Tag: volatility

Algo trading and ice cream

I refuse to share ice cream with my daughter, just like I used to refuse to share peanuts with my father. This refusal to share in both cases primarily has to do with the differential speed of consumption.

With my father and peanuts, it was a matter of ability – as someone who had grown up on a peanut farm (and thus he was a fan of Jimmy Carter), he was an expert at shelling peanuts. The Bangalore-born me was much less expert, and so before I knew it he would have finished the lot of it.

With my daughter and ice cream, it is a matter of willingness – she likes to finish it quickly, in big spoons. I like to savour it over a long time – at home,  I use a rather small spoon and eat it slowly. Nowadays I’ve been trying to cut down sugars and so when I eat them I try to get the maximum benefit out of them and thus eat slowly. However, even as a child I would eat my desserts slowly, trying to “extract maximum benefits”.

So last night we were having ice cream (individual small tubs of course). Daughter finished hers quickly and came to me, to see that my tub was still half full (and I was blogging as I was eating it).

“Appa, why do you like to turn your ice cream into milkshake?”, she asked.

“I don’t”, I said, “I just try to get the maximum value out of it, and thus I eat it slowly”.

“But then if you take too long to eat, then it turns into milkshake which is much less enjoyable than ice cream”, she countered. She had a valid point.

And then I realised this is exactly the problem I worked on during my stint as an investment banking quant in 2009-11. I was working on algo trading, specifically execution of large block deals.

The tradeoff there was that if you traded too quickly, you would end up moving the market and thus trading at an unfavourable price. On the other hand, if you traded too slowly, the natural volatility of the stock would mean that the market might move against you. And so you had to balance the two and trade.

I won’t go into the details on how we solved it (my erstwhile bank might not like it), but it suffices to say here that it is similar to eating ice cream.

If you eat too quickly, you run the risk of not getting sufficient “benefit” out of the ice cream at hand. If you eat too slowly, then there is the risk that the ice cream itself will melt and thus be less enjoyable for you.

I tried explaining this analogy to my daughter last night, but she didn’t get it. I guess she is too young to understand risk, volatility, market impact and the like.

And so I’m inflicting this on you!

Dhoni and Japan

Back in MS Dhoni’s heyday, CSK fans would rave about his strategy that they called as “taking it deep”. The idea was that while chasing  a target, Dhoni would initially bat steadily, getting sort of close but increasing the required run rate. And then when it seemed to be getting out of hand, he would start belting, taking the bowlers by surprise and his team to victory.

This happened many times to be recognised by fans as a consistent strategy. Initially it didn’t make sense to me – why was it that he would purposely decrease the average chances of his team’s victory so that he could take them to a heroic chase?

But then, thinking about it, the strategy seems fair – he would never do this in a comfortable chase (where the chase was “in the money”). This would happen only in steep (out of the money) chases. And his idea of “taking it deep” was in terms of increasing the volatility.

Everyone knows that when your option is out of the money, volatility is good for you. Which means an increase in volatility will increase the value of the option.

And that is exactly what Dhoni would do. Keep wickets and let the required rate increase, which would basically increase volatility. And then rely on “mental strength” and “functioning under pressure” to win. It didn’t always succeed, of course (and that it didn’t always fail meant Dhoni wouldn’t come off badly when it failed). However, it was a very good gamble.

We see this kind of a gamble often in chess as well. When a player has a slightly inferior position, he/she decides to increase chances by “mixing it up a bit”. Usually that involves a piece or an exchange sacrifice, in the hope of complicating the position, or creating an imbalance. This, once again, increases volatility, which means increases the chances for the player with the slightly inferior position.

And in the ongoing World Cup, we have seen Japan follow this kind of strategy in football as well. It worked well in games against Germany and Spain, which were a priori better teams than Japan.

In both games, Japan started with a conservative lineup, hoping to keep it tight in the first half and go into half time either level or only one goal behind. And then at half time, they would bring on a couple of fast and tricky players – Ritsu Doan and Kaoru Mitoma. Basically increasing the volatility against an already tired opposition.

