Hedged In on SDS, FXI & FXP as bears wake up early

Normally at this time of year, bears are getting their stores in & looking at hibernation, but the recent market has turned that around, with bears dozing most of the summer & now waking up & looking hungry.

Followers of our Twitter account, will know that we have been taking a good look at China over the past 10 trading days & have a very bearish outlook on China going into the 3rd Quarter & by default on the S&P 500. Signals have been coming for a while with the BDI declining at an alarming rate from it’s June highs, flagging up the possibility that China’s economy & associated infrastructure drive are starting to run out of steam.

The Shanghai Composite has been steadily declining. losing in the region of 21% of its value in the last month, today the benchmark index slumped an eye boggling 6.75% at its close. This has prompted me to look at a trade that I have been thinking about for a few weeks, that is neatly hedged & could also be a home run as bearish sentiment hits the markets again.

Having looked at three well traded ETFs , we are placing a trade that is mixing it up a little with SDS :Ultra Short S&P 500, FXI :iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index & FXP ProShares UltraSh FTSE/Xinhua China 25. The following chart shows the last 5 trading days of SPY, FXI & FXP. As can be seen, there was a clear signal on Tuesday last, that there was a divergence in FXI / FXP, with the S&P 500 mainly trading sideways.

Now using the Morgan Stanley A Fund CAF as a sentiment monitor for the Shanghai market over the same period against SPY (NYSE: SPY), it would seem that there has been some pretty good correlation over the last 6 months of trading. For me CAF is one of the best tickers to use for real sentiment, as it trades in China A Shares, whilst FXI (NYSE: FXI) is predicated on 25 stocks traded on the Hong Kong market (mostly ADRs). From looking at the charts, it would appear that CAF (NYSE: CAF) actually front runs FXI by a two to three day period & this has helped me immensely in trading Chinese ADRs this summer. At the same time, SPY has followed the FXI trend reasonably faithfully for the last 3 months, until August 17th, when FXI began to dip.

So our feeling is that with China declining at such a rapid rate, Long FXP  (NYSE: FXP) short FXI is a no brainer & we are looking to make some good returns over the next few weeks, we are also adding in a soupcon of SDS for interest & to confirm our bearish sentiment on the S&P 500. With a ratio of 2:1:1 we feel that this is a well hedged play, with a good upside potential.

We are looking to hold this trade for a minimum 10 day period & I have set this trade up on kaChing.com in our test account in order to track it. The idea being that we can give a visual on the performance of the trade & also  a good term of reference when we close out the positions & reblog.

MyStockVoice.com is now alive & kicking

It’s taken a while & it’s been an interesting experience, but am pleased to say that we released MyStockVoice.com into public beta. For me personally, there have been a few challenges, “assisted” along the way by re-locating with my family from Switzerland to Slovakia.

The team at Connection Services who have designed & support the MSV platform have been excellent, especially when responding to an ever changing set of requirements. MyStockVoice started as this WordPress blog, where I could muse on my views on Emerging Markets & BRIC economies. A conversation with a friend who works in the City (London) encouraged me to look at doing something a little more. The original format, was a forum, then a newswire service & now it’s a fully fledged blog publication platform. So you can imagine how happy my colleagues at CSL were, when I tripped back every few months & said “right, this is what we are doing now”

Our aim at MSV is to provide an ever widening audience with value insights into what is rapidly becoming a major topic for hedge funds, investment managers & retail investors alike : BRIC & Emerging Markets. International stocks traded on US exchanges are becoming ever more popular, especially via Depositary Receipts (ADR,ADS,ADN) , for the more cautious or long minded, a number of ETF (Exchange Traded Funds) have sprung up to service the appetite to take part in these growing economies.

Covering all the major regions, MSV provides focussed channels into a variety of sectors & also specific categories for Macro Econmics, ADR & ETF investing. We are pleased to be working with some well established names from the investment community, along with faculties such as Knowledge at Wharton, the Economics Faculty at Beijing University, Skolkovo Business School in Moscow & Cranfiedl University in the UK.

