Tag: regulatory arbitrage

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.

High Frequency Trading and Pricing Regulations

It all began with a tweet, moments ago. Degree Raju, a train travel attempter (I don’t know how often he manages to actually travel since he never seems to get tickets) tweeted this:

It is an apt analogy. The reason high frequency trading exists is that there is regulation on what the minimum bid-ask spread needs to be – it needs be at least 1 cent in the US, and at least 5 paise in India (if I’m not wrong). If the best bid (quote to purchase a stock) is at 49.95 and the best ask (quote to sell a stock) is at 50.00, there is nothing you can do to get ahead of the guy who has bid 49.95 – for regulations mean that you cannot bid 49.96!

The consequence of this is that if you want to offer the best bid, at a price close to 49.95, there is no option but for you to be the first person to have bid that amount! And so there is a race among all possible bidders, and in order to win the race you need to be fast, and so you co-locate your servers with the exchange, and so you (and your co-runners) indulge in what is called High Frequency Trading (this is a  rather simplified explanation, and it works).

Tatkal ticket booking has a similar pricing anomaly – the cancellation charges on Indian railways are fixed, and really low. Moreover, fares are static, and are not set according to demand and supply. More moreover, the Indian Railways suffers from chronic under-capacity. The result of all this together is that if you need to get a railway ticket, you should be the first person to put a bid (at a fixed price, of course) for that ticket, and so there is a race among all ticket-buyers!

In case the pricing of railway tickets was more flexible – either dynamic pricing according to demand, or higher cancellation charges (as I’ve noted here), this mad race (pun intended) to buy tatkal tickets would not be there. The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if agents want to get servers co-located with IRCTC servers so that they can procure tickets the fastest.

With HFT in stock prices, if only there were no limit on the minimum tick size – let’s say that a bid or an ask could just be any real number within a reasonable (say 6-digits?) precision, then in order to have the best bid, you need not be the fastest – you can compete on price!

Thus, HFT in stock markets and tatkal ticket booking are two good examples of situations where onerous regulations have led to a race to be the fastest.

And all this ties in with this old theory I have which says that the underlying reason for most financial innovation is stupid regulations. Swaps were invented because the World Bank could not borrow with floating (or was it fixed?) interest rates. CDOs became popular because AAA rated instruments required lower capital provisioning than home loans. Such examples are plentiful..