And then these high volatility players would do their bit, and as it happened in both games, Japan came back from 0-1 at half time to win 2-1. Basically, having “taken the game deep”, they would go helter skelter (I was conscious to not say “hara kiri” here, since it wasn’t really suicidal). And hit the opposition quickly, and on the break.

Surprisingly, they didn’t follow the same strategy against Croatia, in the pre-quarterfinal, where Doan started the game, and Mitoma came on only in the 64th minute. Maybe they reasoned that Croatia weren’t that much better than them, and so the option wasn’t out of the money enough to increase volatility through the game. As it happened, the game went to penalties (basically deeper than Japan’s usual strategy) where Croatia prevailed.

The difference between Dhoni and Japan is that in Japan’s case, the players who increase the volatility and those who then take advantage are different. In Dhoni’s case, he performs both functions – he first bats steadily to increase vol, and then goes bonkers himself!

Monetising volatility

I’m catching up on old newsletters now – a combination of job and taking my email off what is now my daughter’s iPad means I have a considerable backlog – and I found this gem in Matt Levine’s newsletter from two weeks back  ($; Bloomberg).

“it comes from monetizing volatility, that great yet under-appreciated resource.”

He is talking about equity derivatives, and says that this is “not such a good explanation”. While it may not be such a good explanation when it comes to equity derivatives itself, I think it has tremendous potential outside of finance.

I’m reminded of the first time I was working in the logistics industry (back in 2007). I had what I had thought was a stellar idea, which was basically based on monetising volatility, but given that I was in a company full of logistics and technology and operations research people, and no other derivatives people, I had a hard time convincing anyone of that idea.

My way of “monetising volatility” was rather simple – charge people cancellation fees. In the part of the logistics industry I was working in back then, this was (surprisingly, to me) a particularly novel idea. So how does cancellation fees equate to monetising volatility?

Again it’s due to “unbundling”. Let’s say you purchase a train ticket using advance reservation. You are basically buying two things – the OPTION to travel on that particular day using that particular train, sitting on that particular seat, and the cost of the travel itself.

The genius of the airline industry following the deregulation in the US in the 1980s was that these two costs could be separated. The genius was that charging separately for the travel itself and the option to travel, you can offer the travel itself at a much lower price. Think of the cancellation charge as as the “option premium” for exercising the option to travel.

And you can come up with options with different strike prices, and depending upon the strike price, the value of the option itself changes. Since it is the option to travel, it is like a call option, and so higher the strike price (the price you pay for the travel itself), the lower the price of the option.

This way, you can come up with a repertoire of strike-option combinations – the more you’re willing to pay for cancellation (option premium), the lower the price of the travel itself will be. This is why, for example, the cheapest airline tickets are those that come with close to zero refund on cancellation (though I’ve argued that bringing refunds all the way to zero is not a good idea).

Since there is uncertainty in whether you can travel at all (there are zillions of reasons why you might want to “cancel tickets”), this is basically about monetising this uncertainty or (in finance terms) “monetising volatility”. Rather than the old (regulated) world where cancellation fees were low and travel charges were high (option itself was not monetised), monetising the options (which is basically a price on volatility) meant that airlines could make more money, AND customers could travel cheaper.

It’s like money was being created out of thin air. And that was because we monetised volatility.

I had the same idea for another part of the business, but unfortunately we couldn’t monetise that. My idea was simple – if you charge cancellation fees, our demand will become more predictable (since people won’t chumma book), and this means we will be able to offer a discount. And offering a discount would mean more people would buy this more predictable demand, and in the immortal jargon of Silicon Valley, “a flywheel would be set in motion”.

The idea didn’t fly. Maybe I was too junior. Maybe people were suspicious of my brief background in banking. Maybe most people around me had “too much domain knowledge”. So the idea of charging for cancellation in an industry that traditionally didn’t charge for cancellation didn’t fly at all.

Anyway all of that is history.

