Video – Hugh Hendry Interviewed By Steven Drobny At LSE

Hugh Hendry interviewed by Steven Drobny at the London School of Economics, 2010

Major take-aways from the interview:

• How he got his start: began at an eclectic asset management firm in Edinburgh, which rotated its young associates; began at age 21 in the Japanese stock market the year after it peaked in 1990; the next year rotated to UK large companies; the next year US equities; moved to London in 1998/9 and no one would employ him because he was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none
• 1929/1930 marked a “revulsion with debt” period, which changed very slowly, ultimately eradicated from society in 1973/74; then the opposite cycle occurred, with society massively leveraging; during this upswing, it has paid to be optimistic and the financial economy has become the economy; we appear to be on the verge of a generational shift again, where farmers will reign over hedge fund managers
• Macro opportunities are created by the interactions of economics and the abilities of politicians to try to fudge them
• “The best trade is the one where you don’t fear the consequences of being wrong”
• China
  • China’s economic development strategy is not unique, it’s just large-scale; economy is being directed toward sovereign-profit, not corporate-profit
  • Pursuing sovereign power over economic power results in building your economy on foundations of sand; Japan tried the same thing and it appeared to work until it was revealed to have not worked; Confucius saying, “Wise-man not invest in over-capacity”
  • China is like the sun, you can’t get too close or you’ll melt (can’t short equities in China, HK, or commodity futures or equity derivatives in the West); used the “satellite”, bought CDS on a basket of Japanese industries, as Japan is very reliant on trade with China– steel, for example
• If we’re going to have hyperinflation and the dollar loses its value, you need something profoundly negative to shake the course of economic growth globally, because only if that happens will the central bankers respond with this dramatic decision of hyperinflation
• Slowdown in China, economic restructuring in Europe would be the economic equivalent of a meteor hitting Earth
• Market call: the Yen and the USD could appreciate greatly, because there is so much borrowing in those currencies, if asset values take a hit, you have a shortage of dollars or Yen to pay against the collateral values of that lending; combined with calls on the Nikkei at 40,000, 50,000 (want to be very long equities at that point)
• Good hedge fund managers give great weight to the consequence of their actions and are fearful of them, so they won’t be hurt too much if they’re wrong
• Being plasticine: we spend so much time trying to see the future, we’re deluding ourselves because we have no chance to see the future; better to be careful and flexible, avoid dramatic injury and maintain optionality to respond to whatever the future holds
• Be a centipede, not a mountain climber; have a hundred legs so you can let one or two go if you have to do so
• Strategically, it’s not rational to try to outsmart bright people; bright people are encouraged to be logical in their constructions; my business franchise is trying to get opportunities from the arcane world of paradox, disciplined curiosity, the toolset of the maverick

Doing The Hugh Hendry

Below is some commentary from Hugh Hendry I found in an FT.com editorial I since can not access as I don’t have a login. But I thought it was interesting when I first read it awhile back and I still think it’s interesting now. I meant to post it earlier. Rectifying my mistake:

For the moment, let us forget the chances of a hard landing in China. Forget the drama of Europe’s circus of politically inspired economic incompetency. Forget that the good news of the US economy’s succession of positive economic surprises is really bad news as fixed income managers have sold copious amounts of too cheap volatility and because it has made equity investors turn bullish, sending stock market volatility back to 2007 levels. This is dangerous. Improved US data may represent a classic short-term cyclical upturn amid a profound global deleveraging cycle.

Such moves have been commonplace for the past three years and have yet to prove a harbinger of any structural upswing. I worry that the pathological course of the last several years will see volatility rise sharply once again. Even so, there exists, in terms of my parochial world of hedge fund investing, a bigger issue.

I fear that my no longer small community has been compromised. Last year was generally very tough for long/short strategies and I commiserate with all concerned. But last year world class funds lost more than 15 per cent in just two months. Today they are celebrated again for making double digit returns in the last quarter even though they still languish below high water marks and their reputation for risk management, at least to those clients who have poured over their copious due diligence statements, has been sorely compromised.

You can probably live with that if you are a pension scheme or a large, sophisticated fund-of-fund because you have a global macro sub-sector that can benefit from short-term shifts in volatility. But the unfortunate thing is that this group exercised its stop losses somewhere between the great stock market rallies of 2009 and 2010. That is to say, they honoured the pact they had with clients. They adhered to the terms of their risk budget: they lost money and they reduced their positions. I fear that owing to this nasty experience the financial world is in danger of harvesting a monoculture of fund returns that could prove less than robust should the global economy suffer another deflationary reversal.

