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The End of Hedge Funds? |
rffrydr
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 Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008 4:30 am Post subject: The End of Hedge Funds? |
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Martin Wolf runs some numbers looking for what's real. --Maybe better not to look too deeply into the well....
| Quote: | Hardly a week goes by without the implosion of a hedge fund. Last week it was Carlyle Capital, with an astonishing $31 of debt for each dollar of equity. But we should not be surprised. These collapses are inherent in the hedge-fund model. It is even conceivable that this model will join securitised subprime mortgages on the scrap heap.
Getting away with producing adulterated milk is hard; getting away with an investment strategy that adds no value is not. That was the point made by John Kay, in a superb column last week (this page, March 11). With the “right” fee structure mediocre investment managers may become rich as they ensure that their investors cease to remain so.
Two distinguished academics, Dean Foster at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Peyton Young of Oxford university and the Brookings Institution, explain the point beautifully*. They start by asking us to consider a rare event – that the stock market will fall by 20 per cent over the next 12 months, for example. They assume, too, that the options market prices this risk correctly, say at one in 10. An option costs $0.1 and pays out $1.
Now imagine that we set up a hedge fund with $100m from investors on the normal terms of 2 per cent management fees and 20 per cent of the return above a benchmark. We put our $100m in Treasury bills yielding 4 per cent. We also sell 100m covered options on the event, which nets us $10m. We put this $10m, too, in Treasury bills, which allows us to sell another 10m options. This nets another $1m. Then we go on holiday.
There is a 90 per cent chance that this bet will pay off in the first year. The fund then grosses $11m on the sale of the options, plus 4 per cent interest on the $110m in Treasury bills, for a handsome 15.4 per cent return. Our investors are delighted. Assume our benchmark was 4 per cent. We then earn $2m in management fees, plus 20 per cent of $11.4m, which amounts to over $4m gross. Whatever subsequently happens, we need never give this money back.
The chances are nearly 60 per cent that the bad event will not occur over five years. Since the fund is compounding at a rate of 11.4 per cent a year after fees, we will make well over $20m even if no new money is attracted into this apparently stellar enterprise. In the long run, however, the bad event is highly likely to occur. Since we have made huge profits, our investors have paid us handsomely for the near certainty of losing them money.
The immediate response may be that so naked a scam is inconceivable. Well, imagine a fund that leverages investors’ money by borrowing massively in short-term money markets in order to purchase higher-yielding paper. Assume, again, that the premium gives a correct estimate of the risk. With sufficient leverage, this fund, too, is likely to make profits for years. But it is also very likely to be wiped out, at some point. Does this strategy sound familiar? It certainly should by now.
We can identify two huge problems to be solved. First, many investment strategies have the characteristics of a “Taleb distribution”, after Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness. At its simplest, a Taleb distribution has a high probability of a modest gain and a low probability of huge losses in any period.
Second, the systems of reward fail to align the interests of managers with those of investors. As a result, the former have an incentive to exploit such distributions for their own benefit.
Professors Foster and Young argue that it is extremely hard to resolve these difficulties. It is particularly difficult to know whether a manager is skilful rather than lucky. In their telling example, the chances are more than 10 per cent that the fund will run for 20 years without being exposed. In other words, even after 20 years the outside investor cannot be confident that the results were not being generated by luck or a scam.
It is also tricky to align the interests of managers with those of investors. Obvious possibilities include rewarding managers on the basis of final returns, forcing them to hold a sizeable equity stake or levying penalties for underperformance.
None of these solutions solves the problem of distinguishing luck from skill. The first also encourages managers to take sizeable risks when they are close to the return at which payouts begin. Managers can evade the effects of the second alternative by taking positions in derivatives, which may be hard to police. Finally, even under the apparently attractive final alternative it appears that any clawback contract harsh enough to keep unskilled managers away will also discourage skilled ones.
It is obviously best not to pay the manager, as a manager, at all, but rather to invest alongside him, as at Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s investment company. But we still have the challenge of knowing whether the manager is any good. We know this today of Mr Buffett. Fifty years ago, that would have been very hard to know.
What we have then is a huge “lemons” problem: in this business it is really hard to distinguish talented managers from untalented ones. For this reason, the business is bound to attract the unscrupulous and unskilled, just as such people are attracted to dealing in used cars (which was the original example of a market in lemons). The lemons theorem states that such markets are likely to disappear. The same may happen to today’s hedge-fund industry.
Now consider the financial sector as a whole: it is, again, hard either to distinguish skill from luck or to align the interests of management, staff, shareholders and the public. It is in the interests of insiders to game the system by exploiting the returns from higher probability events. This means that businesses will suddenly blow up when the low probability disaster occurs, as happened spectacularly at Northern Rock and Bear Stearns.
Moreover, if these unfavourable events – stock market crashes, mortgage failures, liquidity freezes – come in stampeding herds (because so many managers copy one another), they will say: “Nobody could have expected this, but, now that it has happened to all of us the government must come to the rescue.”
The more one believes this is how an unregulated financial system operates, the more worried one has to become. Rescue from this crisis may be on the way, but what about next time and the time after next?
*Hedge Fund Wizards, and The Hedge Fund Game, January 2008 |
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The End of Hedge Funds? Replies |
HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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If a fund is willing to reduce their fee structure from "2 and 20" or higher, it is not worth investing in. How could they hire the talent? Better go with a HF replication strategy or a mutual fund that adopts an absolute return strategy.
An industry with $1.5 trillion in AUM cannot all charge "2 and 20." And given the law of the financial markets, only a slight minority should be able to charge that over a market cycle. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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2 and 20 out the window with CalPers and other big pension money coming in after route and bringing reductions with them. At least one still getting 50! And, my kinda of revamp, one only collecting after principle's first doubling.
http://tinyurl.com/m3o6z4
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 11:15 am Post subject: |
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Felix Chee, special advisor to China's CIC (head of its hedge fund and prop trading efforts, and former head of the University of Toronto's endowment hedge fund unit) asserts that the CIC will aim to make investments in hedge funds:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ai5PLqcRXWyc |
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HenryTo
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 10:12 am Post subject: |
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Hedge funds still underweight equities:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azCMr9GHOI0U&refer=home
| Quote: | | About 30 percent of stock hedge funds were sitting on cash at the end of April, compared with 45 percent as of Dec. 31, according to a report published this month by New York-based Morgan Stanley. Net exposure -- the difference between the amount funds wager on rising and falling stocks -- rose to 32 percent in April from 27 percent the previous month. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue May 05, 2009 9:34 pm Post subject: |
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Forced restructuring sole option for many hedge funds
Hedge fund redemption headlines may have fallen by the wayside in recent weeks as the market turns its attention to the implementation of new government initiatives. But, according to Houlihan Smith & Co, redemptions remain a significant overhang and will hinder any sort of recovery in the industry for some time to come.
“Redemptions are still a big issue,” confirms Karl D’Cuhna, senior md at the firm. “31 March was ugly. For some funds, I’d say 30 June will be a bottom, but for others the money is going to continue pouring out...”
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HenryTo
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rffrydr
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diesel
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 4:31 pm Post subject: |
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Thats putting it gently! It is becoming increasingly obvious that from top to bottom, the entire hedge fund, investment banking and financial advising business is riddled with fraud, filled with crooks and a total disaster.
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