My understanding of a hedge fund is simply an organization that is given the freedom to make any type of investment using any type of strategy they want[0]. They raise millions, and for a set period of time the people who gave them the millions cannot pull it out, allowing them to execute strategies that may not make any money for several years, which is different from a traditional investment organization.
So all the author is saying is that giving a "black box" a lot of money, and letting it opaquely invest however it wants, will be a winning investment strategy in the future, even though right now it isn't working out so well.
[0] Of course they have documents that explain the strategy, agree to certain things, etc. I'm simplifying it a bit.
> So all the author is saying is that giving a "black box" a lot of money, and letting it opaquely invest however it wants, will be a winning investment strategy in the future, even though right now it isn't working out so well.
That's the best description of a hedge fund that I've heard. Likewise, I don't see how that will ever be a winning investment strategy. You'd be better off with just an index ETF.
"Winning" is the wrong mode of thought. It's risk/reward. Index funds are low risk low reward, by design. Hedge funds are high risk high reward.
Put another way, Startups are just narrowly defined hedge funds. You can be adverse in investing in a risky startup and still be bullish about startups in general.
Except that the "high reward" part has been missing in the past several years. Hedge funds have been mostly under-performing (compared to the overall market).
> They raise millions, and for a set period of time the people who gave them the millions cannot pull it out, allowing them to execute strategies that may not make any money for several years, which is different from a traditional investment organization
That's not the most accurate. Many (most?) hedge funds don't lock funds for any significant amount of time; the most would be a few months, and even that not because they hold illiquid investments, but because they want to discourage investors that react too emotionally on market moves. I'm guessing your description is more appropriate for VCs and Private Equity.
Hedge Funds do, however, execute strategies not available to "traditional" instituational investors, but that is mostly because of regulatory constraints - e.g. index tracking funds can advertise to the public, hold pension investments etc., whereas hedge funds can't. Another difference is that hedge funds usually have a much broader investment mandate - e.g. a bond mutual fund has to invest the majority of its AUM into bonds, even if everyone believes bond prices will drop, whereas a hedge fund could simply sell everything and keep cash or buy stock or whatever its managers believe will make money. The flip side of this is that "traditional" investment institutions are measured against benchmarks (e.g. if a bond fund makes -20% in a year when a bond index made -21%, the bond fund "outperformed"), but hedge funds are measured absolutely (profit is good, loss is bad) and get paid peanuts if they don't make a profit.
> That's not the most accurate. Many (most?) hedge funds don't lock funds for any significant amount of time; the most would be a few months
This hasn't been my experience. In my experience at a couple firms, redemption schedules have always been tightly controlled to ensure predictable AUM and minimize forced rebalancing of strategies.
Hedge funds are really just teams of people investing money on behalf of others, without regulatory constraints that most mainstay financial firms have, due to the fact that you have to have a certain net-worth etc. to be able to participate.
There's no hard definition of it.
VC firms are essentially a kind of 'hedge fund' though we don't think of them that way.
Most hedge funds do have long 'lock up periods'.
Whether they are a 'good investment' is like asking is a specific home a 'good investment'. It depends on the home. They vary wildy in terms of quality etc...
It's silly to say "hedge funds aren't working out so well right now" because this has always been the case.
Additionally, there are a lot of nuances of hedge funds that are being missed in the comments. Hedge funds can do things on a small scale with hundreds of millions of dollars that would never scale to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and therefore have opportunities to make money that an individual investing into a publicly available fund wouldn't.
Take parking lots in China, for example. A hedge fund can say "hey these are really under priced compared to what they might be in 10 years" and run lots of data to show the most under-priced lots. They can spend $50 million dollars on these lots and make ridiculous returns at relatively little risk. However, this same strategy wouldn't work with millions of investors cumulatively investing trillions of dollars. There aren't enough parking lots to go around.
Also, hedge funds are not black boxes. They communicate to their investors what their strategies are and their feedback on how strategies are progressing. Most investors can even say "Hey I want you to use my funds mostly on X" even if your returns are based on the entire fund's portfolio.
I don't know why anyone is bullish on hedge funds just based on their numbers. Bottomline, there will always be successful hedge funds, but your chance of identifying the winners before hand is challenging to say the least. Add their costs and "heads I win, tails you lose" fee structure and I'm really not interested.
What hedge funds are really good at is creating a tax strategy for the rich. Let's say you have a business and you want to pay less tax. You talk to a hedge fund.
