Category: investment banking

Investment banks, scientific research and cows

I’ve commented earlier on this blog about how investment banks indirectly fund scientific research – by offering careers to people with PhDs in pure sciences such as maths and physics.

The problem with a large number of disciplines is that the only career opportunity available to someone with a PhD is a career in academia. Given that faculty positions are hard to come by, this can result in a drop in number of people who want to do a PhD in that subject, which has the further effect of diminishing research in that subject.

Investment banks, by hiring people with pure science PhDs, have offered a safety net for people who haven’t been able to get a job in academia, as a consequence of which more people are willing to do PhDs in these subjects. This increases competition and overall improves the quality of research in these topics.

Beef is like investment banks to the dairy industry. I recall an article (can’t recall the source and link to it, though) which talked about V Kurien of Amul going to a meeting called by the Union government on banning cow slaughter. Kurien talked about his mandate from his cooperative being that everything was okay as long as cow slaughter wasn’t banned – for that would kill the dairy industry.

Prima facie (use of latin phrase on this block – check)  this might sound like a far-fetched analogy (research to cows). However, cow slaughter has an important (positive) role to play in encouraging the dairy industry.

When you buy a cow, you aren’t sure how good it is in providing milk, until you’ve put it through a few cycles of childbirth and milking. If after purchase it turns out that the cow is incapable of producing as much milk as you were promised, it turns out to be a dud investment – like getting a PhD in a field with few non-academic opportunities and not being able to get a faculty position.

When cow slaughter is permitted, however, you can at least sell the cow for its meat (when it is still healthy and fat) and hope to recover at least a part of the (rather hefty) investment on it. This provides some kind of a “safety net” for dairy farmers and encourages them to invest in more cows, and that results in increasing milk production and a healthier dairy industry.

This is not all. Legal slaughter means that there is a positive “terminal value” that can be extracted from cows at the end of their milking lives. Money can also be made off the male calves (cruel humans have made the dairy industry one-to-many. Semen from stud bulls is used to impregnate lots of cows, and most bulls never get to fuck) which would otherwise have negative value.

A ban on killing cows implies a removal of these safety nets. Investing in cows becomes a much more risky business. And lesser farmers will invest in that. To the detriment of the dairy industry.

There are already reports that following the ban on cow slaughter in Maharashtra last year, demand for cows is going down as farmers are turning to the more politically pliable buffaloes.

Similarly, with the investment banking industry seeing a downturn and the demand for “quants” going down, it is likely that the quality of input to graduate programs in pure science might go down – though it may be reasonable to expect Silicon Valley to offer a bailout in this case. Cows have no such luck, though.

Matt Levine describes my business idea

When I was leaving the big bank I was working for (I keep forgetting whether this blog is anonymous or not, but considering that I’ve now mentioned it on my LinkedIn profile (and had people congratulate me “on the new job”), I suppose it’s not anonymous any more) in 2011, I didn’t bother looking for a new job.

I was going into business, I declared. The philosophy (that’s a word I’ve learnt to use in this context by talking to Venture Capitalists) was that while Quant in investment banking was already fairly saturated, there was virgin territory in other industries, and I’d use my bank-honed quant skills to improve the level of reasoning in these other industries.

Since then things have more or less gone well. I’ve worked in several sectors, and done a lot of interesting work. While a lot of it has been fairly challenging, very little of it has technically been of a level that would be considered challenging by an investment banking quant. And all this is by design.

I’ve long admired Matt Levine for the way in which he clearly explains fairly complicated finance stuff in his daily newsletter (that you can get delivered to your inbox for free),  and more or less talking about finance in an entertaining model. I’ve sometimes mentioned that I’ve wanted to grow up to be like him, to write like him, to analyse like him and all that.

And I find that in yesterday’s newsletter he clearly encapsulates the idea with which I started off when I quit banking in 2011. He writes:

A good trick is, find an industry where the words “Monte Carlo model” make you sound brilliant and mysterious, then go to town.

This is exactly what I set out to do in 2011, and have continued to do since then. And you’d be amazed to find the number of industries where “Monte Carlo model” makes you sound brilliant and mysterious.