To my mind the situation has parallels with the plight of the banana. Today the world eats predominately just one type of banana, the Cavendish, but it is being wiped out by a blight known as Tropical Race 4, which encourages the plant to kill itself. Scientists refer to it as programmed death cell destruction. In stressful situations bananas fortify themselves by dropping leaves, killing off weaker cells so that stronger ones may live to fight anew. They operate a stop-loss system.

But modern mass production of single type bananas has replaced jungle diversity with commercial monocultural fields that provide more hosts to harbour the blight. The economy keeps producing stressful volatility events. Good managers keep shedding risk and monetising losses and are duly fired, leaving us with a monoculture of brazen managers who will never stop loss because they are convinced central banks will print more money.

Diversification has proven the most robust survival mechanism against failures of judgment by any one society, hedge fund manager or style. But what if we are now a single global hedge fund community afraid to take stop losses and convinced of an inflationary outcome to be all short US Treasuries and long real assets?

This is pertinent as I have always been fascinated by that second rout in US Treasuries in 1984, long after the inflation of the 1970s was met head on by Paul Volcker’s monetary vice and a deep recession. How could 10-year Treasury yields have soared back to 14 per cent and how could so many investment veterans have been convinced that a second even more virulent inflation wave was to hit the global economy?

Psychologists tell us the explanation is embedded deep in the mind. They refer to the “availability heuristic”. Goaded by the proximity to the last dramatic event, investors overreacted to the news that the US economy was pulling out of recession in 1984. They saw high inflation where there was none.

With this in mind, I would contend that it may take several more years before the threat of debt and deflation can be successfully exorcised from investors’ minds, even if the global economy were not set on such a perilous course. Such is the potency and memory of 2008’s crash that anything remotely challenging to the economic consensus could be met by a sudden and severe reappraisal to the downside.

Should such an event send 30-year Treasury yields back to their 2008 low of 2.5 per cent, we believe enlightened investors might better be served by thinking the opposite. Only then might it prove rewarding to short the government bond market and embrace what may turn out to be a much promised once in a lifetime buying opportunity for risk assets.

 

More Interviews With David Baran Of Symphony Fund

For reference purposes, here are three more recent interviews with David Baran of the Tokyo-based Symphony Fund, which is involved in shareholder activism and management buyouts of undervalued (especially net-net and net cash bargain) Japanese equities:

• Investment In Japan interview with David Baran (includes a list of websites that may be helpful for finding info on companies in Japan)
• FINAlternatives Q&A with David Baran
• Hedge Funds Review interview with David Baran

Investing in a ZIRP environment:

I’ve been trading Japanese equities since 1990, so I’ve seen it all twice [laughs]…

I think [it’s influenced] our views on how the world is going to look as a result of, not just the current sovereign debt crisis in Europe, but the entire cycle of over-leveraging in the world and the shifting to an almost perpetual low interest rate, low growth scenario.  We’ve lived it in Japan already—we know what it’s like, we know what it does to asset prices, we know you’re going to get attractive bull market runs but you’re still going to be in a long-term bear market. Being able to look back at our own experiences of having dealt with that in Japan gives us a completely different perspective, I think, from other managers who would be relatively new to the market—by relatively new, I mean, they’ve got 10 years experience—and they’ve only seen bull markets with some deep corrections that are reversed by policy.

I don’t think there’s a policy solution for what we have now. You’ve got to get rid of all the debt. The global debt overhang is huge, it’s historic. The amount of unfunded liability in the U.S. can cripple the country. And you have that situation amplified in Europe with fewer policy tools to rectify the problem.

The M&A trend in Japan:

MBOs [management buyouts] first came to prominence in Japan in 2006 with the Skylark MBO. This caused corporate Japan to first sit up and take notice that this was a possible road that management could take. At the same time, there began a series of changes to Japanese corporate governance that aimed to increased corporate disclosure and increase transparency. The most recent of these came out in 2010 and included requirements for director/statutory auditor independence, disclosure of executive compensation, and explanations for cross shareholdings. All of these are hard to swallow for many Japanese companies. In addition, with all these new rules, including IFRS accounting rules that will soon be introduced, the costs of being a listed company was getting high. Too high particularly for smaller cap companies for whom these costs were now of a material size relative to earnings. It is no coincidence that we have seen a steady increase in MBO activity in Japan, with 2011 on track to be the highest in five years.