The hedge fund says, let's convert all your earnings that should be taxed at the short term gains rate and convert them to long-term capital gains!
The hedge fund takes two well-correlated stocks, let's say Coke and Pepsi. They make a hedge going long Coke and short Pepsi. The hedge doesn't make or lose money, but you engineer the hedge so that you hold your long Coke shares 366 days (long-term). You sell your Pepsi shares after 364 days (short-term).
You haven't made any money, but you've engineered short-term capital losses and long-term capital gains. Of course you've created your hedge such that your short-term losses offset your business' short-term gains. Now your profits are in the long-term Coke stock, and rather than paying a 50% marginal tax rate, you pay 20%.
This doesn't actually happen. Tax avoidance is all about related party transactions these days, and there are more efficient ways to convert ST cap gains into LT cap gains.
Whether or not you approve of hedge funds, they don't exist for the sole purpose of helping companies reduce their tax bill. Most companies of significant size can play tax games without the help of a (sometimes expensive) intermediary.
There's not much that needs to be elaborated. Hedge funds don't make any money if they're not generating alpha. the 2 and 20 structure is powerful motivator to search for outsized returns. Hedge funds are in a hard place right now, with a lot of capital being moved out of the industry due to poor performance.
Every hedge fund guy I know constantly stresses about the overall lack of alpha generation in the industry right now. To say thet the point of hedge funds is to avoid taxes is just ridiculous. A company doesn't need to invest in a hedge fund to engineer the type short-term losses and long-term gains. And there's no reason they would, the fees are simply too high for anyone to ever do that.
Don't hedge funds still take the very high 2% fee even if they don't make any profit? Doesn't the 2 and 20 structure just incentivize making risky investments (where you either win big and take the 20% or lose big and take the 2%). Hedge funds seem like a terrible investment these days given how ridiculous the fees are.
Why hasn't competition brought the fees down when hedge funds aren't consistently beating the market?
A 2% fee isn't very much considering the AUM of hedge funds. If you have a 250m fund, that's only a fixed 5m fee per year. Also, investors are very fickle with their money, you can't not be generating alpha for that long before clients pull all of their money.
Fees have gone down in the past couple years, Tudor slashed their fees from 3 and 30 (which is ridiculous) to 25 and 2.25 (still kinda high). Many other hedge funds have gone to 15 and 1.5.
The problem with hedge funds at the moment isn't that they are making bad security choices individually, but that taken together, a short list of securities becomes very crowded, which really hurts liquidity (though this crowding isn't calculated in their liquidity metrics, so they think they have liquidity even though they really don't)
2% being big or small has nothing to do with the size of AUM. In this age of NIRP, 2% is yuuuge especially compared to costs associated with passive funds. Personally, I can see the 2 and 20 model dying within the next few years. The plebes will no longer associate hedge fund managers with the shadowy pinnacle of intellect (Limitless anyone?)
I'm not in the finance industry, but articles like this one http://www.businessinsider.com/hedge-funds-returns-in-2015-2... where hedge funds returns aren't beating the market well having ridiculously high fees compared to something like an index fund seems strange. If the market is crowded, why isn't competition acting to reduce hedge fund fees to levels more in line with the amount hedge funds consistently beat the market?
I'm not sure the fees are going to go down so much as that a ton of hedge funds are going to go out of business. There are many funds generating real alpha and have made outsized returns year after year (Renaissances' medallion fund has made something like 40% per year average since inception). DE Shaw, 2 Sigma, Renaissance, Tudor, Bridgewater, AQR have all historically done pretty well.
On the other hand, there are a ton of hedge funds that have never generated alpha in their entire existence and lack even the most basic modicum of skill.
hedge funds with less limiting investment "thesis" tend to massively outperform bear markets. long s&p500 index funds (all the rage) has been a great strategy since the last real market downturn (7 years), it won't look so ironclad ingenius when stocks take their inevitable 2 year 30-50% dip.
* stays away from the pressure to be "with it" every quarter
* stays away from stuff that everyone is talking about
* stays away from short term thinking (like real time datasets)
* stays away from statistical artefacts and spurious relations (aka “huge amounts of data”)
* stays away from stuff where they don't understand the basic business models
* stays away from stuff that is built on promises
* stays away from mostly all hedging, other than paying the proverbial 50c for a dollar
* stays away from diversification "just because" (looks at each individual investment on its own merits)
* stays away from arbitrary limitations on asset types or sectors
* stays away from short selling (or situations where you can loose more than what you put in)
* stays away from giving or taking tips on individual investments
* even stays away from feeling they have to kick ass every quarter (if you just can't find anything good... do nothing)
* instead just focuses on not loosing big quantities of his/her own money
* tries to keep costs down (less data, less trading, no hedging, low fees, less dealing with currency exchange)
* doesn't worry about volatility or even enjoys it
* has a few large winners and then some smaller potential winners
That may exclude most if not all funds, hedged or otherwise.