Now that I’m back in the industry, it remains to be seen if I can come up with such “brilliant” ideas again.

More On Direct Listings

Regular long-time readers of this blog might know that I’m not a big fan of IPO pops (I’ve written about them at least four times so far: one, two, three and four). You can think of this as Number Five, though this is specifically about Direct Listings.

In case you don’t have patience to click through and read my posts, what is the big deal about direct listings? And what is the problem with traditional IPOs? To put it simply, companies looking to raise capital through IPOs are playing a one-time game (you only do an IPO once), while companies that are investing in them are playing a repeated game (they participate in pretty much every IPO that comes on the market – ok may be not WeWork).

This means that investment banks, which stand between the buyer and the seller in such cases, have an incentive to structure the deal to favour the (repeated) buyers, and they price the IPO conservatively. This means that when the company actually lists on the market, it usually does so at a price higher than the IPO price, resulting in a quick win for the IPO investors.

This is injurious for the original investors in the company (founders, VCs, employees) since they are “leaving money on the table”. A pop of 10-20% is considered fair game (a price for the uncertainty on how the market will react to the IPO), but when MakeMyTrip lists 60% higher, or Beyond Meat lists 160% up, it is a significant loss to the early shareholders.

Over the last few months (possibly after the Beyond Meat IPO), Silicon Valley has woken up to this problem of the IPO pop, and suggested that the middleman (equity capital markets divisions of investment banks) be disintermediated from the IPO process. And their vehicle of choice for disintermediation is the direct listing.

A direct listing is what it is. Rather than raising fresh capital from the market, the company picks an auspicious date and declares that on that date its stock will list on the exchanges. The opening auction in the exchange on that day sets what is effectively the IPO price, and the company is public just like that.

Spotify was among the first well-known companies in recent times to do a direct listing, when it went public in 2018. Earlier this year, Slack did a direct listing as well. Here is Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley (a venture capitalist) on the benefits of a direct listing.

Direct Listing is all well and good when a company doesn’t have to raise capital. The question is how do you go public while at the same time raising capital (which is what a traditional IPO does)? Slack and Spotify were able to do the direct listing because they didn’t want capital from the IPOs – they just wanted to offer liquidity to their investors.

The New York Stock Exchange thinks it can be done, and has proposed a product where companies can use the opening daily auction to price the new shares being offered. There are issues, of course, about things like supply of shares, lock-ups, price support and so on, but the NYSE thinks this can be done.

NYSE’s President Stacey Cunningham recently appeared on the a16z podcast (again run by a VC, notice!) and spoke eloquently about the benefits of direct listing.

The SEC (stock regulator in the US) isn’t very happy with the proposal, and rejected it. Traditional bankers are not happy with the NYSE’s proposal, either, and continue to find problems with it (my main source of this angst is Matt Levine, who is a former ECM Banker and who thus has solid reasons as to why ECM Bankers should exist). In any case, the NYSE has refiled its proposal.

So what is the deal with direct listings?

In a way, you can think about them as a way to simply disintermediate the market. The ECM Banker, after all, is a middleman who stands between the buyer (IPO investor) and seller (company raising capital), helping them come up with a smooth deal, for a fee. The process has been set for about 40 years now, and has become so stable that the sellers think it has become unfair to them. And so there is the backlash.

Until now, the sellers were all independent entities with their own set of investors, and so they were unable to coordinate and express their displeasure with the IPO process. The buyers, on the other hand, play the game repeatedly, and can thus coordinate among themselves and with the middlemen to give themselves a sweet deal.

The development in this decade is that the same set of VC investors invest in a large number of go-to-public companies, and so suddenly you have sellers who are present across deals, and that has changed the game in a sense. And so direct listings are on every tech or investing podcast.

Among the things I wrote in my book (which came out a bit over two years ago) is that one important role that middlemen play is to reduce uncertainty and volatility in the market.

