Morgan Stanley shares WallStreetBets-driven revolution strategies investors can use to gain profits - Intraday traders and the multitude of Reddit Wallstreetbets go by many names, but maybe it's time to wonder what other investors can learn from them.

Whether they're creating bubbles, contributing to fads, or outperforming financial giants at their own game, Morgan Stanley's quantitative trading strategy manager Boris Lerner says there are a number of patterns in their behavior that other investors can take advantage of.

Lerner has analyzed retail imbalances over a 5-year period, essentially identifying the stocks that smaller traders were buying and selling in larger quantities.

"We found that that is related to the subsequent performance of stocks and can be used as an alternative source of alpha in long and short stock portfolios. Stocks with a high purchase imbalance tend to outperform stocks with a high sales imbalance over the next month, " he explains.

Morgan Stanley shares WallStreetBets-driven revolution strategies

He adds that the difference becomes clearer after focusing on more liquid actions with more pronounced mismatches. Lerner focused on the largest 50% of shares listed on the Russell 3000 index, then reduced it to 33% with the highest retail interest and the highest 20% of buy and sell imbalances.

Lerner also notes that retail traders have been more interested in communications, technology and discretionary consumer service actions, especially with the companies they have interacted with. Historically, he says retail has used an approach that points to huge and highly liquid stocks with values of 10,000 million euros and more, and small businesses with values of one and a half million to 770,000 million euros.

They have recently begun to buy more shares in materials, industrial and energy companies. While the data supports the predictive power of buying and selling retail, Lerner argues that retail short sales are an especially strong indicator. "Most of the alpha appears to be on the short side: stocks in the bottom quintile (high sales mismatch) tend to have a lower return than the market by a higher margin," he adds.

Morgan Stanley shares WallStreetBets-driven revolution strategies

In general, retail investors are predisposed to buy rather than sell short and are taking bullish positions today, according to Lerner. They have tended to prefer high-momentum, high-growth stocks that receive a lot of attention, although they are also substantial buyers of those illiquid micro-capitalization stocks.

This could be expected. But Lerner says that they somehow deviate from those preferences. Based on order imbalances, it indicates that they are especially excited about buying the highest quality shares and selling the lowest quality ones.

Morgan Stanley shares WallStreetBets-driven revolution strategies

"The current order mismatch suggests that retail investors are net buyers of high-quality, defensive, low volatility, low momentum, low short interest and value stocks. "They are net sellers of small cap securities and junk stocks," he explains.

He also points out that there is much less participation between defensive, low-volatility and low-impulse stocks, but the imbalances in those sectors are strong, which means that investors who are buying in those sectors have a lot of conviction in the decisions they are making.

Morgan Stanley shares WallStreetBets-driven revolution strategies

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Global shipping crisis and labor shortages may worsen due to slow deployment of vaccines for seafarers, experts warn

The slow deployment of COVID-19 vaccines for shipping workers is proving problematic for the already damaged maritime industry, experts say.

Coronavirus outbreaks on ships can endanger marine works and cause further disruption to trade, as Bloomberg explains.

Despite efforts to vaccinate people working on the high seas in ports, most still rely heavily on their countries of origin to be immunized, and more than half of the 1.6 million maritime workers worldwide come from developing countries such as India, the Philippines or Indonesia; only 2.5% of these professionals are vaccinated, details the same media.

"Supply chains have already been suffering from a sharp spike in consumer demand, semiconductor shortages and shipping difficulties, such as the Suez Canal blockade and the closure of Chinese ports," Tom Fairbairn, a shipping expert, tells.

According to the WHO, more than 80% of world trade is moved by maritime transport. The economy is heavily dependent on the world & apos; s 2 million seafarers operating in the fleet of merchant ships, and both disease and economic hardship remain a serious problem for these workers in the midst of the pandemic.

A new report by maritime consultancy Thetius details current and future problems of shipping: "The year 2020 has demonstrated the collective ineffectiveness of the entire shipping industry, including charities, businesses, trade unions and even international bodies such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO), to act as a single voice for the needs of seafarers during a crisis."

"Governments around the world have repeatedly failed to act on the change of crew crisis, which is still in effect at the time of writing," he adds.

In May, a seafarer died and doctors fell ill in Indonesia because of the varianre Delta, after an infected ship docked in Central Java province on 25 April. At about the same time, the shipping industry suffered further chaos after an outbreak in one of China's busiest ports, in Guangdong Province, which caused an accumulation of shipments in 4 major ports.

These situations are worsening the current crisis in global shipping, as costs have risen and many products, such as chicken or semiconductors, have become scarce.

In an interview with Bloomberg , the president of the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), Esben Poulsson, warns that the crisis is worsening due to the Delta variant: "The demand for products is not stopping, crew changes are not happening fast enough and governments continue not to offer solutions," he laments.

The expected growth in the world merchant fleet in the next decade is unlikely to be met, as the supply of officer positions will remain scarce, according to the ICS.