JPMorgan Sees ‘Extreme Herding’ Blunting Commodity ETF Returns

(Bloomberg) — Retail investors herding into commodity ETFs is a tell-tale sign that their blistering outperformance could be poised to end, according to strategists at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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With a slew of raw materials smashing record highs over the past week, the day-trading crowd poured cash into exchange-traded funds tracking everything from oil and gold to silver at a rate with few precedents. The bank estimates that inflows are deviating big time from the daily average of the previous 12 months.

“Eight standard deviation herding happens less than 0.1% of the time in our data going back to 2016,” JPMorgan strategist Peng Cheng said by email. Following such a rush, “generally we see short term underperformance on these securities and of course heightened volatility,” he said.

Raw material prices have gone haywire in recent days as the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reverberates through markets. U.S. commodity ETFs last week lured $4.5 billion, an amount they would normally attract in a month, eclipsing both stock ETFs and bond ETFs in the process.

In a Wednesday note, Cheng and colleagues said the preferred ETFs among retail investors have included the United States Oil Fund (ticker USO), the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) and the iShares Silver Trust ETF (SLV). Each of those had lured around $100 million or more of retail inflows over the five days through Tuesday, Cheng said.

“Our previous research showed that these extreme herding events tend to precede short term underperformance,” the team wrote.

That chimes with academic thinking. When Robinhood users pile into a stock in large numbers, the average excess return on the day surges to 14% but this is followed by a reversal of nearly 5% over the subsequent month, one 2020 paper found.

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Read more: Herding by ‘Naive’ Robinhood Traders May Be Good Signal to Short

As of Thursday morning in New York, USO had surged about 38% this year, GLD was up around 9% and SLV had gained 11%. But all three had slumped a day earlier.

“Most investors are really bad at timing,” said Athanasios Psarofagis, an ETF analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “If history is any indication, retail tends to come into these ETF after much of the performance has already occurred.”