They’re not activists, they’re advisors:

We are not activists. The whole activist approach doesn’t work in Japan. It probably works better in the U.S. because the shareholder base is more diversified and economically motivated. Shareholders in Japan may not necessarily use the same formula. The activists who tried a hostile approach here before, and this is where the cultural biases come in, they never had the ability to force management to do anything because they never had control. So they were requesting management to do something but doing it in such a way that management would just turn their back on them and say, ‘Well, we don’t even really need to talk to you,’ and the other shareholders really didn’t care, and would side with management.

We take a much more cooperative approach with management…We’ll act more as their counsel, their consigliere, guys they can talk to about things as opposed to the squeaky wheel.  We’re not interested in being the squeaky wheel.

Interview With David Baran Of Tokyo-Based LBO Fund Symphony

This is worth watching if you’re a value-investor interested in the Japanese equity market.

Description of the video from YouTube:

David Baran, Co-Founder of Symphony Financial Partners, has over 20 years of experience investing in Asia. He has lived in Asia and Japan for nearly 3 decades and is fluent in Japanese.

Baran’s SFP Value Realization Fund was launched in September 2003 when Nikkei was about 9,500. The index has fallen since then, yet his fund is still up 56% after fees.

The secret to achieving returns in Japan is that you’ll have to do more than just long-only investing. The unloved, under-covered nature of the Japanese market creates opportunities that ordinary fund managers are not capable of pursuing because it’s too hard to extract the value. Many Japanese firms, particularly the smaller ones, can boast about 40+% operating profits and 30+% EBITDA margins. They can have net cash positions and trade at 50+% net cash to market cap. Hundreds actually trade at over 100% net cash to market — which means the market is valuing these viable businesses at zero.

“Investors in the U.S. equity markets would be falling over themselves to invest in a company like these – net cash, strong business moat and growth prospects,” says Baran. But being “cheap” isn’t enough — you need catalysts to unlock the value.

M&A activity flourishing in Japan

Corporate activity is such a catalyst. MBOs have an average premium of 50% (!) and sometimes reach triple digit numbers. Many of the large Japanese conglomerates started to buy back listed subsidiaries. Baran also advises on the Sinfonietta Asia Macro hedge fund, one of the best performing Asian hedge funds in 2001.

Hear David speak about:

* The 8 reasons why management buyouts are gaining popularity

* Why you need catalysts to unlock value in Japan equities

* What investors are missing by considering Japan as an “asset class”

* How to avoid “value traps”

* Considering tail risk: Why Baran’s Sinfonietta hedge fund is “geared towards a disorderly market”

Review – More Money Than God

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds And The Making Of A New Elite

by Sebastian Mallaby, published 2010

A veritable pantheon of masters of the universe

Mallaby’s book is not just an attempt at explaining and defending the beginning, rise and modern state of the hedge fund industry (the US-focused part of it, anyway), but is also a compendium of all of the hedge fund world’s “Greatest Hits.” If you’re looking for information on what hedge funds are, where they come from, what they attempt to do, why they’re called what they are and how they should be regulated (SURPRISE! Mallaby initially revels in the success “unregulated” funds have had and feints as if he’s going to suggest they not be regulated but, it being a CFR book and he being a captured sycophant, he does an about-face right at the last second and ends up suggesting, well, umm, maybe SOME of the hedge funds SHOULD be regulated, after all) this is a decent place to start.

And if you want to gag and gog and salivate and hard-to-fathom paydays and multiple standard deviations away from norm profits, there are many here.

But that wasn’t my real interest in reading the book. I read it because I wanted to get some summary profiles of some of the most well known hedgies of our time — the Soroses and Tudor Joneses and such — and understand what their basic strategies were, where their capital came from, how it grew and ultimately, how they ended up. Not, “What’s a hedge fund?” but “What is this hedge fund?” As a result, the rest of this review will be a collection of profile notes on all the BSDs covered by the book.

