Tag: structured products

Suckers still exist

Matt Levine’s latest newsletter describes a sucker of a trade:

 

  1. You give Citigroup Inc. $1,000, when Amazon.com’s stock is at $1,339.60.
  2. At the end of each quarter for the next three years, Citi looks at Amazon’s stock price. If it’s at or below $1,339.60, Citi sends you $25 and the trade continues. If it’s above $1,339.60, Citi sends you back your $1,000 and the trade is over.
  3. At the end of the three years, Citi looks at Amazon’s stock price. If it’s above $1,004.70 (75 percent of the initial stock price), then Citi sends you $1,025 and the trade is over. But if it’s below $1,004.70, you eat the full amount of the loss: For instance, if Amazon’s stock price is $803.80 (60 percent of the initial stock price), then you lose 40 percent of your money, and get back only $600. Citi keeps the rest. (You get to keep all the premiums, though.)

Anyone with half a brain should know that this is not a great trade.

For starters, it gives the client (usually a hedge fund or a pension fund or someone who represents rich guys) a small limited upside (of 10% per year for three years), while giving unlimited downside if Amazon lost over 25% in 3 years.

Then, the trade has a “knock out” (gets unwound with Citigroup paying back the client the principal) clause, with the strike price of the knockout being exactly the Amazon share price on the day the contract came into force. And given that Amazon has been on a strong bull run for a while now, it seems like a strange price at which to put a knock out clause. In other words, there is a high probability that the trade gets “knocked out” soon after it comes into existence, with the client having paid up all the transaction costs (3.5% of the principal in fees).

Despite this being such a shitty deal, Levine reports that Citigroup sold $16.3 million worth of these “notes”. While that is not a large amount, it is significant that nearly ten years after the financial crisis, there are still suckers out there, whom clever salespersons in investment banks can con into buying such shitty notes. It seems institutional memory is short (or these clients are located in states in the US where marijuana is legal).

I mean, who even buys structured notes nowadays?

PS: Speaking of suckers, I recently got to know of the existence of a school in Mumbai named “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour“. Splendid.

Travel agents and investment bankers

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that travel agents perform a very similar role to investment bankers. In the olden days, not everyone had access to financial markets. In order to buy or sell stocks, one had to go through a brokerage company, who would be paid a hefty commission for his services. The markets weren’t that liquid, and they were definitely not transparent, so the brokers would make a killing on the spread. With the passage of time, advent of electronic trading and transparency in the markets brokers aren’t able to make the same spreads that they used to. Customers know the exact market price for the instruments they are trading, and this results in brokers not able to make too much out of these trades.

It is a similar case with travel agents. Vacation markets (flights, hotels, etc.) are nowhere as liquid as financial markets, and will never be. Sometimes, when you are booking holidays to a strange place, you know little about it, and hence commission a travel agent to find you a place to stay there. Given that you know little about that place, the agent can charge you hefty commissions, and make a nice spread. Of course, nowadays such opportunities are diminishing for agents, as you have websites such as Agoda which allow you to book hotels directly. Now, at one place you can compare the prices of different hotels, and have better information compared to what the agents traditionally offer you. The spread is on the downswing, I must think.

Then, don’t you think package tours are very similar to structured products? Structured products are nothing but a package of several risks packaged together. By acting as a counterparty on a structured product, a bank (even now ) can afford to charge fairly hefty fees. Structured products are illiquid,  and there is no publicly available “market price”, so it is easy for banks to make themselves good spreads on such products. However, all it takes to defeat this is an intelligent customer. All the customer needs to do is to try and understand the risks himself, and start “unbundling” them. Once he unbundles the risks, he can now trade each of them independently, on more liquid markets, and get a much better price than what bankers will offer him. The catch here is that he’ll need to put in that effort in unbundling.

It’s the same with package tours. Given the bundles, it is easy for the agents to make higher spreads. However, if you as a customer simply unbundle the package (hotels, transport, food, etc.), you can find out the price of each (available on sites like agoda and elsewhere) and find out for yourself the spread that the agent is making. And then you compare the agent’s premium with the “cost” of making all the bookings yourself and make an informed choice.

Apart from communication, among the greatest boons of the internet has to do with dismantling middleman monopolies. It is incredible how much use a little information can be of!