Our strapline is “your community … your voice”  & to reflect this, we will be bringing our readers plenty of new unique content. Much of my time in the last two to three months has been spent contacting individual bloggers & also online media services that are based in the regions covered. In this way, we can present a “blend of thought”, that will allow our subscribers to formulate informed opinions on their own particular areas of interest.

So, enough jawing from me, but to close, Alex, Chris & myself would like to thank the team at CS & all the people that have had input into the project. We sincerely hope that you enjoy the MSV experience & are always open to new ideas, partnership opportunities & most of all feedback.

Many thanks

Paul

Chile leads the way for South American ETFs

Whilst suffering from shrinking export markets, led by the all important 20% supply of global copper, a shrinking economy & climbing unemployment; Chile continues to buck global trends, with ratings agency, Moody’s Investors Service making it the first investment- grade country to be awarded a higher credit rating this year. The South American country’s $22 billion of savings in wealth funds has put it in a position to recover more quickly from the global credit crisis than other, similarly rated nations, Moody’s said yesterday in raising Chile’s foreign debt to A1 from A2 with a positive outlook.

This has been the result of a canny economic long game by President Michelle Bachelet, while near neighbours have splashed out on the commodities boom over the last decade, Chile has followed a prudent path of pumping  profits from state owned copper giant Codelco into soverign funds, providing the nation with a $22Bn cushion against global turmoil. That cushion is equal to roughly 13% of Chile’s GDP ($154Bn), so Chile looks as thought it should weather the storms of 2009 quite nicely.

“Nobody else compares with Chile,” Moody’s analyst Mauro Leos said in a phone interview from New York. “Like everywhere else, they’re getting hit hard. But because of the work they did ahead of time, they can go from a 5 percent surplus to a 5 percent deficit without any additional borrowing.”

Also helping is the price of copper on global markets, which is on a slow uptick, & an expectation that China’s economic recovery package will drive demand for the metal towards the end of 2009, this is reflected in current long term copper contracts on the London Metal Exchange. Central government has acted promptly, with Bachelet committed to a $19.5Bn package incorporating tax cuts & subsidies that should help stymie economic contraction. Even with copper prices at all time lows, economists think that Chile can still exit the current crisis without hitting recession.

Codelco announced its full year results earlier this month, generating a pre-tax profit of $4.968 Bn to December 2008, it is estimated that Codelco has provided an average of $7.5Bn per annum in revenues for the last 4 years. This follows Fitch rating $600M of the company’s debt as “A” back in January.

According to Fitch : “The company had USD 4.6 billion of total debt, of which USD 1.3 billion was classified as short-term. Codelco has adequate liquidity, backed by a track record of accessing debt in the local and international markets and a well-diversified debt maturity profile. Short-term debt is expected to be refinanced through a combination of the 2019 notes, bank loans from undrawn facilities and cash flow from operations.”

Chile’s banking sector is also helping stem the flow, business loans grew sharply in January, despite a deep economic slowdown amid the financial crisis, the country’s superintendent of banks said on Monday. Gustavo Arriagada told lawmakers that loans continued to grow, though at a slower pace, as Chilean banks, in counterpoint to their Western counterparts pass on a series of aggressive from the central bank to customers

“Although we have seen tighter credit conditions in the last few months and a fall in requests for credit, that is due to factors like an increase in risk and worsening of employment conditions and client income,” Arriagada said in his presentation.

This has led analysts to rethink their strategy regards South America, the single country ETF –  iShares MSCI Chile Investable Index : (NYSE : ECH) has seen some good buying activity of late, even if there is a 15% weighting towards Codelco within this product. ECH managed to add 5% over the last five days, with a huge spike in trading in yesterdays surge on the US markets. Along with Brazil / EWZ & Mexico /EWW, it looks as though Chile could be an interesting mid to long term long within the country specific ETFs.

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South America : Copper cartel on the horizon ?

With global copper prices sinking from a 2008 high of $4 per lb, down to todays miserly, $1.25 per lb, it is hardly surprising that the two major copper producing countries in South America are looking at ways to buoy up their operations. Last week, Peruvian president Alan Garcia dropped some strong hints that Peru & Chile should coordinate on copper production , in order to achieve greater control of prices on international markets.

