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Time Horizons of Investors and Traders

July 1, 2021 | Commentary

  • Information is the lifeblood of markets.  Whether it is at the company, sector or macro market level, whenever new information appears it is analyzed and incorporated into current prices.
  • Academics might think this is a neat and tidy process.  It is anything but.  New information can get to market participants at different times and analyzing its importance is rarely easy or definitive.  The result is a noisy path of prices.
  • It does not help that market participants are heterogeneous.  Offit Capital looks through the lens of a long-term investor.  As important as this perspective is, considering the absolute size of long-term investors in the market, it represents little of the daily volume.  That activity is dominated by traders and market makers that have time horizons from a few months, weeks or days all the way down to fractions of a second.
  • We are sometimes asked, “The S&P was down 3% last week.  What is that telling us about inflation, economic growth or employment?”  The honest answer is that the market drop might be pointing to a change in macroeconomics, or it might just mean that short-term traders have changed their mind for some other reason.  Anyone who tries to second guess those motivations and act on it shifts from being a long-term investor into a short-term trader, and often to no good effect.

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