Tagged with finance …

Apr 13 2012
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Matt Taibbi on Obama’s JOBS Act

Matt Taibbi has a strong opinion on Obama’s JOBS Act:

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

This is where I become less convinced. Are there really investors who pay attention to PowerPoint presentations and don’t do independent research before investing? 

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give “pre-prospectus” presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they’ll still be held liable for what’s in those. But it’ll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the “pre-presentation.”

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond “accredited investors,” giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as “crowdfunding.”

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

When I first read this, I asked myself: how does a law exempting a Silicon Valley startup from independent accounting actually encourage investment? If American companies have to have their internal processes independently verified before and after they go public, doesn’t that give investors all around the world a big reason to put their money here, instead of investing in, say, Mobbed-Up Siberian Aluminum LLC, or Bangalore Sweatshop Inc.?  

In other words, how does letting www.investonawhim.com go to market (and stay on the market for five years!) without publishing real numbers actually help the industry attract more financing in general, when the whole point of all of these controls is to make investment a less risky experience for the investor?

Get ready for the ostensible answer, because you won’t believe it. Here’s how CNN explained the reasoning behind that exemption:

Having 500 investors or raising $5 million previously forced a company to register with the SEC — a costly endeavor. Filling out stacks of legal forms and undergoing independent accounting audits can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The law loosens requirements for most companies by raising several thresholds.

We needed Barack Obama and the congress to compromise the entire U.S. stock market because it’s too expensive for a publicly-listed company with billion-dollar ambitions to hire an accountant?

There are multiple provisions of the bill, but it seems Taibbi is focusing on a sub-set of them. Still worth reading, however.

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Apr 02 2012
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The Global Financial Crisis in One Infinite Run-On Sentence

This one long run-on sentence describes the global financial crisis:

In the beginning man created the housing bubble when dishonest banks loaned money to unqualified home owners whose jointly illegal activities were ignored by a sleeping financial press and an incompetent regulatory army who both failed to awaken the FBI and SEC and other financial-crime prosecutors from pursuing criminal charges including those against Wall Street bankers who knowingly sold bad assets with grossly erroneous ratings to highly leveraged investors (including themselves) who had all gorged to the hilt on the FED’s cheap money leveraging their losses and destroying their entire equity accounts which bankrupted our major financial institutions  who were saved by bailouts but not before triggering a global financial crisis during which all lenders on all continents lost all faith in each other because they all knew about their own garbage mortgage holdings bundled into black-box securities whose staggering losses panicked banks again due to the known unknown of massive pools of unregulated derivatives which pay off in the event of a financial default and whose opacity re-double-spooked investors thereby multiplying a crowded stampede into high-quality high-liquidity assets and setting the pattern thereby for what we can expect to be an endless loop of panic lasting a decade or two as terror is continually re-discovered by global markets now concentrated on European banks who made overleveraged housing investments many in housing bubbles much more crazy-Ponzi than that of America’s 120-year-power-ball bubble and further exacerbated by bankers depending upon the ultra safety of sovereign-debt requiring that old magical no-money-down equity investment for their loans to European governments of which many or all are now strangulating themselves after having accumulated 60-plus years of socialist labor laws and entitlement obligations but now those asphyxiating restrictions and promises are revealed as unworkable and un-payable when new borrowing must end and is unaffordable but still the Europeans while they are pathetic and bankrupt they have not achieved the scale of otherworldliness which is The Great & Terrible Japanese Zombie…

You can finish reading the rest of this masterpiece over here. Why is it a masterpiece? Because once you reach the end, you are requested to continue at the beginning… So it’s an infinite run-on sentence describing the financial crisis!

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(hat tip: @counterparties)

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Mar 08 2012
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links of the day

A School for Quants

This is an interesting piece in The Financial Times about a “school for quants” (at the University College London). There is a general profile of the quant business, and then the articles profiles a few students working at the center and what they’re doing with their skills (not all of it is finance related):

The Financial Computing Centre at UCL, a collaboration with the London School of Economics, the London Business School and 20 leading financial institutions, claims to be the only institute of its kind in Europe. Each year since its establishment in late 2008, between 600 and 800 students have applied for its 12 fully funded PhD places, which each cost the taxpayer £30,000 per year. Dozens more applicants come from the financial industry, where employers are willing to subsidise up to five years of research at the tantalising intersection of computers, data and money.

