Twenty Third Floor
Technical Business Advantage

Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written an engaging account of the role that subprime lending played in the global financial crisis. The new book is called “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine”.

The jargon that Lewis uses is generally explained and shouldn’t prevent non finance geeks from understanding the role of subprime lenders, mortgage originators and, of course, the Wall Street banks that fed the frenzy with CDSs, synthetic CDOs and bonuses for all.

The story places a few characters at the centre of the story. I wasn’t convinced that these guys were all skill and no luck, but they certainly seemed to have a clearer idea of what was going on in the murky, muddy waters of securitisations of that era than many of the supposed experts.

Overall, it’s won’t be the smash hit that Liar’s Poker is, but it’s entertaining reading all the time. The links to Gutfreund are tenuous and smell a little of name-dropping. If Lewis wanted to remind the reader of his role in toppling the ex CEO of Salomon Brothers he succeeded. If he wanted to somehow project the glory onto the new book, he failed.

The Big Short at Amazon.co.uk

The Big Short at Kalahari.net

Check out Book Finder for prices from several stores (new and used) in your currency including delivery costs to your location.

I blogged recently about why I park on the fourth floor of the Cape Town airport parkade, and also about understanding and utilising unlikely but extreme events to your advantage. There is actually a link between these two posts.

Parking on the top floor does have a cost. It takes longer to drive up all the ramps and does, perhaps, on average take longer than parking on the most convenient floor every time. This extra time is a premium I pay to reduce the potential for really bad outcomes and thus optimising the parking problem. For example:

• I avoid the situation of attempting to park on a lower floor (trusting the untrustworthy electronic vehicle counter) and, after driving around for a while trying to find parking, having to give up and try a different floor. This much longer time, even if it only happens rarely, is a much worse outcome than 30 seconds on every flight. It can easily be the difference between making and missing a flight.
• I don’t have to worry about remembering where I parked my car. I don’t know that I am more forgetful than the average traveller, but travelling almost every week makes each trip blur into the next. I don’t waste headspace on trying to remember where I parked my car, and I don’t worry about forgetting. I have the peace of mind from having purchased a time of insurance against the risk of forgetting where I parked.

I get no value out of successfully memorising my car location, but gain from removing this risk and this worry from my routine.

If your company has a foreign currency exposure due to imported input components, this is a risk and a worry over which you have no control. Your energies are better expended elsewhere, on the operational and sales issues that you can effectively change. Get rid of these risks and get on with your real business.

Insurance and gambling have much in common. They both involve uncertainty and money and the rational consumer will, on average, lose money through the interaction. Both business models involve leveraging the tail of probability distributions (one nasty and one nice).

The tail of a distribution includes the very bad and very good possible outcomes, that typically have a very low frequency of occurring. Having your house burn down is a very bad outcome, but fortunately happens very infrequently. Winning the lottery is very good, but unfortunately in this case is also very unlikely for any particular individual.

Managing the nasty tail

A rational person who wants to avoid the unlikely but catastrophic risk of  losing their house to fire will be prepared to pay more than just the average cost of the loss of the house in order to avoid the risk. Typically, we humans are risk averse (a wild generalisation given the research into utility and decision making that has led to behavioural finance and behavioural economics, but probably good enough for now). Insurance provides:

• genuine decrease in risk and indemnification of losses against the loss event happening
• peace of mind even if no loss is ever experienced, which has real value in terms of clearing the mind to think about other more important and more controllable personal and business matters
• reduction in the amount of capital / liquid assets individuals and businesses need to keep against unforeseen events. This capital can be better used and invested elsewhere

Contrary to the popular view, insurance has value even if you never claim.

Gearing to the nice tail

Gambling can be dangerous and addictive. It can also be entirely rational to gamble within certain parameters. (more…)

I blogged before about some medium-term concerns I have around Lebanon’s currency stability. A story I saw today shows an opposite view, so I’m linking it here.  Moody’s have upgraded Lebanon’s bond ratings due to improved external liquidity.

My original post was to temper the irrational optimism around the currency peg, rather than to say there is bad news around the corner. However, I still feel Moody’s may be slightly optimistic, upgrading a small country’s bonds when the extent of the global recession is not clear.

Currencies aren’t what they used to be. The US Dollar can no longer be viewed as a safe bet as Obama and Bernanke spend their way out of a crisis partly fueled by too much spending. Inflation will come, it’s just a matter of time. Warren Buffet thinks so too. The current relative strength of the USD is a short-term reaction to the money flowing back into the US. It won’t last.

photo credit: plenty.r.