Alfred Winslow Jones – “Big Daddy”

• started out as a political leftist in Europe, may have been involved in U.S. intelligence operations
• 1949, launches first hedge fund with $60,000 from four friends and $40,000 from his own savings
• By 1968, cumulative returns were 5,000%, rivaling Warren Buffett
• Jones, like predecessors, was levered and his strategy was obsessed with balancing volatilities, alpha (stock-picking returns) and beta (passive market exposure)
• Jones pioneered the 20% performance fee, an idea he derived from Phoenician merchants who kept one fifth of the profits of successful voyages; no mgmt fee
• Jones attempted market timing as a strategy, losing money in 1953, 1956 and 1957 on bad market calls; similarly, he never turned a profit following charts even though his fund’s strategy was premised on chartism
• Jones true break through was harvesting ideas through a network of stock brokers and other researchers, paying for successful ideas and thereby incentivizing those who had an edge to bring him their best investments
• Jones had information asymetry in an era when the investment course at Harvard was called “Darkness at Noon” (lights were off and everyone slept through the class) and investors waited for filings to arrive in the mail rather than walk down the street to the exchange and get them when they were fresh

Michael Steinhardt – “The Block Trader”

• Background: between end of 1968 and September 30, 1970, the 28 largest hedge funds lost 2/3 of their capital; January 1970, approx. 150 hedge funds, down from 200-500 one year earlier; crash of 1973-74 wiped out most of the remainders
• Steinhardt, a former broker, launches his fund in 1967, gained 12% and 28% net of fees in 1973, 74
• One of Steinhardt’s traders, Cilluffo, who possessed a superstitious eating habit (refused to change what he ate for lunch when the firm was making money), came up with the idea of tracking monetary data, giving them an informational edge in an era where most of those in the trade had grown up with inflation never being higher than 2% which meant they ignored monetary statistics
• One of Steinhardt’s other edges was providing liquidity to distressed institutional sellers; until the 1960s, stock market was dominated by individual investors but the 1960s saw the rise of institutional money managers; Steinhardt could make a quick decision on a large trade to assist an institution in a pinch, and then turn around and resell their position at a premium
• Steinhardt’s block trading benefited from “network effects” as the more liquidity he provided, the more he came to be trusted as a reliable liquidity provider, creating a barrier to entry for his strategy
• Steinhardt also received material non-public information: “I was being told things that other accounts were not being told.”
• In December 1993, Steinhardt made $100M in one day, “I can’t believe I’m making this much money and I’m sitting on the beach” to which his lieutenants replied “Michael, this is how things are meant to be” (delusional)
• As the Fed lowered rates in the early 90s, Steinhardt became a “shadowbank”, borrowing short and lending long like a bank
• Steinhardt’s fund charged 1% mgmt fee and 20% performance fee
• Anecdote: in the bloodbath of Japan and Canada currency markets in the early 90s, the Canadian CB’s traders called Steinhardt to check on his trading (why do private traders have communications with public institutions like CBs?)

Paul Samuelson & Commodities Corporation – “Fiendish Hypocrite Jackass” (my label)

• Paul Samuelson is one of history’s great hypocrites, in 1974 he wrote, “Most portfolio decision makers should go out of business– take up plumbing, teach Greek, or help produce the annual GNP by serving corporate executives. Even if this advice to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed.”
• Meanwhile, in 1970 he had become the founding backer of Commodities Corporation and also investing in Warren Buffett; he funded his investment in part with money from his Nobel Prize awarded in the same year
• Samuelson paid $125,000 for his stake; total start-up capital was $2.5M
• Management of fund resembled AW Jones– each trader was treated as an independent profit center and was allocated capital based on previous performance
• Part of their strategy was built on investor psychology: “People form opinions at their own pace and in their own way”; complete rejection of EMH, of which Samuelson was publicly an adherent
• Capital eventually swelled to $30M through a strategy of primarily trend-surfing on different commodity prices; in 1980 profits were $42M so that even net of $13M in trader bonuses the firm outearned 58 of the Fortune 500
• Trader Bruce Kovner on informational asymetries from chart reading: “If a market is behaving normally, ticking up and down within a narrow band, a sudden breakout in the absence of any discernible reason is an opportunity to jump: it means that some insider somewhere knows information that the market has yet to understand, and if you follow that insider you will get in there before the information becomes public”

George Soros – “The Alchemist”