As of this winter, the centre had about 60 PhD students, of whom 80 per cent were men. Virtually all hailed from such forbiddingly numerate subjects as electrical engineering, computational statistics, pure mathematics and artificial intelligence. These realms of knowledge contain concepts such as data mining, non-linear dynamics and chaos theory that make many of us nervous just to see written down. Philip Treleaven, the centre’s director, is delighted by this. “Bright buggers,” he calls his students. “They want to do great things.”

In one sense, the centre is the logical culmination of a relationship between the financial industry and the natural sciences that has been deepening for the past 40 years. The first postgraduate scientists began to crop up on trading floors in the early 1970s, when rising interest rates transformed the previously staid calculations of bond trading into a field of complex mathematics. 

An example of how Ilya Zheludev, one of the students profiled, is applying his skills:

Ilya Zheludev, one of the students from the meeting, showed me his study of 500,000 internal Enron emails, which were released following the collapse of the energy company in 2001. Zheludev’s sentiment analysis showed a spike in emotion among employees – both positive and negative, a massive, contradictory shiver – in April 1999, a few months before the company’s stock began to take off on its exponential (and fraudulent) trajectory.

Picking up on such bubbles of emotion as they emerge (around a company, for instance, or a government) even in such murky waters as Twitter, or Facebook, or the website of the Financial Times, has an obvious allure to individual investors trying to stay ahead of the market. At least one London-based hedge fund, Derwent Capital, now trades purely on social data, mined in this way.

Read more here.

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(Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky)

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Mar 06 2012
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Watson Gets a Job on Wall Street

After winning Jeopardy! against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last year, IBM’s Watson is on to bigger and better things. Bloomberg reports that Watson is now set to work on Wall Street:

IBM expects to generate billions in new revenue by 2015 by putting Watson to work. The technology giant has already sold Watson to health-care clients, helping WellPoint Inc. (WLP)and Seton Health Family analyze data to improve care. IBM executives say Watson’s skills – understanding and processing natural language, consulting vast volumes of unstructured information, and accurately answering questions with humanlike cognition — are also well suited for the finance industry.

Financial services is the “next big one for us,” said Manoj Saxena, the man responsible for finding Watson work. IBM is confident that with a little training, the quiz-show star that can read and understand 200 million pages in three seconds can make money for IBM by helping financial firms identify risks, rewards and customer wants mere human experts may overlook.

Banks spent about $400 billion on information technology last year, said Michael Versace, head of risk research at International Data Corp.’s Financial Insights, which has done research for IBM.

I am not sure if this is entirely good news…

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Feb 29 2012
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Bonus Drops and Wall Street

This Bloomberg piece describes some of the “crushing setbacks” of those working on Wall Street experiencing a reduction in bonus pay. It’s kind of ridiculous.

The man who spends $17,000 a year on two dogs:

Richard Scheiner, 58, a real-estate investor and hedge-fund manager, said most people on Wall Street don’t save.

“When their means are cut, they’re stuck,” said Scheiner, whose New York-based hedge fund, Lane Gate Partners LLC, was down about 15 percent last year. “Not so much an issue for me and my wife because we’ve always saved.”

Scheiner said he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.

Or how about a twentysomething guy who spent thousands on exotic vacations?

Hans Kullberg, 27, a trader at Wyckoff, New Jersey-based hedge fund Falcon Management Corp. who said he earns about $150,000 a year, is adjusting his sights, too.

After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, he spent a $10,000 signing bonus from Citigroup Inc. (C) on a six-week trip to South America. He worked on an emerging-markets team at the bank that traded and marketed synthetic collateralized debt obligations.

His tastes for travel got “a little bit more lavish,” he said. Kullberg, a triathlete, went to a bachelor party in Las Vegas in January after renting a four-bedroom ski cabin at Bear Mountain in California as a Christmas gift to his parents. He went to Ibiza for another bachelor party in August, spending $3,000 on a three-day trip, including a 15-minute ride from the airport that cost $100. In May he spent 10 days in India.