Considering the difficulties I’ve occasionally had in communicating to people what exactly I do, I think I should adopt Levine’s line to describe my work. I clearly can’t go wrong that way.

 

Darwin Awards in Investment Banking

Some 20 analysts from Goldman Sachs and 10 from JP Morgan have been dismissed after it emerged that they were cheating during some mandatory tests during their analyst training program.

As the article says, it is not unusual for bankers to assist each other when it comes to tests in mandatory training and compliance, since they are seen as being time consuming and repetitive.

In that sense, that these guys copied or helped each other is not news. What matters, though, is that they got caught in the process. And that is unacceptable for a banker.

If you look at how investment banking has been shaped over the last decade or so, there have apparently been several people who have fudged stuff – from financial results to key rates to benchmarks, and gotten away with it because they haven’t got caught. And they continue to remain successful bankers.

So in the banking culture, fudging is okay, but getting caught isn’t. By getting caught fudging in tests during their training program, these analysts have betrayed the one skill that is necessary for being a successful banker, and for this reason they have been rightly weeded out.

It’s like the Darwin awards, except that for these guys it is only the end of their careers in banking.

Revisiting IPOs

I’ve written several times (here, here and here) that the IPO pop is unfair to existing shareholders since they end up selling the stock cheaper than necessary. Responses I’ve received to this (not all on the blog comments) have mostly been illogical and innumerate, talking about how the pop “increases the value of the entrepreneurs’ holdings”, and that the existing shareholder “should be happy that the value has gone up” rather than wondering why he sold his shares at the low value.

Thinking about this in the context of the impending Cafe Coffee Day IPO, I realised that a pop is necessary (though not maybe to the extent of the MakeMyTrip and LinkedIn pops), because investors need some incentive to invest in the IPO rather than buying the stock in the secondary market after listing.

Secondary markets have superior price discovery compared to primary markets since the former have several (close to infinite) attempts at price discovery, while the latter have only one attempt. Also, prices in the secondary market change “slowly” (compared to the price difference between primary and secondary market), so even if someone has invested at a price they later have dissonance with, they can reverse the investment without incurring a high cost.

For this reason, if you want to invest in a company and want to know that you are paying a “fair price”, investing in secondary markets is superior to investing in primary markets. In other words, you need a higher incentive in order to buy in primary markets. And this incentive is provided to you in the form of the IPO pop.

In other words, the IPO pop is an incentive paid to the IPO buyer in exchange for investing at a time when the price discovery is in a sense incomplete and cannot be particularly trusted. Rather than pricing the IPO at what bankers and bookbuilders think is the “fair price”, they will price it at a discount, which offers IPO investors insurance against the bankers having made a mistake in their pricing of the IPO.

And how much to underprice it (relative to any “fair price” that the bankers have discovered) is a function of how sure the bankers are about the fair price they have arrived at. The greater their confidence in such a price, the smaller the pop they need to offer (again, this is in theory since investors need not know what fair price bankers have arrived at).

The examples I took while arguing that the IPO pop is unfair to existing shareholders were MakeMyTrip and LinkedIn, both pioneers in some sense. LinkedIn was the first major social network to go public, much before Facebook or Twitter, and thus there was uncertainty about its valuation, and it gave a big pop.

MakeMyTrip was a travel booking site from India listing on NASDAQ, and despite other travel sites already being public, the fact that it was from an “emerging market” possibly added to its uncertainty, and the resulting high pop.

So I admit it. I was wrong on this topic of IPO pops. They do make sense, but from a risk perspective. Nothing about “wealth of existing shareholders increases after the pop”.

Analysts, competition and Wall Street deaths

Yet another investment banking analyst has died. Sarvshreshth Gupta, a first year Analyst at Goldman Sachs’s San Francisco office reportedly killed himself after not being able to handle the workload. Reporting and commenting on this, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:

Some banks, like Goldman, are also taking new steps, like introducing more efficient software and technology to help young analysts do their work more quickly. And investment banks say they are hiring more analysts to help balance the workload.