Also: in my experience every 19 year old and his dog now tend to consider themselves "macro traders". It’s an indication of how extremely financialized the entire world has become since the 80s. That in itself bodes ill for the 2 and 20 crowd.
I suspect those filters produce the same quality as grabbing names from a hat, since they are a list of popular but vague aphorisms. Judging each and every investment on its own merits is the only way to succeed.
"Judging each and every investment on its own merits is the only way to succeed."
I completely disagree.
You have to judge the (long term) investment in full context of the market, i.e. what other people are thinking about it, regulatory climate, geopolitical issues, taxation, position in the value chain, status of customers/suppliers etc..
And for some strategies - none of it is relevant. If you can make trades 0.1 seconds faster than anyone else, the nature of the approach will be such that you don't care anything about the company other than where it's price is now - and where it will probably be 0.1 seconds from now.
> Judging each and every investment on its own merits is the only way to succeed.
True. And yet the world of investing (I'm not talking about market makers etc) is filled with funds whose composition is determined by everything except simply buying predictable cash flows for cheap, wherever you can find them.
Every one of those items could be a good thing, and the primary 'alpha producing quality' of a given find.
* stays away from stuff everyone else is talking about --> the big hits only come from things that everyone eventually 'talks about'. So you must be aware of this dynamic. You don't want to ignore the herd - you want to be just ahead of it. Ergo - you have to understand herd dynamics.
* stays away from hedging - 'hedging' is still used often, and it's an important part of risk mitigation and execution strategy. Anyone that ignores herding is ignoring an essential tool that they can use
* stays away from diversification - same as previous: financial diversification is another essential tool.
* arbitrary limitations - no investor makes 'arbitrary' decisions. They stay away from certain sectors for a reason: they don't understand it, it's risky, there are geopolitical issues they can't control etc.
* tries to keep costs down - uh ... keeping costs down is what every company should aspire to do. In fact - if a fund can get rid of 1/2 it's staff through automation, well, you could make more money depending on how the fees are structured
* doesn't worry about volatility - no - you definitely want them to worry about volatility as it's an essential financial characteristic of the market and means a lot. If your strategy is to invest in cheap blue-chips that pay nice dividends because other investors are not paying attention ... well, volatility is bad.
Here's the key: Investing is not really investing. It's mostly gambling - in the sense that it's a zero-sum game, played against other players. It's more like poker.
You don't win at poker just by playing smart cards. You win at poker by understanding other players predictable behaviour, ie understanding the market, as it is driven by other players.
Though markets do grow and there are some 'bonus surpluses' for everyone, most firms do not win off this - they can only win if someone else loses.
If your going to try and predict human behavior your better off using that when buying stock. AKA if you know the iPhone is going to win then buy Apple. Or if you bought Dell at IPO that's 500x returns over 12 years.
* “Stuff everyone is talking about”: I mean mostly staying away from IPOs, crap on business magazine covers, TINA narratives etc. Especially stay away from “tips”. And from stuff involving former politicians or government (yea I’m European). Actually I can go on for hours on all the stuff I don't like.
* Dealing with risk: hedging and diversification are expensive in more than 1 way. An investor can manage risk with cruder and cheaper means. E.g. by taking out the original investment after the first ~100% in capital gains. Or quickly cutting companies that start violating your initial criteria. Or limiting yourself to trampled paper that hides a beautiful earning machine. Or most important of all: doing nothing in case you can’t find that kind of trampled paper.
* Wrt risk: I guess periodically holding a huge war chest of cash is the only “diversification” I can approve of.
* Many funds and portfolios are built around arbitrary criteria. By which I mean any criteria that have nothing to do with predictability of earnings and low prices for each individual position (when talking about stocks).
* Volatility is irrelevant. Actually, if you have the tiniest bit of patience and a decent stomach, volatility is awesome. I’m happy if I can pay $1 dollar for a well run company that makes 0.25 dollars in yearly profits. I’m happier if it’s an illiquid company and one beautiful day my fishing order for $0.75 dollars gets filled. Often, companies are more volatile when they’re down, so I even feel confident to say that volatility can do wonders for your performance.
