Things happen – Tracy Alloway

Old trading docs

October 31, 2019 Tracy Alloway Comments 0 Comment

Last week, MrMacroMarkets tweeted a link to an old documentary on FX trading called Billion Dollar Day. It was amazing, and sent me down a rabbit hole of old trading videos.

Bulls and Bears, 1998 – Follows a group of futures traders in the late 1990s including John “Rambo” Moulton, a sarong-clad American working out of Queensland.

Trader, 1987– Paul Tudor-Jones in the 1980s is peak Wall Street in the 1980s.

Billion Dollar Day, 1985– Follows currency traders in the financial centres of London, New York and Hong Kong. This one is brimming with charming anachronisms

Let’s Deal Direct, 1984– Not a documentary per se but more of an educational advert for Bear Stearns’ mortgage-trading desk, of all things. Features some, umm, questionable acting and dialogue: “Could you use the bonds?” … “Yes sir, I CAN use the bonds” etc.

Black Wednesday, 1997– The BBC looks back at 1992’s Black Wednesday. It’s not quite as swash-buckling as some of the other videos on this list, but it does have some good trading colour from the day the Bank of England intervened in the currency market.

Goodbye Bond King, we hardly knew ye

February 4, 2019 Tracy Alloway Comments 0 Comment

Bill Gross, the erstwhile ‘Bond King,’ has announced his retirement. Over the course of four decades, Gross made his name actively trading bonds and started doing that before those bonds were really even considered things that were actively traded. He co-founded Pimco, then moved to Janus in late 2014 in an abrupt and somewhat drama-filled chapter of market history.

While buckets of ink have been spilt on Gross’s career and legacy, I want to point out two things. The first is that, as the title suggests, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the Bond King’s strategy. While investing in bonds might seem like a straightforward activity, it’s no secret that Pimco augmented its performance with a host of derivatives and ‘overlays.’

See for instance, Zoltan Pozsar’s work on the topic in early 2015, which I wrote up in a column for the Financial Times around the same time:

Reach for returns takes funds into the shadows
… The extent to which low interest rates have driven mutual funds and other asset managers to become entwined with shadow banking is laid bare in a new research paper by Zoltan Pozsar, former senior adviser at the US Treasury.
This shadow banking system has long been described as a network of non-bank financial intermediaries, but it is perhaps better characterised as a reference to a particular set of financial activities.
Classic examples of such activities include financial institutions borrowing money by pawning their assets through ‘repo’ agreements or securities lending transactions, as well as using derivatives.
Traditional notions of shadow banking usually centre on the idea of repo being used to fund the balance sheets of broker-dealers and banks. When entities like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns became locked out of the repo market in 2008 they suddenly found themselves starved of financing, triggering an avalanche of stress across the financial system.
Regulators have spent the years since the financial crisis trying to clamp down on shadow banking as they attempt to improve the overall safety of the financial system. Since such activities are rarely associated with traditional mutual funds that invest in bonds and other assets on behalf of large investors such as pension funds and insurers, such funds have rarely been mentioned in conjunction with shadow banking.
Mr Pozsar’s research suggests that is a mistake. For example, a cursory look at the balance sheet of Pimco’s flagship Total Return Fund shows a bevy of derivatives including futures, forwards and swaps. Moreover, its repo borrowings at the end of the first quarter of 2014 stood at $1.12bn. The fund’s subsequent annual report shows repo borrowings for the period averaged $5.73bn — more than five times the amount reported at quarter-end.
Such window dressing is usually associated with big investment banks that cut back on their leverage ahead of quarter ends as they seek to flatter their funding profiles and impress their investors.
Its presence on Pimco’s balance sheet is symptomatic of a long-term trend that has seen mutual funds evolve from staid, largely “long-only” managers into very different beasts. In addition to accumulating billions of dollars’ worth of fixed income securities in recent years, the funds have reached for an alternative financial toolkit of derivatives, securities lending and other forms of leverage, to help boost returns.

Gross was also famously vocal when it came to espousing a short-volatility strategy in mid-2014. Doing so wasn’t necessarily wrong, as Gross noted it was “part and parcel” of an overall investment strategy that rested on sluggish U.S. growth and low interest rates, but it nevertheless raised eyebrows among his peers and competitors who viewed the new crop of buy-side volatility-sellers as tourists in a somewhat dangerous market.

The second point is that the sheer size of Gross’s creation — Pimco — has at times had massive effects on the wider market. “Big West Coast player” means just one thing for many in fixed income, and Pimco was said by plenty of observers to have frequently thrown around its gorilla-esque weight to get favourable pricing and allocation on new bond deals. Conversely, however, the sheer size of the Total Return Fund (which from memory peaked at almost $300 billion), was also said by market participants to pose challenges for its managers, the idea being the fund had grown so large it effectively struggled to beat its benchmarks.