I simply fail to understand how these measures help balance the workload. I mean having more analysts is good in that the same work now gets split between a larger number of analysts. However, that there are more analysts doesn’t mean that the demand for Associates or Vice Presidents has actually gone up – that might go up only with deal flow.

In other words, what the above measure has done is to actually make the organisational structure “more pyramidal” (i.e. reduced the slope of the “pyramid’s walls”). So now you have a larger number of analysts competing for the same number of associate and VP positions. I don’t see how it makes things better at all!

On another note, I wonder if the number of deaths among Wall Street analysts has actually gone up, or if they have only started being reported more in recent times, after Wall Street got into trouble. Based on my limited understanding, I think it is the case of the former, and I attribute it to the lack of choice.

Back in 2004, I attended a talk by a Goldman Sachs MD (who worked in the Investment Banking Division, which does Mergers and Acquisitions, IPOs, etc.) in IIMB where he told me about the lifestyle in his division. That was the day I swore never to apply to that kind of a role. Given that the sales and trading side was doing rather well then, however, I had a choice to take up another equally lucrative, but less stressful-on-lifestyle career. That I chose not to (in 2006) is another matter.

The way I see it, following the crash of 2008, sales and trading have never recovered and don’t recruit as many as they used to. That takes care of one “competitor” of investment banking division. The other “competitor” is consulting, but they don’t pay just as well. In fact, with banking on the downswing, the supply of quality candidates to consulting firms has improved to the extent that they haven’t had to raise salaries as much. For example, starting salaries of IIM graduates at top-tier consulting firms in India have only grown at a CAGR of 6.5% since the time I graduated in 2006.

What this means is that few jobs can match the pay of investment banking, and that reduces the number of exit options. A few years back, anyone who found it too stressful had the option to move out to another job that was less demanding in terms of number of hours (though still stressful) without a cut in pay. This option has expired now, with the effect that people soldier on in investment banking jobs even if they’re not completely cut out for them.

And then some don’t make it. And so they go..

More on IPOs

In the past I’ve written on this blog that IPOs that open with a pop are actually unfair to the existing shareholders of the company, and are not as “successful” as reported by the media. To this, people from the industry have pointed out that the “pop” (increase in share price on the day of listing) actually increases the value of the shares held by the existing shareholders and hence this is a good deal.

I’ve always been unsure about this kind of analysis, and have held it suspiciously as one of those views held by people who accept “received wisdom” without much questioning and so much of such wisdom gets received that it becomes a thing. While investment bankers are usually incentivised on a percentage of the money raised by the IPO, considering that they are a platform for trading, they choose to forego some of that income by transferring money to the other side of the market – the “buy side” who are their more consistent customers.

In the aftermath of the LinkedIn IPO which I had written about in a similar context a few years back,  Facebook went public and it seems like they had put immense pressure on their bankers (Morgan Stanley if I’m not wrong) to “not leave money on the table”. And the IPO had opened rather flat. Not great for investors but excellent for Mark Zuckerberg and other old shareholders in Facebook.

Anyway, the reason I revisit this topic is this IPO by this Chinese company called Beijing Baofeng. Check out its share price movement:

The reason you see the neat step graph is that on each trading day following its IPO the share has hit the upper circuit breaker (at which point trading in the security is closed for the day). The inimitable Matt Levine has mentioned in his daily newsletter (which I subscribe to, and you should, too) that the stock has gained 1600% after the IPO, which makes LinkedIn’s doubling of share price on IPO day look like child’s play!

A takeaway from this is that investment banking remains strong as an industry, and bankers continue to shaft their hapless clients (or, if we should give them more credit, are so inept that they consistently underprice IPOs). It would be a great industry to get into except that they’re not hiring (a straw poll I conducted in the IIMB class I taught showed that hardly anyone had got a banking job)!

I continue to wonder how the IPO industry can be disrupted!