I don’t think proper investing is anything like gambling and I’m pretty sure you’re not playing a zero sum game.
Trading on the other hand is a zero sum game. That’s one reason to not be bullish on any given guy who trades without working for Rentec & co.
Dude, I don't mean to disrespect you, but I don't think you have a background in finance.
* "Especially stay away from “tips”." Ha. My friend - most of the big earnings are made from tips. Financial markets are awash in near-insider trading. It's totally institutionalized. "Tips" are how some of the biggest funds make 100% of their money. Do you honestly think these people are better investors? They pay 'consultants' to talk and try to glean info or they're just passed tips directly.
* There are very well established mathematical mechanisms for proper hedging, diversification and risk management. Most stocks are correlated with other stocks, usually in the same sector. There are mechanisms to evaluate correlations across a portfolio and find inversely correlated stocks to properly hedge. It has nothing to do with those companies, usually sectors.
* "Actually, if you have the tiniest bit of patience and a decent stomach, volatility is awesome" - this is your, personal investment approach. It has nothing to do with what funds may or may not do WRT to volatility. You missed my point: some funds will pay a heavy price for more volatility in the market, given their strategy. So volatility is pretty important and relevant to any strategy.
* "I don’t think proper investing is anything like gambling and I’m pretty sure you’re not playing a zero sum game."
Yes - investing is gambling. There is only about 1% GDP growth in the US economy in a given year. This means there are very little surpluses to be spread out. If funds could only fight for those surpluses, then nobody would be getting amazing returns, and most funds would get 0% return. Ergo - it's mostly a zero-sum game. Meaning - your winnings come from others loses. Meaning: it's poker - and strategies mostly involve understanding how other people invest.
Do you know the saying - when you look around the poker table if you don't see the 'mark' - then the 'mark' is you? You are playing against people who have access to inside information, better research, better trading tools, and tons of staff. Do you think you're going to beat them?
Almost every retail investor is a 'mark'. They are giving their money to the hedge funds. The same can almost also be said for larger funds, often lazily managed.
“I don't think you have a background in finance", don’t worry about it, I’ll take it as a compliment.
* Please do pay for the advice of experts and consultants. I'm sure there's a couple of useful ones amongst the subgroup who don’t speak in riddles and who put their own money where their mouth is.
* Please do engage in hedging and diversification to manage risk. Can’t spend enough on safety! I mean, what else can you do if you’re not sufficiently convinced that some company is super cheap vs earnings?
* Please do spend lots of time and money dwelling on volatility. Hey maybe it will reduce your risk!
* Oooh the “mark at the poker table” thing. Very hedge fundy.
Truth is, I constantly feel like the mark. Like everybody is out to get me. I've considered legally changing my name to Mark but I'm Dutch so it doesn't make much sense.
I feel like a mark with most management teams whose companies I’m looking at. I feel like a mark when people try to overcharge me on the market. I especially feel like a mark when financial services people offer me better research and better trading tools. Since ~2003 I’ve been afraid the entire planet has become a mark for finance.
The good thing is, when I feel like a mark, I don't act. I've never felt like a mark more often than today.
Anyways, if you think we're sitting on the same table, come and get my money. I from my side think you're just 20 years late to your table.
Good luck hedging dude! Being a self admitted gambler, you’ll need it.
I thought publishing on the company's domain was reasonable disclosure, apologies if I didn't make it clear enough.
That said, we also sell to investment banks, insurance companies, PR firms etc. I'm certainly not an entirely unbiased outsider, but our book is relatively balanced, as it were!
Sadly, most of the history of hedge funds it would seem relates to winning in 'zero sum games'.
i.e. a waste of human potential.
Obviously there are side benefits: market liquidity, rational pricing, 'market making' for specific activities, the ability to allocate resources in more exotic ways etc. but by enlarge it doesn't look good.
It'd be nice to see more opportunity in growing the pie rather than fighting for the same pieces.
We talk about it a lot in the office and I definitely agree with you. Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't think it needs to be the case though. I sort of touched on it at the end of this [1] but it's something I want to dig deeper into.
We really feel there's a lot of power to use the profit making incentive that drives these firms to generate real-world value, and that the main driver of that has to be tying trading decisions more closely to true human value by giving the industry better real-world information (and potentially sensible regulation).