That size could also have more deleterious effects. Few people seem to remember now, for instance, that when Gross left Pimco, it coincided with a noticeable sell-off in inflation-linked bonds and junk-rated paper. Or that the flash crash in U.S. Treasuries in October 2014 was rumoured to have been sparked by a sudden liquidation of interest rate positions favoured by Gross. There are still so many interesting open-ended questions posited by Bill Gross’s adventures in Bond Land, and from that perspective I’m somewhat sorry to see him go.

Anyway, for those interested in mulling these questions more, here’s some previous work — much of it done with the FT’s fantastic Mike Mackenzie:

Gross exit from Pimco tests bond market – September, 2014
Pimco upheaval rattles bond market – September, 2014
Wall St sheds light on Bill Gross reign after Pimco departure – October, 2014
Bonds: Anatomy of a market meltdown – November 2014
Caught on the wrong side of the ‘vol’ trade – December, 2014
Reach for returns takes funds into the shadows – February, 2015

Did someone say something about synthetics?

August 28, 2017 Tracy Alloway Comments 1 comment

Two words excite me like no others.

They are synthetic securitisation (or, for the truly old-school, they are three words: regulatory capital trades). These deals usually involve repackaging loans on a bank’s balance sheet, then slicing them up into different tranches, and selling the exposure to a non-bank entity like an insurer, hedge fund, or asset manager through the use of credit derivatives.

In many respects, they hark back to the early days of securitisation, when JPMorgan first put together its BISTRO trades, otherwise known as the first synthetic CDOs. Banks may be genuinely offloading risk here, and the deals were called reg-cap trades precisely because they offered capital relief that’s so far been genuinely sanctioned by regulators. On the other hand, they seem to speak to some of the worst of the current environment: a pervasive search-for-yield that may see investors put their money in silly things at silly prices (for this reason, you will sometimes hear reg-cap specialists – usually hedge funds – gripe about the non-expertise of new entrants and the need to price the deals perfectly), as well as nagging concern that in fortifying the banking system post the financial crisis, we’ve simply offloaded a bunch of balance sheet risks onto other entities in a classic case of regulatory arbitrage.

In any case, I bring it up because in less than a week we’ve seen two stories published on the market, now said to be booming, first in the Financial Times and then in the Wall Street Journal. Both detail the rise of the market, with issuance described as having jumped by anywhere from 5.6 percent in the first quarter to at least 33 percent so far this year.

Those looking for a graphical representation of the recent rise of synthetic CDOs, could do worse than this chart from Deutsche Bank. It shows European deals only, but the direction of the trajectory is pretty obvious. The WSJ story also references some interesting figures from consultancy Coalition, pointing out that structured credit revenues at the top 12 investment banks more than doubled year-on-year to $1.5 billion the first quarter of 2017, exceeding the growth rate in more conventional trading businesses in the same period.

Growth in the business is not exactly a surprise, though.

More than five years ago I wrote in the FT about some of the bigger banks working hard to get the business going as a way of securing some new fees at a time when many of their other revenue streams were sluggish. In retrospect, that story’s now looking pretty prescient.

Big banks seek regulatory capital trades

Big banks are aiming to help smaller lenders cut the amount of regulatory capital they need to hold against loans in an attempt to make money from deals similar to those first created in the early days of securitisation more than a decade ago.

The big banks want to create so-called regulatory capital trades for smaller lenders as they expect demand for these kind of securitisation structures will rise ahead of regulations designed to provide more stability in the financial system.

Such trades, also known as synthetic securitisations, involve repackaging loans on a bank’s balance sheet, then slicing them up into different tranches.

The bank typically then buys protection on the riskiest or mid-level tranche from an outside investor such as a hedge fund, insurance company or private equity firm.

Doing so allows a bank to reduce the amount of regulatory capital it has to hold against the loans – a tempting prospect as banking groups are forced to hold more capital ahead of new regulation such as the forthcoming Basel III rules.

Some of the biggest global and European banks, including Barclays and Standard Chartered, are known to have recently built and used the structures to reduce the amount of capital they need to hold against corporate or trade finance loans.

But some large banks are now hoping to sell their structuring expertise and help distribute the resulting trades to buyers, investors in the trades say.

“The holy grail for some of the investment banks is to try to get some of the second and third tier banks involved, to get structuring fees,” said one investor. The trades hark back to the early days of securitisation in the late 1990s, which helped fuel the financial crisis.

“It’s almost as if you’re seeing the start of the securitisation market coming back in a very modest way,” said Walter Gontarek, chief executive of Channel Advisors, which operates Channel Capital Plc, a vehicle with $10bn in portfolio credit transactions with banks and has started a new fund dedicated to these structures.

Investors such as Channel Advisors say the yields on the deals are attractive compared with other debt securities on offer, and they are able to gain exposure to a specific portion of a bank’s balance sheet rather than invest in the entire thing. The insurers, hedge funds or private equity firms are not bound by the same, relatively onerous capital regulations as the banks. That makes it easier for them to write protection on the underlying loans in a classic case of regulatory arbitrage.”

