Jeffrey Kleintop is on bubble watch.
Kleintop, senior vice president and chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, recently posted a commentary, called Where's the Next Bubble?, that looks at potential bubbles that are worth watching.
According to Kleintop, there are four popular candidates for bubbles based on the questions he gets from investors. Remarkably, he says, none of these seem to fit the "classic profile of a potentially damaging bubble, but that doesn't mean they don't carry risks for investors."
While sometimes only seen in hindsight, bubbles with potentially damaging effects on the broader markets and economy seem to have some similar characteristics that can help investors spot them before they burst. For instance, past bubbles — like the technology, telecommunications and media stocks of the Nasdaq Composite Index; crude oil; precious metals; and homebuilder stocks in the S&P 500 Homebuilding Index — inflated 1,000% over 10 years before bursting and cutting prices by more than half in the following two years.
According to Kleintop, the 10-year buildup is important to how embedded the bubble becomes in the markets and economy when it bursts.
Here are the four bubble candidates, according to Kleintop:
1. Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin, which is the most popular cryptocurrency, has surged more than 1,000% in the past two years. It did so much faster than the bubbles that took 10 years to inflate to this level — like the technology, telecommunications and media stocks of the Nasdaq Composite Index or the homebuilder stocks in the S&P 500 Homebuilding Index.
"The shorter amount of time that it took may mean that if bitcoin is a bubble and were to burst it probably won't have as broad of a ripple effect on the economy as the technology or housing bubbles did," Kleintop says.
2. Volatility
Stock market volatility in the world's major markets is very low.
There are specific products that are tied directly to volatility, and some of these products track the S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Inverse Daily Index, which seeks to reflect the total return for those betting on low volatility for the S&P 500. This index has soared over 800% as it approaches 10 years from the end of the last bull market on Oct. 9, 2007, according to Kleintop.
"While the pattern seems to line up fairly well with prior bubbles, it would look different with a much larger rise and have more time to go until it reaches the 10-year time frame if I shifted the start date to the end of the bear market in March 2009, when volatility last peaked," he says.
There is also evidence that low volatility doesn't yet have the "overly optimistic outlook" that is consistent with typical bubbles. Kleintop points to data from the Investment Company Institute that shows individual investors have only become net buyers of stocks in the past 9 months or so.