Hopefully, we can help in some small way, but I think we still need to do a lot of work to understand the incentive mechanisms of the industry better.
If you want to subscribe I'll leave a note and let you know particularly when something on that topic comes up.
Sounds mostly like gibberish to me, sorry to say it.
> By the 90s, hedge funds were back, this time capitalising on advances in sheer computing power that permitted real-time pricing of instruments in volumes never previously possible. By introducing more and more complex derivatives and so increasing the difficulty of pricing the market, hedge funds managed to maintain this source of alpha almost until 2000.
There are very few funds who make a living pricing complex derivatives. I used to work in a couple of funds that traded derivatives, and quite often we had to explain to people what volatility trading was. Generally, the more complex it is, the more the market maker will charge you in spread for trading it.
It's also not computing power that allows you to make money trading them. A few numerical PDE solvers do not take a huge amount of computing power (or indeed data) to calculate. The people who make money off it are the ones who manage to sell a product to a client at a price the client doesn't understand. I wouldn't use "complex derivatives" as speculation vehicles ("I'm bullish/bearish -> trade") in themselves.
> Even as the market caught up and the potential for alpha withered for hedge funds in the early 2000s, these newly-technically-savvy funds shifted their focus to speed; driving in the era of the hyper-successful HFT firm that drew massive, riskless profits from the sheer speed at which they could capitalise on arbitrage opportunities.
HFT firms are not hedge funds. I'm sitting in the offices of one right this minute, writing code for a strategy. It's not something outside people can invest in. I wouldn't say the profits are riskless either, they're just not traditional risks that you list in a finance course.
> The winners in this market will require many of the skills that have been required before - deep market understanding, strong technical competence and grounded, balanced leadership - but they will also require a new skill; the ability to acquire, make sense of and apply these new data sets.
Gibberish. You need to know what you needed to know, but also to be open to new situations?
There's no discussion here of how various styles generate their alpha. What do macro guys do? Surely not complex derivatives and HFT? What about special situations? And activists?
53 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 98.0 ms ] threadSo all the author is saying is that giving a "black box" a lot of money, and letting it opaquely invest however it wants, will be a winning investment strategy in the future, even though right now it isn't working out so well.
[0] Of course they have documents that explain the strategy, agree to certain things, etc. I'm simplifying it a bit.
That's the best description of a hedge fund that I've heard. Likewise, I don't see how that will ever be a winning investment strategy. You'd be better off with just an index ETF.
Put another way, Startups are just narrowly defined hedge funds. You can be adverse in investing in a risky startup and still be bullish about startups in general.
s/Startups/VC Funds
Also, VC Funds are Narrowly defined PE Funds, which are in turn Narrowly defined Hedge Funds [1], which in turn are narrowly defined Money Managers.
[1]a "hedge fu8nd" should be able to mimic a PE Fund if it chose to do so
That's not the most accurate. Many (most?) hedge funds don't lock funds for any significant amount of time; the most would be a few months, and even that not because they hold illiquid investments, but because they want to discourage investors that react too emotionally on market moves. I'm guessing your description is more appropriate for VCs and Private Equity.
Hedge Funds do, however, execute strategies not available to "traditional" instituational investors, but that is mostly because of regulatory constraints - e.g. index tracking funds can advertise to the public, hold pension investments etc., whereas hedge funds can't. Another difference is that hedge funds usually have a much broader investment mandate - e.g. a bond mutual fund has to invest the majority of its AUM into bonds, even if everyone believes bond prices will drop, whereas a hedge fund could simply sell everything and keep cash or buy stock or whatever its managers believe will make money. The flip side of this is that "traditional" investment institutions are measured against benchmarks (e.g. if a bond fund makes -20% in a year when a bond index made -21%, the bond fund "outperformed"), but hedge funds are measured absolutely (profit is good, loss is bad) and get paid peanuts if they don't make a profit.
This hasn't been my experience. In my experience at a couple firms, redemption schedules have always been tightly controlled to ensure predictable AUM and minimize forced rebalancing of strategies.
I wouldn't call a guaranteed 2% shave every year 'peanuts'. That's more than any index fund would ever imagine charging.
There's no hard definition of it.
VC firms are essentially a kind of 'hedge fund' though we don't think of them that way.
Most hedge funds do have long 'lock up periods'.
Whether they are a 'good investment' is like asking is a specific home a 'good investment'. It depends on the home. They vary wildy in terms of quality etc...
