Oil and U.S. Banks

(by John Authers, FT.com) Bastille Day, July 14, is a good day for an old order to come to a sudden and brutal end. And on July 14, the blade came down on the phenomenally successful “buy oil, sell financials” trade.

This trade, popular with hedge funds, offered a rare way to make money this year. It exploited the credit crisis and the response it provoked from the Federal Reserve. Investors deserted banks in the US (and Europe to a lesser extent) and bet that liquidity would instead flow to oil. As higher oil prices made it harder to aid banks with lower rates, and intensified pressure on banks’ customers, it was self-reinforcing.

By July 14, a trade of buying crude oil futures on Nymex while selling short the KBW index of US commercial banks would have made a profit of 168 per cent for the year. Even if we substitute the broader MSCI world financials index for the KBW, which covers the banks most exposed to US housing, the trade had made 114 per cent.

Then, banks bounced while oil dropped 15 per cent. The trade, using the KBW index, lost 35 per cent in the six days after Bastille Day (20.7 per cent using the MSCI world financials index).

This plunge was also self-reinforcing, in a different way. Traders covering their short positions by buying back bank stocks may have funded this by selling their positions in oil.

Note, however, that anybody who made the “long oil/short US banks” trade at the beginning of the year is still sitting on a gain of 74 per cent, much the same as they were six weeks ago. This has not hurt that much.

With the trade back to its level of early June, it appears, thankfully, that we can chalk up the extremes for banks and oil in the weeks before Bastille Day to speculative “piling on”.

But traders now have to find a new way to make money. And the world must still contend with the strong fundamental reasons for high oil prices and cheap US bank stocks.