises a legacy, lots of jobs and the ability to keep voters at arm’s length.image: The EconomistIn other countries, rulers have slightly more esoteric ambitions. El Salvador is planning to sell bonds that pay out in bitcoin in order to fund a crypto-city. The Kingdom of Bhutan said in December that it would build a “mindfulness city”, with neighbourhoods designed on the repeating geometric patterns of a mandala, a Buddhist symbol. The emergence of the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, whose workers are building cities in Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East, has lowered the costs of all megaprojects, whether fanciful or prosaic.How many of these cities will prosper? Some infrastructure, such as electricity, internet and roads, must be in place before the first resident arrives, which means that upfront costs can be staggeringly large. Mr Sramek’s company has already sunk $1bn into buying land for California Forever and will need an additional $1bn-2bn for just the first stage of construction. Mr Lore expects to marshal $25bn in initial investment for his city in the desert. Prince Muhammed will lean on his kingdom’s oil riches to pay for NEOM at an initial cost of $319bn. But enthusiasm, and money, can run out; grandiose projects can become white elephants. Work on Egypt’s $60bn capital city has slowed as the country’s economy falters. The Chinese developer behind Malaysia’s Forest City defaulted in 2023, before residents had even moved in.History points to characteristics shared by successful projects. State institutions can help anchor cities, as Brasília (in Brazil) and Chandigarh (in India) showed in the 20th century. Although both have had problems, people in Brazil and India are voting with their feet. Brasília’s population is growing at 1.2% a year, more than double the national average. Chandigarh, a state capital, is now India’s fourth-richest region on a per-person basis.The future is less certain for cities that cannot rely on taxpayers to provide jobs and pay the bills, but California Forever and Tatu seem to be based on sensible ideas. As Mr Jennings puts it, the crucial thing is to focus on getting the “boring stuff”, such as roads and sewerage, right in order to create a city that is walkable and green, but not especially smart. In addition to being what he calls “a dumb city”, Mr Sramek’s California Forever shares another advantage with Tatu: both will piggy-back on neighbouring economies. “We are five miles away from cities on both sides,” says the Californian developer. “The strength of the demand makes a big difference to how fast you can grow.” In Britain, Milton Keynes—a city established in the 1960s, less than an hour by train from London—is thriving. Reston, a planned town outside Washington, DC, is another success.Sensible city-builders are wary of taking on debt. Developers have instead started to sell stakes in projects, demonstrating buy-in for what are long-term ventures. “You are looking at a 50-year time horizon,” says Mr Jennings, who admits that it “sounds insane”. He has tapped friends for capital, avoiding private-equity backers and their investment horizons, which normally come in at under a decade. California Forever is entirely funded by equity investments. If the two new settlements succeed, their investors will be rewarded. But so will many others. That is the glory of cities. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More