In the Truman Show, the late nineties Hollywood film, the eponymous character lives a seemingly charmed world, snuggled comfortably into an American suburbia of white picket fences and crisply cut lawns.
But gradually Truman starts to notice something is not quite right. He is actually trapped inside a film set controlled by hidden directors, and discovers to his horror that he is the unknowing star of the world’s most popular reality TV show.
The question some of the world’s biggest hedge funds are starting to ask is whether overly placid investors will also wake up to discover they are living in a “Truman Show market” – where central bankers’ ultra loose monetary policy has manufactured a fake reality that is bound to end.
For Seth Klarman, the manager of the $27bn hedge fund the Baupost Group who recently coined the analogy in a letter to clients, investors have been lulled into a false sense of security that is creating an ever greater risk of a sharp correction.
“All the Trumans – the economists, fund managers, traders, market pundits – know at some level that the environment in which they operate is not what it seems on the surface,” Mr Klarman wrote in his letter, later adding: “But the zeitgeist is so damn pleasant, the days so resplendent, the mood so euphoric, the returns so irresistible, that no one wants it to end.”
But no matter how sceptical hedge fund managers may be, they find themselves in a bind. While the assumption that central bank bond-buying will continue for the foreseeable future has been a boon to broader markets, indiscriminately surging equities have made life frustrating for most specialised stock pickers.
At the same time other hedge fund strategies, such as making bets on interest rates and currencies according to views on the direction of the global economy, have faltered as markets have refused to obey previously presumed iron rules, such as money printing leading to devaluation. Of late these so-called global macro funds have retreated from such trades as their performance has suffered.
“Many hedge funds continue to predict this ongoing drift upwards in asset prices due to an implicit backstop from central banks, who want to believe they are omnipotent, and that when data is bad they can just turn on the taps again and make it go away,” says Anthony Lawler, portfolio manager at GAM, one of the world’s biggest investors in hedge funds.
As a result, while many managers feel deeply uneasy with the lofty valuations attached to certain parts of the US stock market, and low returns offered by risky assets such as junk bonds, few are willing to step out just yet.
More recently, encouragement has been taken from falling correlations between assets, meaning some portfolio managers are confident they can start to exploit more effectively the pricing anomalies between better and worse quality securities.
“The number of individual stocks mispriced to each other is high, there are some trading on vapour whilst others are still trading on reasonable valuations,” says Luke Ellis, president of Man Group, the world’s largest listed hedge fund. “Are there lots of cheap stocks? No, but on a long short basis there are opportunities.”
“The big question is when this is all going to change. From a purely intellectual point of view, it is interesting how central banks will reverse their policies. From a market point of view, it is uncertain and complicated.”
Sir Michael Hintze, chief executive and founder of CQS, one of Europe’s largest hedge funds, has argued that loose central banks have actually increased the riskiness of markets as a result of their policies forcing too much money into the same assets, meaning any corrections are likely to be sharper than normal.
“Everyone is thinking the same and being driven into the same trade,” he wrote in a note to clients. “Shifts when moving from one state to another can be difficult and abrupt. It is not healthy to have a ‘rigged’ market”.
Yet, for now, as long as markets continue to believe in the willingness and ability of central bankers to maintain current conditions, few hedge fund managers are ready to make any big bets against a reversal.
“Few argue that equities are cheap on any metric, but the majority of hedge fund managers are opting to remain invested,” says Mr Lawler of GAM.
The Truman Show market looks set to continue, even if an increasing number of participants have started to spot the cameras hidden behind the trees