One month ago, in his latest letter to clients, Horseman Capital’s Russell Clark revealed a new “investing” strategy using ETF flows as a catalyst for positioning and bets.
Citing the transition from active to passive as a catalyst that makes markets increasingly more inefficient, something One River’s Eric Peters noted in a recent weekly note, Clark repeated a lament made by many short sellers, stating that there “are complaints from some quarters about it being harder to short sell as flows of money push up stocks.”
So what is his new shorting philosophy? This is how he explained it, using his biggest short at the moment, retail REITs:
The biggest short sector in the fund are REITs. In the US, they are mainly retail REITs, and there are two reasons for this. One is that we have guaranteed sellers in the Japanese US Reit fund. The other reason is the appalling performance of the major tenants. However, as an aside, I like them as a short area as they have the highest exposure to ETFs of any sector. Bloomberg allows you to find the biggest ETFs and open ended funds which are invested in US Real Estate Sector. The top 28 funds have total assets of 187bn USD, of which 13.3bn USD invested in Simon Property Group, that is 24% of Simon’s market cap. However, Real Estate passive funds are not the only passive fund invested in Simon. When all passive funds weights are added together I get over 50% of Simon Property Group shareholders are passive. I wonder who will become the buyer if all these funds start to see redemptions if there are some problems in US commercial real estate?
This post was published at Zero Hedge on May 11, 2017.
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