That would be one theory as to the interior of the black box, I imagine, in more profitable cases.
Additionally, there are a lot of nuances of hedge funds that are being missed in the comments. Hedge funds can do things on a small scale with hundreds of millions of dollars that would never scale to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and therefore have opportunities to make money that an individual investing into a publicly available fund wouldn't.
Take parking lots in China, for example. A hedge fund can say "hey these are really under priced compared to what they might be in 10 years" and run lots of data to show the most under-priced lots. They can spend $50 million dollars on these lots and make ridiculous returns at relatively little risk. However, this same strategy wouldn't work with millions of investors cumulatively investing trillions of dollars. There aren't enough parking lots to go around.
Also, hedge funds are not black boxes. They communicate to their investors what their strategies are and their feedback on how strategies are progressing. Most investors can even say "Hey I want you to use my funds mostly on X" even if your returns are based on the entire fund's portfolio.
The hedge fund says, let's convert all your earnings that should be taxed at the short term gains rate and convert them to long-term capital gains!
The hedge fund takes two well-correlated stocks, let's say Coke and Pepsi. They make a hedge going long Coke and short Pepsi. The hedge doesn't make or lose money, but you engineer the hedge so that you hold your long Coke shares 366 days (long-term). You sell your Pepsi shares after 364 days (short-term).
You haven't made any money, but you've engineered short-term capital losses and long-term capital gains. Of course you've created your hedge such that your short-term losses offset your business' short-term gains. Now your profits are in the long-term Coke stock, and rather than paying a 50% marginal tax rate, you pay 20%.
Yay hedge funds!
i think you need to brush up on hedge funds and investment management generally.
Every hedge fund guy I know constantly stresses about the overall lack of alpha generation in the industry right now. To say thet the point of hedge funds is to avoid taxes is just ridiculous. A company doesn't need to invest in a hedge fund to engineer the type short-term losses and long-term gains. And there's no reason they would, the fees are simply too high for anyone to ever do that.
Why hasn't competition brought the fees down when hedge funds aren't consistently beating the market?
Fees have gone down in the past couple years, Tudor slashed their fees from 3 and 30 (which is ridiculous) to 25 and 2.25 (still kinda high). Many other hedge funds have gone to 15 and 1.5.
The problem with hedge funds at the moment isn't that they are making bad security choices individually, but that taken together, a short list of securities becomes very crowded, which really hurts liquidity (though this crowding isn't calculated in their liquidity metrics, so they think they have liquidity even though they really don't)
On the other hand, there are a ton of hedge funds that have never generated alpha in their entire existence and lack even the most basic modicum of skill.
Because over any time period, some strategies are winners, some are losers.
* stays away from the pressure to be "with it" every quarter
* stays away from stuff that everyone is talking about
* stays away from short term thinking (like real time datasets)
* stays away from statistical artefacts and spurious relations (aka “huge amounts of data”)
* stays away from stuff where they don't understand the basic business models
* stays away from stuff that is built on promises
* stays away from mostly all hedging, other than paying the proverbial 50c for a dollar
* stays away from diversification "just because" (looks at each individual investment on its own merits)
* stays away from arbitrary limitations on asset types or sectors
* stays away from short selling (or situations where you can loose more than what you put in)
* stays away from giving or taking tips on individual investments
* even stays away from feeling they have to kick ass every quarter (if you just can't find anything good... do nothing)
* instead just focuses on not loosing big quantities of his/her own money
* tries to keep costs down (less data, less trading, no hedging, low fees, less dealing with currency exchange)
* doesn't worry about volatility or even enjoys it
* has a few large winners and then some smaller potential winners
That may exclude most if not all funds, hedged or otherwise.
Also: in my experience every 19 year old and his dog now tend to consider themselves "macro traders". It’s an indication of how extremely financialized the entire world has become since the 80s. That in itself bodes ill for the 2 and 20 crowd.
I completely disagree.
You have to judge the (long term) investment in full context of the market, i.e. what other people are thinking about it, regulatory climate, geopolitical issues, taxation, position in the value chain, status of customers/suppliers etc..
And for some strategies - none of it is relevant. If you can make trades 0.1 seconds faster than anyone else, the nature of the approach will be such that you don't care anything about the company other than where it's price is now - and where it will probably be 0.1 seconds from now.
True. And yet the world of investing (I'm not talking about market makers etc) is filled with funds whose composition is determined by everything except simply buying predictable cash flows for cheap, wherever you can find them.