…MORE…

Some more early coverage below, for those interested.

Synthetic tranches anyone? – FT Alphaville
Anti-Abacus, anti-BISTRO and anti-balance sheet synthetic securitisation – FT Alphaville
Big banks seek regulatory capital trades – FT, April 2012
Banks share risk with investors – FT, September 2011
Balance sheet optimisation – BOOM! – FT Alphaville, 2010

Midnight Madness, revisited

January 10, 2017 Tracy Alloway Comments 0 Comment

Elisha Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, is replacing Marty Chavez as Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs.

It’s an interesting bit of Goldman kremlinology given his history at J Aron. It’s also an excuse to revisit some of my old work on Midnight Madness – the epic all-night Wall Street scavenger hunt/first-person puzzle/charity fundraiser that Wiesel is credited with inventing and which I wrote about for the Financial Times.

So here’s a fun throwback to 2013, when Midnight Madness was first expanded to include non-Goldman firms:

Wall St lines up for ‘Midnight Madness’

Some time next week Dan Keegan, Citigroup’s head of US equities, will be asked to sing a ballad over the speakers on the bank’s New York trading floors.

The unusual request is part of Citi’s efforts to raise at least $250,000 to enter five teams into a fundraising competition known as “Midnight Madness”.

Traditionally the purview of Goldman Sachs bankers, this year the all-night competition has expanded to include other financial groups. Goldman will now compete in the lavish scavenger hunt and puzzle-solving game against Citi, Credit Suisse, the hedge fund BlueMountain and Secor Asset Management.

The competition takes place on October 5 and has already kicked off a flurry of activity across a competitive Wall Street. The prospect of earning bragging rights in a battle of wits against rivals while raising money for charity is set to lure about 250 traders, quantitative analysts and bankers to this year’s event.

“This type of mental Olympics, combined with adventure, is something that I think might have a broad appeal on Wall Street, and when it’s all for a good cause it’s an attractive combination,” said Michael Liberman, managing partner at BlueMountain.

Goldman has asked participants to stump up at least $50,000 per team. Proceeds go to Good Shepherd Services, a New York City-based charity which offers education and support services for poor or at-risk children and teenagers.

A pamphlet used to pitch Midnight Madness to potential participants describes the games as “a series of cleverly camouflaged, incredibly ingenious and devilishly difficult puzzles – the answers to which indicate the location of the next puzzle . . .”

Last year’s competition saw teams play with lasers in an abandoned building, use circuit boards to reveal locations on a map, and work to change the colour of the lights at the top of a New York skyscraper.

The geekiness of the Manhattan-based event has earned it a reputation for attracting the cadre of “quant” maths experts who have increasingly come to dominate Wall Street institutions and their trading strategies.

This year’s event will include 25 teams of 10 people each, organisers said. Goldman is fielding 16 teams, down from the 20 it sent last year.

From next week, Citi will hold a series of silent auctions and challenge senior staff to “dares” in order to raise the $250,000 in funds it needs to compete. One executive plans to pay $5,000 to challenge Mr Keegan to croon “Danny Boy”.

Citi staff can also pay $20 to wear jeans (usually a no-no on the trading floor), proffer cash to throw pies at their superiors, or enter a hot dog-eating competition. The bank chose team members in a random draw after receiving more than 100 volunteers.

At Credit Suisse, convincing staff to participate in the elaborate competition was relatively more challenging. “It had this reputation of an event that’s very complicated and extreme,” said Dan Miller, head of strategic risk management for the investment bank.

The bank is entering one team into the event and raising cash the old-fashioned way – through solicitation. Division heads were asked to pay $5,000 each to nominate one of their brightest underlings to the Swiss bank’s team.

The Credit Suisse team has also been given a $3,000 budget to buy supplies such as cellphone chargers and copious amounts of Red Bull, the energy drink.

Elisha Wiesel, a partner at Goldman and a member of Good Shepherd’s board, said it is not unknown for contestants to fall asleep on the sidewalk while competing in Midnight Madness, which was started in the 1990s but went on hiatus in 2007 until it was revived last year by Mr Wiesel and other organisers.

“This is really like a marathon. It’s a sporting event,” Mr Wiesel said. “You have to survive a very, very challenging evening, morning and potentially afternoon.”

Last year’s “Madness” raised $1.4m, after about $270,000 of expenses. This year’s budget is “going up a little bit” because the event is “aiming to be more ambitious and make more money for the charity,” Mr Wiesel said.

The hefty budget for last year’s event drew some scepticism, including from Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, who wrote that “at some point you do have to wonder whether they really needed to spend that much money on the game design”.

When asked whether the competition could become an annual Wall Street event, Mr Wiesel said that it would depend on organisers’ ability to commit their time.

But he added: “This is just too cool and too fun not to do.”

Those looking to get on the new CIO’s good side can go here, to an old FT Alphaville post, to try out some Midnight Madness puzzles and practice lateral thinking for themselves.