How my IIMB Class explains the 2008 financial crisis

I have a policy of not enforcing attendance in my IIMB class. My view is that it’s better to have a small class of dedicated students rather than a large class of students who don’t want to be there. One of the upsides of this policy is that there has been no in-class sleeping. Almost. I caught one guy sleeping last week, in what was session 16 (out of 20). Considering that my classes are between 8 and 9:30 am on Mondays and Tuesdays, I like to take credit for it.

I also like to take credit for the fact that despite not enforcing attendance, attendance has been healthy. There have usually been between 40 and 50 students in each class (yes, I count, when I’ve bamboozled them with a question and the class has gone all quiet), skewed towards the latter number. Considering that there are 60 students registered for the course, this translates to a pretty healthy percentage. So perhaps I’ve been doing something right.

The interesting thing to note is that where there are about 45 people in each class, it’s never the same set of 45. I don’t think there’s a single student who’s attended all of my classes. However, people appear and disappear in a kind of random uncoordinated fashion, and the class attendance has remained in the forties, until last week that is. This had conditioned me into expecting a rather large class each time I climbed up that long flight of stairs to get into class.

While there were many causes of the 2008 financial crisis, one of the prime reasons shit hit the fan then was that CDOs (collateralised debt obligations) blew up. CDOs were an (at one point in time) innovative way of repackaging receivables (home loans or auto loans or credit card bills) so as to create a set of instruments of varying credit ratings.

To explain it in the simplest way, let’s say I’ve lent money to a 100 people and each owes me a rupee each month. So I expect to get a hundred rupees each month. Now I carve it up into tranches and let’s say I promise Alice the “first 60 rupees” I receive each month. In return she pays me a fee. Bob will get the “next 20 rupees”, again for a fee. Note that if fewer than 60 people pay me this month, Bob gets nothing. Let’s say Eve gets the next 10 rupees, so in case less than 80 people pay up, Eve gets nothing. So this is very risky, and Eve pays much less for her tranche than Bob pays for his which is in turn much less than what Alice pays for hers. The last 10 rupees is so risky that no one will buy it and so I hold it.

Let’s assume that about 85 to 90 people have been paying on their loans each month. Not the same people, but different, like in my class. Both Alice and Bob are getting paid in full each month, and the return is pretty impressive considering the high ratings of the instruments they hold (yes these tranches got rated, and the best tranche (Alice’s) would typically get AAA, or as good as government bonds). So Alice and Bob make a fortune. Until the shit hits the fan that is.

The factor that led to healthy attendance in my IIMB class and what kept Alice and Bob getting supernormal returns was the same – “correlation”. The basic assumption in CDO markets was that home loans were uncorrelated – my default had nothing to do with your default. So both of us defaulting together is unlikely. When between 10 and 15 people are defaulting each month, that 40 (or even 20) people will default together in a given month has very low probability. Which is what kept Alice and Bob happy. It was similar in my IIMB class – the reason I bunk is uncorrelated to the reason you bunk, so lack of correlation in bunking means there is a healthy attendance in my class each day.

The problem in both cases, as you might have guessed, is that correlations started moving from zero to one. On Sunday and Monday night this week, they had “club selections” on IIMB campus. Basically IIMB has this fraud concept called clubs (which do nothing), which recruiters value for reasons I don’t know, and so students take them seriously. And each year’s officebearers are appointed by the previous year’s officebearers, and thus you have interviews. And so these interviews went on till late on Monday morning. People were tired, and some decided to bunk due to that. Suddenly, there was correlation in bunking! And attendance plummeted. Yesterday there were 10 people in class. Today perhaps 12. Having got used to a class of 45, I got a bit psyched out! Not much damage was done, though.

The damage was much greater in the other case. In 2008, the Federal Reserve raised rates, thanks to which banks increased rates on home loans. The worst borrowers defaulted, because of which home prices fell, which is when shit truly hit the fan. The fall in home prices meant that many homes were now worth less than the debt outstanding on them, so it became rational for homeowners to default on their loans. This meant that defaults were now getting correlated! And so rather than 85 people paying in a month, maybe 45 people paid. Bob got wiped out. Alice lost heavily, too.

