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The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYXdata website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let's examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt and the market, using the S&P 500 as the surrogate for the latter.
The first chart shows the two series in real terms — adjusted for inflation to today's dollar using the Consumer Price Index as the deflator. I picked 1995 as an arbitrary start date. We were well into the Boomer Bull Market that began in 1982 and approaching the start of the Tech Bubble that shaped investor sentiment during the second half of the decade. The astonishing surge in leverage in late 1999 peaked in March 2000, the same month that the S&P 500 hit its all-time daily high, although the highest monthly close for that year was five months later in August. A similar surge began in 2006, peaking in July 2007, three months before the market peak.
The latest data puts margin debt as at an all-time high, not only in nominal terms but also in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars.
Unfortunately, the NYSE margin debt data is a few weeks old when it is published. Real margin debt at the end of January, the latest available data, had accelerated over the previous five months. If the acceleration prior to the two previous peaks offers a clue, margin debt could see some further growth.
Lance Roberts, General Partner & CEO of Streettalk Advisors, analyzes margin debt in the larger context that includes free cash accounts and credit balances in margin accounts. Essentially, he calculates the Credit Balance as the sum of Free Credit Cash Accounts and Credit Balances in Margin Accounts minus Margin Debt. The chart below illustrates the mathematics of Credit Balance with an overlay of the S&P 500. Note that the chart below is based on nominal data, not adjusted for inflation.
There are too few peak/trough episodes in in this overlay series to take the latest credit-balance trough as a definitive warning for U.S. equities. But we'll want to keep an eye on this metric in the months ahead.
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