Is the suffering relative and real, as one professor in the article attests?

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Feb 24 2012
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Apple and the Law of Large Numbers

This is a good but flawed New York Times piece which reflects on Apple’s staggering growth. This week, Apple stock hit a record high of $526 per share. The bulk of the piece focuses on the so-called Law of Large Numbers in assessing Apple’s growth:

Apple is so big, it’s running up against the law of large numbers.

Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger.

If Apple’s share price grew even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 trillion by 2022. That is bigger than the 2011 gross domestic product of France or Brazil.

Unfortunately, the writer of the piece (and its editors) don’t fully grasp the meaning of “Law of Large Numbers.” That law states that if you perform an experiment enough times, the average of results will approximate the expected value of the random variable. Here’s the rub: you can use this law to predict the behavior of experiments where you can deduce (or solve for) the expected value. For instance, if you toss a fair coin enough times, the Law of Large Numbers implies that the coin will land on heads (approximately) equal number of times as tails. Similarly, if you toss a fair six-sided die enough times, and look at the face value, the result should approach the expected value of 3.5 (the average of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6).  But you can’t use the Law of Large Numbers for experiments where you can’t deduce the expected value. Who’s to say that Apple’s earnings or share price should follow a certain reversion to the mean? What if we’re witnessing a novel company that is going to break all kinds of records? I think this is the case here.

The New York Times piece then attempts to justify the Law of Large Numbers by citing examples such as the fall of Cisco systems from a record $557 billion market capitalization to close to $100 billion today. Again, the major assumption there is that stocks tend to behave in a similar fashion, and that history repeats itself.

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Disclosure: I am long AAPL.

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Feb 20 2012
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An Honest Letter from a Hedge Fund

Well, this is something you don’t see every day. One hedge fund decided to tell the bitter* truth in its annual letter to investors:

Dear investor,

In line with the rest of our industry we are making some changes to the language we use in our marketing and communications. We are writing this letter so we can explain these changes properly. Most importantly, Zilch Capital used to refer to itself as a “hedge fund” but 2008 made it embarrassingly clear we didn’t know how to hedge. At all. So like many others, we have embraced the title of “alternative asset manager”. It’s clunky but ambiguous enough to shield us from criticism next time around.

We know we used to promise “absolute returns” (ie, that you would make money regardless of market conditions) but this pledge has proved impossible to honour. Instead we’re going to give you “risk-adjusted” returns or, failing that, “relative” returns. In years like 2011, when we delivered much less than the S&P 500, you may find that we don’t talk about returns at all.

It is also time to move on from the concept of delivering “alpha”, the skill you’ve paid us such fat fees for. Upon reflection, we have decided that we’re actually much better at giving you “smart beta”. This term is already being touted at industry conferences and we hope shortly to be able to explain what it means. Like our peers we have also started talking a lot about how we are “multi-strategy” and “capital-structure agnostic”, and boasting about the benefits of our “unconstrained” investment approach. This is better than saying we don’t really understand what’s going on.

Some parts of the lexicon will not see style drift. We are still trying to keep alive “two and twenty”, the industry’s shorthand for 2% management fees and 20% performance fees. It is, we’re sure you’ll agree, important to keep up some traditions. Thank you for your continued partnership.

Zilch Capital LLC

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(*satire; via The Economist)

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Feb 17 2012
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links of the day, longreads

Equity and the Banking System

Writing in London Review of Books, Andrew Haldane provides a brief history of banking (with emphasis on the U.K. banks) and considers the too-big-to-fail conundrum:

Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. Debtor discipline will therefore be weakest among those institutions where society would wish it to be strongest. This encourages them to grow larger still: the leverage cycle isn’t merely repeated, but amplified. The doom loop grows larger. The biggest banks effectively benefit from a disguised, and growing, state subsidy. By my estimate, for UK banks this subsidy amounts to tens of billions of pounds per year and has often stretched to hundreds of billions. Few UK government spending departments have budgets this big. For the global banks, the subsidy can reach a trillion dollars – about eight times the annual global development budget.