This was not all. Other people had bet on how much Alice would get paid. And when she didn’t get paid in full, these people lost a lot of money. And then they defaulted. And it set off a cascade. No one was willing to trade with anyone any more. Lehman brothers couldn’t even put a value on the so-called “toxic assets” they held. The whole system collapsed.

It is uncanny how two disparate events such as people bunking my class and the 2008 financial crisis are correlated. And there – correlation rears its ugly head once again!

 

More on the Swiss Franc move

The always excellent Matt Levine has reported in Bloomberg (with respect to the recent removal of the cap on the price of the Swiss Franc) that:

Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer Harvey Schwartz said on this morning’s earnings call that this was something like a 20-standard-deviation event

While mathematically this might be true, the question is if it makes sense at all. Since it is mathematically easy to model, traders look at volatility of an instrument in terms of its standard deviation. However, standard deviation is a good descriptor of a distribution only if the distribution looks something like a normal distribution. For all other distributions, it is essentially meaningless.

The more important point here is that the movement of the Swiss Franc (CHF) against the Euro had been artificially suppressed in the last three odd years. So from that perspective, whatever Standard Deviation would have been used in order to make the calculation was artificially low and essentially meaningless.

Instead, the way banks ought to have modelled it was in terms of modelling where EUR/CHF would end up in case the cap on the CHF was actually lifted (looking at capital and current flows between Switzerland and the Euro Area, this wouldn’t be hard to model), and then model the probability with which the Swiss National Bank would lift the cap on the Franc, and use the combination of the two to assess the risk in the CHF position. This way the embedded risk of the cap lifting, which was borne out on Thursday, could have been monitored and controlled, and possibly hedged.

There are a couple of other interesting stories connected to the lifting of the cap on the value of the CHF. The first has to do with Alpari, a UK-based FX trading house. The firm has had to declare insolvency following losses from Thursday. And as the company was going insolvent, they put out some interesting quotes. As the Guardian reports:

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s move by the Swiss central bank, analysts at Alpari had described the decision as “idiotic” and by Friday the firm had announced it was insolvent. “The recent move on the Swiss franc caused by the Swiss National Bank’s unexpected policy reversal of capping the Swiss franc against the euro has resulted in exceptional volatility and extreme lack of liquidity,” said Alpari.

The second story has to do with homeowners in Hungary and Poland who borrowed their home loans in Swiss Franc, and are now faced with significantly higher payments. I have little sympathy for these homeowners and less sympathy for the bankers who sold them the loans denominated in a foreign currency. I mean, who borrows in a foreign currency to buy a house? I don’t even …

There is a story related to that which is interesting, though. Though Hungary is more exposed to these loans than Poland, it is the Polish banks which are likely to suffer more from the appreciation in the CHF. The irony is that the Hungarian market was initially much more loosely regulated compared to the Polish market, where only wealthier people were allowed to borrow in CHF. But in Hungary, the regulator took more liberties in terms of forcing banks to take the hit on the exchange rate movement, and the loans were swapped back into the local currency a while back.

In related reading, check out this post by my Takshashila colleague Anantha Nageswaran on the crisis. I agree with most of it.

 

Depression and TARP

When the US Treasury initiated the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ collapse, they imposed one condition on banks – banks were forced to borrow money under the scheme irrespective of how they were doing. So you had banks that weren’t doing badly such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan taking TARP money, and getting flak for giving fat bonuses (“from TARP money”, as the press claimed) to their employees who had helped them survive the crisis.

The reason even well-to-do banks were forced to take money under TARP was for the signalling effect. If only banks that really needed the money were to take money from TARP, then banks who really needed the money would be loathe to take it, for it would them mark them out as being ‘in trouble’. By making the well-to-do banks take money under TARP, this stigma of borrowing under TARP was removed, and the American banking system was “saved”.

The reason I got reminded of this was this piece on actor Anupam Kher coming out with his depression. This is on the back of actor Deepika Padukone coming out with her depression, which was reported yesterday. From the article on Kher’s “coming out”:

Kher says what Padukone had done is a very brave and wise thing to do. “People look up to her. When they know that she is consulting a therapist, they will understand there is no problem in getting help, and it is an okay thing to do,” he says.