* stays away from stuff everyone else is talking about --> the big hits only come from things that everyone eventually 'talks about'. So you must be aware of this dynamic. You don't want to ignore the herd - you want to be just ahead of it. Ergo - you have to understand herd dynamics.
* stays away from hedging - 'hedging' is still used often, and it's an important part of risk mitigation and execution strategy. Anyone that ignores herding is ignoring an essential tool that they can use
* stays away from diversification - same as previous: financial diversification is another essential tool.
* arbitrary limitations - no investor makes 'arbitrary' decisions. They stay away from certain sectors for a reason: they don't understand it, it's risky, there are geopolitical issues they can't control etc.
* tries to keep costs down - uh ... keeping costs down is what every company should aspire to do. In fact - if a fund can get rid of 1/2 it's staff through automation, well, you could make more money depending on how the fees are structured
* doesn't worry about volatility - no - you definitely want them to worry about volatility as it's an essential financial characteristic of the market and means a lot. If your strategy is to invest in cheap blue-chips that pay nice dividends because other investors are not paying attention ... well, volatility is bad.
Here's the key: Investing is not really investing. It's mostly gambling - in the sense that it's a zero-sum game, played against other players. It's more like poker.
You don't win at poker just by playing smart cards. You win at poker by understanding other players predictable behaviour, ie understanding the market, as it is driven by other players.
Though markets do grow and there are some 'bonus surpluses' for everyone, most firms do not win off this - they can only win if someone else loses.
If your going to try and predict human behavior your better off using that when buying stock. AKA if you know the iPhone is going to win then buy Apple. Or if you bought Dell at IPO that's 500x returns over 12 years.
* Dealing with risk: hedging and diversification are expensive in more than 1 way. An investor can manage risk with cruder and cheaper means. E.g. by taking out the original investment after the first ~100% in capital gains. Or quickly cutting companies that start violating your initial criteria. Or limiting yourself to trampled paper that hides a beautiful earning machine. Or most important of all: doing nothing in case you can’t find that kind of trampled paper.
* Wrt risk: I guess periodically holding a huge war chest of cash is the only “diversification” I can approve of.
* Many funds and portfolios are built around arbitrary criteria. By which I mean any criteria that have nothing to do with predictability of earnings and low prices for each individual position (when talking about stocks).
* Volatility is irrelevant. Actually, if you have the tiniest bit of patience and a decent stomach, volatility is awesome. I’m happy if I can pay $1 dollar for a well run company that makes 0.25 dollars in yearly profits. I’m happier if it’s an illiquid company and one beautiful day my fishing order for $0.75 dollars gets filled. Often, companies are more volatile when they’re down, so I even feel confident to say that volatility can do wonders for your performance.
I don’t think proper investing is anything like gambling and I’m pretty sure you’re not playing a zero sum game.
Trading on the other hand is a zero sum game. That’s one reason to not be bullish on any given guy who trades without working for Rentec & co.
* "Especially stay away from “tips”." Ha. My friend - most of the big earnings are made from tips. Financial markets are awash in near-insider trading. It's totally institutionalized. "Tips" are how some of the biggest funds make 100% of their money. Do you honestly think these people are better investors? They pay 'consultants' to talk and try to glean info or they're just passed tips directly.
* There are very well established mathematical mechanisms for proper hedging, diversification and risk management. Most stocks are correlated with other stocks, usually in the same sector. There are mechanisms to evaluate correlations across a portfolio and find inversely correlated stocks to properly hedge. It has nothing to do with those companies, usually sectors.
* "Actually, if you have the tiniest bit of patience and a decent stomach, volatility is awesome" - this is your, personal investment approach. It has nothing to do with what funds may or may not do WRT to volatility. You missed my point: some funds will pay a heavy price for more volatility in the market, given their strategy. So volatility is pretty important and relevant to any strategy.
* "I don’t think proper investing is anything like gambling and I’m pretty sure you’re not playing a zero sum game."
Yes - investing is gambling. There is only about 1% GDP growth in the US economy in a given year. This means there are very little surpluses to be spread out. If funds could only fight for those surpluses, then nobody would be getting amazing returns, and most funds would get 0% return. Ergo - it's mostly a zero-sum game. Meaning - your winnings come from others loses. Meaning: it's poker - and strategies mostly involve understanding how other people invest.