We have arrived at a situation in which the ownership and control of banks is typically vested in agents representing small slivers of the balance sheet, but operating with socially sub-optimal risk-taking incentives. It is clear who the losers have been in the present crisis. But who are the beneficiaries? Short-term investors for one. More than anyone else, they benefit from a bumpy ride. If their timing is right, short-term investors can win on both the upswings (by buying) and the downswings (by short-selling) in financial prices. Bank shareholding has become increasingly short‑term over recent years. Average holding periods for US and UK banks’ shares fell from around three years in 1998 to around three months by 2008.

Bank managers have benefited too. In joint-stock banking, ownership and control are distinct. That means managers may not always do what their owners wish. They may seek to feather their own nests by making decisions that boost short-term profits and thereby justify an increase in their own pay. Such decisions may also increase banks’ vulnerability to shocks. In an attempt to avoid this problem, shareholders have sought to align managerial incentives with their own. One way of doing that, increasingly popular over the past decade, has been to remunerate managers not in cash but in equity or using equity‑based metrics. This can generate hugely powerful pecuniary incentives for managers to act in the interests of shareholders. At the peak of the boom, the wealth of the average US bank CEO increased by $24 for every $1000 created for shareholders. They earned $1 million for every 1 per cent rise in the value of their bank. But such equity-based contracts also set up some peculiar risk incentives. In the 19th century, managers monitored shareholders who monitored managers; in the 21st, managers egged on shareholders who egged on managers. The results have been entirely predictable. Before the crisis, the top five equity stakes were held by the CEOs of the following US banks: Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Countrywide. We know how these disaster movies ended.

The evolution of banking as I have described it has satisfied the immediate demands of shareholders and managers, but has short-changed everyone else. There is a compelling case for policy intervention. The best proposals for reform are those which aim to reshape risk-taking incentives on a durable basis. Perhaps the most obvious way to tackle shareholder-led incentive problems is to increase banks’ equity capital base. This directly reduces their leverage and therefore the scale of the risks they can take. And it increases banks’ capacity to absorb losses, reducing the need for taxpayer intervention. Over the past few years, this case has been pushed by regulatory reformers. Under the so‑called Basel III agreements struck in 2010, banks’ minimum equity capital ratios will rise fivefold over the next decade, from 2 per cent to close to 10 per cent of assets for the largest global banks. That is a significant shift. Will it be enough?

 

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Feb 15 2012
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The Golden Age for the Individual Investor

Tadas Viskanta, founder and editor of financial blog Abnormal Returns, writes that there has never been a better time to be an individual investor. Citing the advent of low-fee ETFs, blossoming of options markets, and most importantly the rise of technology and social tools, Tadas explains his argument:

  1. Easier:  Investors today can with a brokerage account and a computer is now only a few mouse clicks away from a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs that in terms of expenses rivals what institutions paid a decade ago.  For all intents and purposes the expense ratio on the big ETFs is closer to 0.0% that 1.0%.  Many brokers now allow online trading of individual bonds and overseas securities.
  2. Cheaper:  Brokerage commissions continue to get driven towards $0 over time.  In fact, many brokers today provide commission-free trading of a range of ETFs.  Options strategies that would have been cost-prohibitive a few years ago are now viable strategies today.  Do you remember when you used to have to pay extra for real-time quotes?  Today real-time quotes are a commodity.
  3. Richer:  The range of asset classes, sectors and strategies available via ETFs is truly dizzying.  It is even for interested parties hard to keep up.  Will most of these more exotic strategies fail?  Probably.  But sometimes a strategy, like low volatility investing, that is based in deep academic research, becomes available to investors.
  4. More social:  Blogging and microblogging (StockTwits & Twitter) has opened up the world of idea generation to the masses.  Anyone with a computer these days can put his or her ideas out there for the world to see.  The blogosphere and Twittersphere is a meritocracy, albeit imperfect, where the smartest and most generous contributors rise to the top.  The social model is pushing into things like earnings estimates with Estimize and institutional-grade services like SumZero.  Many bloggers these days make fun of the raft of ‘free’ webinars that go on these days.  But if you think about it the software and Internet speeds were not there to make mass online seminars possible not all that long ago.
  5. Smarter:  The raw material for investment analysis and trading is of course data.  Financial and price data is for the purposes of most individual investors is free these days.  Many firms are using data in interesting ways.  In the area of fundamental data some firms likeTrefis and YCharts are making fundamental analysis easier.  A firm like AlphaClone allows you to track the moves of (and invest) like the big hedge funds.  When it comes to portfolio level data firms like Wikinvest are aggregating account data making analysis easier for investors.
I’ve been following Tadas’ blog for about six months now, and his daily links are superb. Indeed, Abnormal Returns (and its Twitter feed) is a blog I peruse daily.
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Feb 09 2012
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On Art as Investment