 

The thing with depression is that it affects people from all over the spectrum – some of them are wildly successful despite their depression, like Kher or Padukone, while depression ruins some others. And then there are others who are ravaged by depression, and lead mostly “middling” lives.

Depression is an illness to which much stigma is attached. Especially in India, if you are consulting a therapist, or taking psychiatric drugs, people assume something is “wrong” with you, and discriminate against you. This gives people with depression a strong incentive to hide their illness, and appear to the world as if they’re fine.

The consequence is that people end up not seeking help even when it is prudent for them to seek help, and this leads to their depression possibly consuming them, sometimes even leading to fatal consequences.

In this context, when you have people who have had successful careers despite being ravaged by depression “coming out”, it makes depression a little more “normal”. On the margin, it can lead to the depressed person seeking help, and potentially getting better, rather than letting depression continue to waste them. Thus, successful depressed people owning up to depression makes it easier for less successful people (who might be worried about the stigma attached to mental illness) to come out with their condition and seek help.

In that sense, “coming out” with depression is similar to banks that were not in trouble taking TARP funds! Oh, and while on that topic, here is my “coming out essay”, from almost three years back.

A misspent career in finance

I spent three years doing finance – not counting any internships or consulting assignments. Between 2008 and 2009 I worked for one of India’s first High Frequency Trading firms. I worked as a quant, designing intra-day trading strategies based primarily on statistical arbitrage.

Then in 2009, I got an opportunity to work for the big daddy of them all in finance – the Giant Squid. Again I worked as a quant, designing strategies for selling off large blocks of shares, among others. I learnt a lot in my first year there, and for the first time I worked with a bunch of super-smart people. Had a lot of fun, went to New York, played around with data, figured that being good at math wasn’t the same as being good at data – which led me to my current “venture”.

But looking back, I think I mis-spent my career in finance. While quant is kinda sexy, and lets you do lots of cool stuff, I wasn’t anywhere close to the coolest stuff that my employers were doing. Check out this, for example, written by Matt Levine in relation to some tapes regarding Goldman Sachs and the Fed that were published yesterday:

The thing is:

  • Before this deal, Santander had received cash (from Qatar), and agreed to sell common shares (to Qatar), but wasn’t getting capital credit from its regulators.
  • After this deal, Santander had received cash (from Qatar), and agreed to sell common shares (to Qatar), and was getting capital credit from its regulators, and Goldman was floating around vaguely getting $40 million.

This is such brilliantly devious stuff. Essentially, every bad piece of regulation leads to a genius trade. You had Basel 2 that had lesser capital requirements for holding AAA bonds rather than holding mortgages, so banks had mortgages converted into Mortgage Backed Securities, a lot of which was rated AAA. In the 1980s, there were limits on how much the World Bank could borrow in Switzerland and Germany, but none on how much it could borrow in the United States. So it borrowed in the United States (at an astronomical interest rate – it was the era of Paul Volcker, remember) and promptly swapped out the loan with IBM, creating the concept of the interest rate swap in that period.

In fact, apart form the ATM (which Volcker famously termed as the last financial innovation that was useful to mankind, or something), most financial innovations that you have seen in the last few decades would have come about as a result of some stupid regulation somewhere.

Reading articles such as this one (the one by Levine quoted above) wants me to get back to finance. To get back to finance and work for one of the big boys there. And to be able to design these brilliantly devious trades that smack stupid regulations in the arse! Or maybe I should find myself a job as some kind of a “codebreaker” in a regulatory organisation where I try and find opportunities for arbitrage in any potentially stupid rules that they design (disclosure: I just finished reading Cryptonomicon).

Looking back, while my three years in finance taught me much, and have put me on course for my current career, I think I didn’t do the kind of finance that would give me the most kick. Maybe I’m not too old and I should give it another shot? I won’t rule that one out!

PS: back when I worked for the Giant Squid, a bond trader from Bombay had come down to give a talk. I asked him a question about regulatory arbitrage. He didn’t seem to know what that meant. At that point in time I lost all respect for him.