Do you know the saying - when you look around the poker table if you don't see the 'mark' - then the 'mark' is you? You are playing against people who have access to inside information, better research, better trading tools, and tons of staff. Do you think you're going to beat them?
Almost every retail investor is a 'mark'. They are giving their money to the hedge funds. The same can almost also be said for larger funds, often lazily managed.
* Please do pay for the advice of experts and consultants. I'm sure there's a couple of useful ones amongst the subgroup who don’t speak in riddles and who put their own money where their mouth is.
* Please do engage in hedging and diversification to manage risk. Can’t spend enough on safety! I mean, what else can you do if you’re not sufficiently convinced that some company is super cheap vs earnings?
* Please do spend lots of time and money dwelling on volatility. Hey maybe it will reduce your risk!
* Oooh the “mark at the poker table” thing. Very hedge fundy.
Truth is, I constantly feel like the mark. Like everybody is out to get me. I've considered legally changing my name to Mark but I'm Dutch so it doesn't make much sense.
I feel like a mark with most management teams whose companies I’m looking at. I feel like a mark when people try to overcharge me on the market. I especially feel like a mark when financial services people offer me better research and better trading tools. Since ~2003 I’ve been afraid the entire planet has become a mark for finance.
The good thing is, when I feel like a mark, I don't act. I've never felt like a mark more often than today.
Anyways, if you think we're sitting on the same table, come and get my money. I from my side think you're just 20 years late to your table.
Good luck hedging dude! Being a self admitted gambler, you’ll need it.
Your points regarding what hedge funds should do or not are simply wrong.
I don't invest, I leave that to professionals.
Also - you might want to take a course in investing finance. You'll find it very interesting.
Ok so when giving people advice and talking about courses and backgrounds, at least you have experience with investing or trading in the past?
Or just the courses?
That said, we also sell to investment banks, insurance companies, PR firms etc. I'm certainly not an entirely unbiased outsider, but our book is relatively balanced, as it were!
Thanks for reading anyway :)
i.e. a waste of human potential.
Obviously there are side benefits: market liquidity, rational pricing, 'market making' for specific activities, the ability to allocate resources in more exotic ways etc. but by enlarge it doesn't look good.
It'd be nice to see more opportunity in growing the pie rather than fighting for the same pieces.
We really feel there's a lot of power to use the profit making incentive that drives these firms to generate real-world value, and that the main driver of that has to be tying trading decisions more closely to true human value by giving the industry better real-world information (and potentially sensible regulation).
Hopefully, we can help in some small way, but I think we still need to do a lot of work to understand the incentive mechanisms of the industry better.
If you want to subscribe I'll leave a note and let you know particularly when something on that topic comes up.
[1] http://www.krzana.com/blog/the-future-of-financial-analysis
> By the 90s, hedge funds were back, this time capitalising on advances in sheer computing power that permitted real-time pricing of instruments in volumes never previously possible. By introducing more and more complex derivatives and so increasing the difficulty of pricing the market, hedge funds managed to maintain this source of alpha almost until 2000.
There are very few funds who make a living pricing complex derivatives. I used to work in a couple of funds that traded derivatives, and quite often we had to explain to people what volatility trading was. Generally, the more complex it is, the more the market maker will charge you in spread for trading it.
It's also not computing power that allows you to make money trading them. A few numerical PDE solvers do not take a huge amount of computing power (or indeed data) to calculate. The people who make money off it are the ones who manage to sell a product to a client at a price the client doesn't understand. I wouldn't use "complex derivatives" as speculation vehicles ("I'm bullish/bearish -> trade") in themselves.
> Even as the market caught up and the potential for alpha withered for hedge funds in the early 2000s, these newly-technically-savvy funds shifted their focus to speed; driving in the era of the hyper-successful HFT firm that drew massive, riskless profits from the sheer speed at which they could capitalise on arbitrage opportunities.
HFT firms are not hedge funds. I'm sitting in the offices of one right this minute, writing code for a strategy. It's not something outside people can invest in. I wouldn't say the profits are riskless either, they're just not traditional risks that you list in a finance course.
> The winners in this market will require many of the skills that have been required before - deep market understanding, strong technical competence and grounded, balanced leadership - but they will also require a new skill; the ability to acquire, make sense of and apply these new data sets.
Gibberish. You need to know what you needed to know, but also to be open to new situations?
There's no discussion here of how various styles generate their alpha. What do macro guys do? Surely not complex derivatives and HFT? What about special situations? And activists?