Sarah Thornton writes about the “gravity-defying surge” of people buying art as investments:

The bulk of revenues comes from “ultra high net worth” individuals, many of whom operate at a level far above national economies. Even those who have taken blows in recent years remain super-rich. If they were worth £3bn in 2007, maybe they’re worth £2bn now. It’s not like they’re feeling the pinch.

The burden for the stinking rich is what to do with their money. There is currently no interest to be earned on cash, so they can’t leave it in the bank. The property market is nearly paralysed and, for these globetrotters, the drawback of real estate is that it is tied to specific currencies. A Mayfair flat sells in pounds, but the Francis Bacon painting that hangs on its wall could sell in Hong Kong dollars and take up residence on a yacht in the South Pacific. Like historic or extra-large diamonds, works by artists with international recognition are a hedge against volatile currency fluctuations.

Fifteen years ago financial advisers were not in the practice of recommending that rich people diversify their portfolios by buying art. Now it is the norm. While buying emergent art is high-risk, speculative investment, acquiring established masterpieces is perceived as the opposite – a back-up in hard times. If all goes wrong in the world, if the eurozone cracks, the Middle East erupts in war, and a tsunami hits Manhattan, that rare, portable 1964 Marilyn by Andy Warhol will still be worth something.

The auction houses are fostering a globalisation of taste with the help of galleries with international outposts such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth and now White Cube. While wealthy Belgians used to spend their money differently from wealthy Indonesians, this is decreasingly the case.

Felix Salmon counters:

This would be a lot more convincing if Thornton actually named or quoted any of the financial advisers who are reportedly “recommending” buying art as an investment. Because I’d love to talk to one. Art’s a dreadful investment: it’s got a negative carry, it’s highly unpredictable in terms of value, there’s no reason whatsoever why prices should go up rather than down, and, of course, you can put your elbow through it at any time.

In my experience, the only people who ever recommend that rich people diversify their portfolios by buying art are people who are going to make money, somehow, from the deal: people selling art investment or advisory services. Everybody else is generally pretty sensible, and sticks to saying the simple truth: Buy art because you love it, not because you think it’s going to rise in value.

More generally, the stinking rich are, as a rule, swamped with bright ideas from people guiding them on what to do with their money. They all have family offices, replete with highly-paid investment managers: The alternative here is not to simply leave the money in the bank, earning no interest. (More likely, they own the bank, take other people’s deposits, and lend them out at a healthy profit.)

And the idea of art as “a hedge against volatile currency fluctuations” is just bonkers; I’m not at all surprised that the line appears in a column for the Guardian, rather than in Thornton’s normal home of the Economist. If you have billions of dollars and you want to hedge against currency fluctuations, then — and I hope you’re sitting down for this — you hedge against currency fluctuations. Options and swaps and futures and forwards and the like are as commoditized as they come in the foreign-exchange markets, and much easier and cheaper to buy and sell than any major artwork.

Thornton’s wrong, too, about the intrinsic value of a 1964 Marilyn by Andy Warhol. If it was worth 10% of its current value a few years ago, it can be worth 10% of its current value in a few years’ time, too. Admittedly, 10% of its current value is still “something”. But that hardly makes the Warhol a remotely sensible investment. The whole point of art is that it has no intrinsic value: that its financial value is a magical number which is some highly variable function of how much various incredibly rich people love and covet the work.

I agree with Felix Salmon. Artwork is not a viable investment: it’s illiquid and highly speculative and subject to modern tastes and preferences. Buy artwork because you enjoy looking at it on your wall. Don’t buy it thinking that you can sell it later for a profit.

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