The Swiss are acting in the market to weaken the Swiss Franc to protect the economy. Given the problems Swiss banks have been having as a result of the credit crisis and pressure on banking secrecy rules out the franc.

The South African Rand? South Africa has a huge current account deficit, significant political risk, serious government spending and a decline in exports and production in our base metals economy.

The Pound Sterling is teetering on the back of a meltdown of the financial system – long the heart of the London and UK economy. I hear Ireland is in horrible shape too.

Some are suggesting the Norwegian Krone. It’s one of the world’s top ten traded currencies, which provides liquidity. Significant oil wealth has been accumulated and diversified in a “pension fund for the country”. However, currencies can be driven for extended multi-year period purely based on fashion. I don’t know that I want to risk being in a currency that simply goes out of favour.

The Japanese Yen has to deal with the worst economic declines in nearly 40 years. The Chinese Yuan is subject to state manipulation, usually pushing to keep it low to sustain an export-driven economy. Not sure I like my eggs  fried in that basket either.

The argument typically turns to Gold. The shiny metal that has been a store of value for several hundred years. Only problem is that gold arguably has less intrinsic value than steel or wheat or oil. The price is driven by demand – demand that is driven by assumed future demand. Flows into Gold ETFs have been strong, and significantly responsible for the current prices. Getting in now at around $900 per ounce might not be smart if everyone else is already in and looking for a time to sell.

So, where’s the safe?

The Fed joins Bank of England and Bank of Japan in repurchasing government bonds.

photo credit: amber.kennedy

This actions (quantitative easing) increases the prices of bonds (more demand, diminishing supply) pushing down long-term yields.

Great if you own bonds, not so great if you are an insurer with imperfectly matched long-term liabilities. Given how difficult it is to find assets of sufficiently long term to back long-dated annuities, many insurers may find themselves with assets of shorter duration than liabiltiies. More losses for insurers could follow.

Insurers have started using swaps to match their annuity portfolios, or to simply increase the duration of their assets such that the sensitivity of assets and liabilities to overall changes in the level of the yield curve has a limited effect. This solves part of the problem. When short term interest rates are affected  by desperate monetary policy and longer term yields are set by a perfect storm of future inflationary expectations, recession fears and now central bank intervention in the markets, matching key durations is a minimum requirement not to have large swings in surplus assets.

And this doesn’t even consinder the impact on Guaranteed Annuity Options and Variable Annuities in the US. More fun.

CNN has a story on house price declines being at their highest in 30 years. Turns out the headline is misleading in two ways. Firstly it proclaims house prices at a 30-year low, which is fortunately not quite the reality. However, the largest decline in 30 years is still pretty shocking. The second item is that the 12.4% decline in US house prices in 2008 is the worst since they have been systematically recorded.

Home prices fell 12.4% during 2008, the largest yearly decline since the National Association of Realtors began keeping comprehensive records in 1979.

As always, averages are a useful measure of overall market movements, but hide some truly enormous declines in individual areas: (more…)

What do the names Oneway, Bull, Kansvatter, Inthemoney, The Bull! and Millionaire in the making have in common? They’re all optimistic, aggressive names used in the Make A Million competition. They’re also, as of right now, all in the bottom ten out of nearly 300 entrants and have all lost everything but a few rand from the R10,000 they started with on their chance to Make A Million speculating with Single Stock Futures. None can even take what’s left of their R10,000 and watch a Movie (except maybe at a Sterkinekor Classic, on Tuesdays, in PE).

These aren’t the unlucky few. As I warned in a previous post on how the Make A Million competition is a bad idea and encourages wild speculation and ill-advised risk-taking, the performances of the best and worst entrants is dramatically different after just two months, with rather more entrants looking at poor returns.

The highest return (so far as of about the time this blog is posted) based on the live leaderboard is a massive, impressive return of 735% in two months. That’s over a 30 million percent return on an annualised basis. That is also where the good news ends.

Some more stats:

• Highest return 735%
• Average return -27%
• Median return -53%
• Worst return -107% (yes, someone lost all their fund and more thanks to the geared danger of SSFs)
• Approximate percentage of entrants with negative returns 82%

It’s abundantly clear that entrants have been massive losers in just a short space of time.  The average return translates to an annual return of -85%. Of course, the position would have looked much better had the markets boomed during the period, and it’s still possible there could be a huge rally from now until the competition ends. It’s just that I wouldn’t give any of my money to Bull! or Spitfire or Druggies or even Fantastic.

Not in a million years.