In Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Demand for Gold and Dollars Soars

ISTANBUL—Deep in the stone warren of Istanbul’s 560-year-old Grand Bazaar, a cluster of traders selling gold and dollars pace the alleyway, murmuring into phones and smoking. The tension rises as demand grows. A shout comes from the crowd: “I’ve got it ready!”

Turks are pouring money into foreign currency, gold, cryptocurrency, jewellery and other assets that they see as a safer bet than the Turkish lira, which has lost more than 80% of its value in the past five years.

“There’s an atmosphere of panic,” said Mustafa Demiray, 39, a currency trader standing on the edge of the crowd and clutching two phones. “People think the price [for dollars] will go up, so there’s a higher demand right now.”

The collapse of the lira is the result of an era of economic mismanagement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, economists say. The Turkish leader in recent years has pressured the central bank into cutting interest rates despite the country’s high rate of inflation—the opposite of what central banks would usually do.

Erdogan has attempted to adjust course since winning a close election in May in which his opponents attacked him over Turks’ purchasing power, with many people cutting back on meat, fish and even vegetables.

The country’s newly appointed central-bank governor, Hafize Gaye Erkan, and Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek have raised interest rates, but too slowly to get inflation under control, analysts say.

The Turkish lira continued to slide after the central bank’s July meeting, in which officials decided to raise interest rates by a mere 2.5 percentage points, a move that slowed the pace of the rate increases and put the lira under further pressure. The decision disappointed some economists and investors who hoped Simsek and Erkan would be more aggressive about tackling inflation.

Erkan on July 27 raised the bank’s year-end inflation forecast to 58% from 22.3%, while predicting that price increases would slow next year. Analysts said the upward revision was an acknowledgment that the bank’s current stance was unlikely to tame inflation, which is running at 38%.

Erkan said the bank would lift rates further, and would adopt a holistic approach to tackling inflation, including using other policy instruments such as quantitative tightening.

Investors and analysts are concerned that Erkan and Simsek don’t have a genuine mandate from Erdogan to do what is needed to stabilize the Turkish economy. Erkan pushed back on those questions on July 27.

“The central bank of the Republic of Turkey is an independent institution,” she said. “We will continue the increases in interest rates alongside the quantitative tightening alongside the selective credit tightening because that’s what the current situation demands.”

Turkey’s economic turmoil has put pressure on the traders at the Bazaar, who have played a central role in the economy since the vast covered marketplace was built during the days of the Ottoman Empire, more than five centuries ago. The small and midsize shops in the Bazaar are part of a sprawling global network of businesses and banks dealing in gold and currency.

Mehmet Akif Turker, a 44-year-old gold trader, sat in his office at the Bazaar on a recent morning, his phone and two slabs of gold on the desk in front of him. The high demand for gold should be good for his business, he explained, but the turmoil in the Turkish economy isn’t.

Turks and other traders must contend with a complex web of rules imposed by the government in recent years to scare up foreign currency and keep the country from tipping into insolvency. Those include a rule that forces businesses like Turker’s to convert 40% of their foreign-currency earnings into lira, traders say.

“In general, in our line of work, crisis makes money,” Turker said. “But when the dollar fluctuates so much and the market is so unstable, it can bring us profit or it can bring us losses. We are exhausted.”

Despite the government’s efforts to bring gold and other assets out from “under the mattresses” of the country’s citizens and into the financial system, Turks continue to pour money into precious metals, traders say. Industry groups estimate that between $200 billion and $300 billion worth of gold is in Turkish citizens’ private possession.

“We are a country that loves gold as a financial instrument,” said Ercan Doner, 39, who owns a shop selling gold coins and jewellery. “In order to stop their money from melting away in case of inflation, people are trying to make use of their gold investments by continuously buying and selling.”

Volatility in the economy isn’t the only driver of gold sales, vendors say. The pandemic also increased business, said Metin Kocatepe, 54, a salesman from another jewellery shop.

“After corona, people’s mentality changed. They’re more relaxed in their shopping. They say ‘maybe tomorrow I’m gonna die, I’ll buy something nice.’”

Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.

For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.

The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.

Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.

“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.

Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.

Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.

Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.

“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.

Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.

“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”

Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.

Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”

The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.

The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.

These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.

Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.

Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.

Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.

And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.

“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”

In Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Demand for Gold and Dollars Soars

Turks are pouring money into foreign currency, jewellery and other assets as the lira weakens

Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.