“I believe that as countries with a strong mining presence in the world we must work in a joint manner, because when brotherly countries produce and compete with the same metal, the only thing we achieve is a fall in the price of copper, and we are both losers”, said Garcia

Demand growth in China, the world’s largest user of the metal used in plumbing and wiring, slowed to an estimated 9.8 percent in 2008 from 26 percent in 2007. Freeport-McMoran amongst others has shelved projects including a $450 million expansion at its Chilean copper mine El Abra. Freeport owns 51 percent of the mine and Codelco the remainder. The decline cut net income at Chile’s state-run Codelco, the world’s top copper miner, by nearly half to $4.5 billion in 2008.

In December, Jose Pablo Arrelano, CEO of Codelco stated copper prices will be “depressed” next year and demand almost “stagnant” as the international economic crisis leads to higher stockpiles of the metal. This will undoubtedly hurt other players in the commodities market, including BHP Billiton (NYSE – BBL) & Freeport McMoran (NYSE – FCX), Freeport McMoran have made some inroads to looking at the problem, the board announced in early December ,a  Revised Operating Plan in Response to Weak Market Conditions. Which is basically a slow down in extraction & refining in both its North & South American operations.

In Chile & Peru, copper extraction looks like a loss leader at the moment, in aggregate across all units, costs in 2009 are predicted to range from between $0.85 – $1.45 per pound. BHP have similarly looked at cutbacks regards copper extraction, the world’s biggest mining company, has delayed plans for an energy plant in Chile that it planned to build to supply two of its existing copper mines.

As discussed in an earlier post, Aussie-Canuck operator Equinox opened the largest copper mine in Africa last year, at Lumwana in Zambia, which when it comes fully online in early 2009, will be churning out 172,000 tonnes of high yield concentrate per year, which can only bring about additional competition for Codelco, BHP & Freeport, especially as Equinox has hedged production at $2.00 for the first three years of operation at Lumwana & have an estimated existing extraction cost of $0.80.

Chile may be able to weather the storm as Otto at Inka Cola puts forth in this article, the country has one of the highest per capita reserves in South America, totalling $26.49Bn, he further argues that Chile has an additional  $23Bn “tucked away in overseas accounts to call on.” Which is a considerable cushion to see out 2009, as Codelco & Arrelano await  global copper demand to turn positive in 2010.

Peru on the other hand does not look as if it will fare so well, although looking at Otto’s chart, they have a reasonable level of foreign reserves, the Andean nation is beset by rising unempolyment & a lack of foreign investment. Peru’s largest miner Southern Copper (NYSE – PCU) posted  a $125 million net loss in the fourth quarter, compared with a $311 million profit in the year-ago period, due to demand destruction. It is estimated that more than 9,000 miners have been laid off in Peru, whilst new projects have been suspended, including Southern Copper‘s plan to invest $1 billion in the Tia Maria mine. These cutbacks have already helped slow Peru’s growth rate to a projected 5% in January.

The question is, will Garcia’s plan, if it comes to fruition be timely enough ? We have seen how long it has taken OPEC production cuts to start to have an effect on the market price of crude. Of more concern for Garcia will be the new productive mines being opened in Zambia by Equinox at Lumwana & also the the Chinese backed Chambishi mine, which is operated by China Non-Ferrous Metals Mining Corporation (CNMC). The expected copper ore output is one million tons per annum, with a projected service life of 25 years. China has also embarked on an acquisition spree of late, which had also brought it interests in Australian miners such as Rio Tinto. Garcia will also have to play a careful game, as China is estimated to have committed to investing over $6 billion in Peru’s mining sector over the next five years. Politics come into play of course & the Chinese are expert in this field, my gut is that production cuts will come, although China will no doubt be exempt from any surging price changes in the near future.

My feel is that the copper mining stocks will remain low for a good time to come, much has been made of the Chinese stimulus bill, however, there is no guarantee that this will come to fruition any time soon, as & when it does kick in, China will be adequately supplied by its current investments in South America & Africa, as discussed in this piece. I am however, a little more bullish on the mining sector in general & have just initiated a position in the S&P Metals & Mining Index (ETF –  XME ,) which looks as though it may be building momentum for a bullish 2009.