• Soros had an investment theory called “reflexivity”: that a trend could feedback into itself and magnify until it became unavoidable, usually ending in a crash of some sort
• Soros launched his fund in 1973, his motto was “Invest first, investigate later”
• Soros quotes: “I stood back and looked at myself with awe: I saw a perfectly honed machine”; “I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes”
• Soros was superstitious, he often suffered from back pains and would “defer to these physical signs and sell out his positions”
• Soros believed in generalism: know a little about a lot of things so you could spot places where big waves were coming
• Soros had a “a web of political contacts in Washington, Tokyo and Europe”
• Soros hired the technical trader Stan Druckenmiller, who sometimes read charts and “sensed a panic rising in his gut”
• As Soros’s fund increased in size he found it harder and harder to jump in and out of positions without moving the markets against himself
• Soros rejected EMH, which had not coincidentally developed in the 1950s and 1960s in “the most stable enclaves within the most stable country in the most stable era in memory”
• Soros was deeply connected to CB policy makers– he had a one on one with Bundesbank president Schlesinger in 1992 following a speech he gave in Basel which informed Quantum fund’s Deutschemark trade
• “Soros was known as the only private citizen to have his own foreign policy”; Soros once off-handedly offered Druckenmiller a conversation with Kissinger who, he claimed, “does know things”
• Soros hired Arminio Fraga, former deputy governor of Brazil’s central bank, to run one of his funds; Fraga milked connections to other CB officials around the world to find trade ideas, including the number two official at the IMF, Stanley Fischer, and a high-ranking official at the central bank of Hong Kong
• Soros was a regular attendee at meetings of the World Bank and IMF
• Soros met Indonesian finance minister Mar’ie Muhammed at the New York Plaza hotel during the Indonesian financial crisis
• Soros traveled to South Korea in 1998 as the guest of president-elect Kim Dae-jung
• In June 1997, Soros received a “secret request” for emergency funding from the Russian government, which resulted in him lending the Russian government several hundred million dollars
• Soros also had the ear of David Lipton, the top international man at the US Treasury, and Larry Summers, number 2 at the Treasury, and Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary, as well as Mitch McConnell, a Republican Senator

Julian Robertson – “Top Cat”

• Managed a portfolio of money managers, “Tigers”
• Used fundamental and value analysis
• Once made a mental note to never buy the stock of an executive’s company after watching him nudge a ball into a better position on the golf green
• Robertson was obsessed with relative performance to Soros’s Quantum Fund
• Called charts “hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo bullshit”
• Robertson didn’t like hedging, “Why, that just means that if I’m right I’m going to make less money”
• High turnover amongst analysts, many fired within a year of hiring
• Tiger started with $8.5M in 1980
• A 1998 “powwow” for Tiger advisers saw Margaret Thatcher and US Senator Bob Dole in attendance
• Tiger assets peaked in August 1998 at $21B and dropped to $9.5B a year later, $5B of which was due to redemptions (Robertson refused to invest in the tech bubble)

Paul Tudor Jones – “Rock-And-Roll Cowboy”

• Jones started out as a commodity trader on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange; started Tudor Investment Corporation in 1983, in part with an investment of $35,000 from Commodities Corporation
• “He approached trading as a game of psychology and high-speed bluff”
• Superstition: “These tennis shoes, the future of this country hangs on them. They’ve been good for a point rally in bonds and about a thirty-dollar rally in stocks every time I put them on.”
• Jones was a notorious chart reader and built up his theory of the 1987 crash by lining up recent market charts with the 1929 chart until the lines approximately fit
• Jones was interested in Kondratiev wave theory and Elliott wave theory
• “When you take an initial position, you have no idea if you are right”but rather you “write a script for the market” and then if the market plays out according to your script you know you’re on the right track
• Jones made $80-100M for Tudor Investment Corp on Black Monday; “The Big Three” (Soros, Steinhardt and Robinson) all lost heavily in the crash
• Jones, like Steinhardt, focused on “institutional distortions” where the person on the other side of the trade was a forced seller due to institutional constraints
• Jones once became the catalyst for his own “script” with an oil trade where he pushed other traders around until they panicked and played out just as he had predicted
• PTJ never claimed to understand the fundamental value of anything he traded
• PTJ hired Sushil Wadhwani in 1995, a professor of economics and statistics at the LSE and a monetary policy committee member at the Bank of England
• PTJ’s emerging market funds lost 2/3rd of their value in the aftermath of the Lehman collapse

Stanley Druckenmiller – “The Linebacker” (my title)

• Druckenmiller joined Soros in 1988; while Soros enjoyed philosophy, Druckenmiller enjoyed the Steelers
• He began as an equity analyst at Pittsburgh National Bank but due to his rapid rise through the ranks he was “prevented from mastering the tools most stock experts take for granted” (in other words, he managed to get promoted despite himself, oddly)
• Survived crash of 1987 and made money in the days afterward
• Under Druckenmiller, Quantum AUM leaped from $1.8B to $5B to $8.3B by the end of 1993
• Druckenmiller stayed in touch with company executives
• Druckenmiller relied on Robert Johnson, a currency expert at Bankers Trust, whose wife was an official at the New York Fed, for currency trade ideas; Johnson himself had once worked on the Senate banking committee and he was connected to the staff director of House Financial Services Committee member Henry Gonzalez
• Druckenmiller was also friends with David Smick, a financial consultant with a relationship with Eddie George, the number 2 at the Bank of England during Soros and Druckenmiller’s famous shorting of the pound
• Druckenmiller first avoided the Dot Com Bubble, then jumped aboard at the last minute, investing in “all this radioactive shit that I don’t know how to spell”; he kept jumping in and out until the bubble popped and he was left with egg on his face, ironic because part of his motivation in joining in was to avoid losing face; Druckenmiller had been under a lot of stress and Mallaby speculates that “Druckenmiller had only been able to free himself by blowing up the fund”

David Swensen & Tom Steyer – “The Yale Men”

• Swensen is celebrated for generating $7.8B of the $14B Yale endowment fund
• Steyer and his Farallon fund were products of Robert Rubin’s arbitrage group at Goldman Sachs; coincidence that Rubin proteges rose to prominence during the time Rubin was in the Clinton administration playing the role of Treasury secretary?
• Between 1990 and 1997 there was not a single month in which Steyer’s fund lost money (miraculous)
• Farallon somehow got access to a government contact in Indonesia who advised Bank Central Asia would be reprivatized soon and Farallon might be able to bid for it
• Some rumors claimed Farallon was a front for the US government, or a Trojan horse for Liem Sioe Liong (a disgraced Indonesian business man); it is curious that Yale is connected to the CIA, Farrallon is connected to Yale

Jim Simons & Renaissance Capital – “The Codebreakers”

• Between the end of 1989 and 2006, the flagship Medallion fund returned 39% per annum on average (the fund was named in honor of the medals Simons and James Ax had won for their work in geometry and number theory– named in honor of an honor, in other words)
• Jim Simons had worked at the Pentagon’s secretive Institute for Defense Analyses (another possible US intelligence operative turned hedgie?)
• Simons strategy was a computer-managed trend following system which had to be continually reconfigured due to “Commodities Corporation wannabes” crowding the trades by trending the trends
• Simons looked to hire people who “would approach the markets as a mathematical puzzle, unconnected to the flesh and blood and bricks and mortar of a real economy” (this is distinctly different than the Graham/Buffett approach, and one wonders how this activity is actually economically valuable in a free market)
• “The signals that we have been trading without interruption for fifteen years make no sense. Otherwise someone else would have found them.”
• Renaissance treated employee NDAs like a wing of the CIA– anyone who joined could never work elsewhere in the financial industry afterward, and for this reason they specifically avoided hiring from Wall St in the first place; they were required to invest a fifth of their pay in the Medallion Fund and was locked up as bail payment for four years after they departed (money hostage)

David Shaw & D.E. Shaw

• Began trading in 1988, the same year as the Medallion fund
• Shaw was originally hired by MoStan in 1986 into their Analytical Proprietary Trading unit which aimed at beating Steinhardt at his block-trading game using predictive computer technology
• In 1994, Shaw’s 135-member firm accounted for 5% of the daily turnover on the NYSE
• Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, was originally a DE Shaw employee
• The strategy was heavily reliant on pair-trade “arbitrage”, looking for securities in similar industries which were temporarily misaligned in price/multiple
• Circle of competence: in 1995 the firm launched the ISP Juno Online, as well as FarSight, an online bank and brokerage venture

Ken Griffin & Citadel

• Created in 1990, grew to $15B AUM and 1400 employees by 2008
• Griffin’s goal was to develop an investment bank model that could compete with traditional, regulated ibanks, but which was actually a hedge fund
• Flagship funds were down 55% at the end of 2008, losing $9B (the equivalent of two LTCMs)

John Paulson

• Paulson graduated from HBS in 1980 and went to work for Bear Stearns; he launched his hedge fund in 1994 with initial capital of $2M which grew to $600M by 2003; by 2005 he was managing $4B
• Paulson’s main strategy was capital-structure arbitrage
• He looked for “capitalism’s weak spot”, the thing that would blow up the loudest and fastest if the economy slowed even a little; cyclical industries, too much debt, debt sliced into senior and junior tranches, risk concentrated
• Paulson spent $2M on research related to the US mortgage industry, assembling a proprietary database of mortgage figures and statistics
• Many of Paulson’s investors doubted him and threatened to pull capital in 2006
• Paulson enlarged his bets against the mortgage market through derivative swaps on the ABX (a new mortgage index) and eventually acquired over $7.2B worth of swaps; a 1% decline in the ABX earned Paulson a $250M profit, in a single morning he once netted $1.25B
• By 2007, he was up 700% net of fees, $15B in profits and made himself $3-4B

Conclusion

I’m actually even more bored with this book having finished typing out my notes than I was when I finished the book the first time I read it. The book actually has some great quotes in it, from the insane delusions of grandeur of government officials and central bank functionaries, to wild facts and figures about the statistical trends of the hedge fund and financial industries over the last 60 years. I am too exhausted to go back and type some of it out right here even though I kind of wish I had some of the info here even without an idea of what I’d use it for anytime soon.

My biggest takeaway from MMTG is that most of these masters of the universe have such huge paydays because they use leverage, not necessarily because they’re really good at what they do. Many of their strategies actually involve teasing out extremely small anomalies between asset prices which aren’t meaningful without leverage. And they’re almost uniformly without a meaningful and logically consistent understanding of what risk is– though many are skeptics of EMH, they seem to all see risk as volatility because volatility implies margin calls for levered traders.

There were so many displays of childish superstition. Many of these guys are chart readers. The government intelligence backgrounds of many was creepy. And it was amazing how many relied on informational asymmetries which are 100% illegal for the average investor. These people really travel in an elite, secretive world where everyone is scratching each other’s backs. How many one on one conversations have you had with central bank presidents? How many trips to foreign countries have you been on where you were the invited guest of the head dignitary of the country? Are you starting to put the picture together like I am?

Overall, it seems so arbitrary. The best word that comes to mind to describe these titans and their success is– “marginalism”. We have lived in an inflationary economy for the last 60+ years and these players all seem to excel in such an environment. But inflationism promotes marginalism; the widespread malinvestment of perpetual inflation confuses people looking to engage in real, productive economic activity, and paper shuffling necessarily becomes a high value business.

The author himself is incredibly ignorant of economic fundamentals and the role monetary intervention plays in the economy. All of the various crises these hedgies profited from seem to come out of nowhere according to his narrative. The incredible growth in volumes of money managed by the hedge fund industry over time goes without notice, as if it was just a simple, unexceptional fact of life. Shouldn’t that be interesting? WHY ARE THERE HUNDREDS OF FIRMS MANAGING TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EACH? Where did all this money come from?!

That makes the book pretty worthless as it’s key.

One thing that does strike me is that many of the most successful, most levered trades of Soros, Druckenmiller and others were related to currencies. These guys are all Keynesians but they probably don’t fully believe their own economic theories. However, they do understand them well enough to make huge plays against the dope money managers who DO put all their credence into what they learned at university. I should think an Austrian econ-informed large cap macro fund would have quite a time of it playing against not only the dopes, but the Soroses of the world– they’ll get their final comeuppance as this system of artificial fiat exchange finally unwinds over the next decade.

And, little surprise, the guy with the nearly perfect trading record for almost a decade (Farrallon) was involved in arbitrage trades.

Trend following is for slaves. It may have proven to be a profitable strategy (with gobs of leverage) for the contemporary crop of hedgies but I feel fairly confident in saying most of these guys will get hauled out behind the woodshed in due time if they keep it up, to the extent their strategies truly are reliant on mystic chart reading and nothing more.

Bon voyage!