One concern with direct listings is that there can be a wide variation in the valuations by different players in the market, and the opening auction is not an efficient enough process to resolves all these variations. The thing with the Spotify and Slack listings was that there was a broad consensus on the valuation of these companies (more in line with public company valuations), a set of investors who wanted to get in and a set of investors who wanted to get out. And so it all went smoothly.

But what do you do with something like WeWork? The problem with private market valuations is that with players like SoftBank, they can be well divorced from market realities. In WeWork’s case, the range of IPO valuations that came up differed by an order of magnitude. And that kind of difference is not usually reconcilable in one normal opening auction (imagine a bid of 8 billion and an ask of 69 billion, and other numbers somewhere in between) without massive volatility going forward. In that sense, the attempted traditional IPO did a good job of understanding demand and supply and just declaring “no deal”. “No deal” is usually not an option when you do a direct listing.

OK I’ve written a lot I know (this is already 2X the length of my usual blog posts), so what do I really think about IPOs? I think all this talk about direct listings will shift the market ever so slightly in favour of the sellers. Companies will follow a mixed strategy – well known companies (consumer brands, mostly) with stable valuations will go for direct listings. Less well known companies, or those with unstable valuations will go for IPOs.

And in the latter case, I predict that we will move closer to a Dutch auction (like what Google did) among the investors rather than the manual allocation process that ECM bankers indulge in nowadays. It will have the benefit of large blocks being traded at time zero, at a price considered fair by everyone, and hopefully low volatility.

Dimensional analysis in stochastic finance

Yesterday I was reading through Ole Peters’s lecture notes on ergodicity, a topic that I got interested in thanks to my extensive use of Utility Theory in my work nowadays. And I had a revelation – that in standard stochastic finance, mean returns and standard deviation of returns don’t have the same dimensions. Instead, it’s mean returns and the variance of returns that have the same dimensions.

While this might sound counterintuitive, it is not hard to see if you think about it analytically. We will start with what is possibly the most basic equation in stochastic finance, which is the lognormal random walk model of stock prices.

dS = \mu S dt + \sigma S dW

This can be rewritten as

\frac{dS}{S} = \mu dt + \sigma dW

Now, let us look at dimensions. The LHS divides change in stock price by stock price, and is hence dimensionless. So the RHS needs to be dimensionless as well if the equation is to make sense.

It is easy to see that the first term on the RHS is dimensionless – \mu, the average returns or the drift, is defined as “returns per unit time”. So a stock that returns, on average, 10% in a year returns 20% in two years. So returns has dimensions t^{-1}, and multiplying it with dt which has the unit of time renders it dimensionless.

That leaves us with the last term. dW is the Wiener Process, and is defined such that dW^2 = dt. This implies that dW has the dimensions \sqrt{t}. This means that the equation is meaningful if and only if \sigma has dimensions t^{-\frac{1}{2}}, which is the same as saying that \sigma^2 has dimensions \frac{1}{t}, which is the same as the dimensions of the mean returns.

It is not hard to convince yourself that it makes intuitive sense as well. The basic assumption of a random walk is that the variance grows linearly with time (another way of seeing this is that when you add two uncorrelated random variables, their variances add up to give the variance of the sum). From this again, variance has the units of inverse time – the same as the mean.

Finally, speaking of dimensional analysis and Ole Peters, check out his proof of the Pythagoras Theorem using dimensional analysis.

Isn’t it beautiful?

PS: Speaking of dimensional analysis, check out my recent post on stocks and flows and financial ratios.

 

A one in billion trillion event

It seems like capital markets quants have given up on the lognormal model for good, for nobody described Facebook’s stock price drop last Thursday as a “one in a billion trillion event”. For that is the approximate probability of it happening, if we were to assume a lognormal model of the market.

Created using Quantmod package. Data from Yahoo.

Without loss of generality, we will use 90 days trailing data to calculate the mean and volatility of stock returns. As of last Thursday (the day of the fall), the daily mean returns for FB was 0.204%, or an annualised return of 51.5% (as you can see, very impressive!). The daily volatility in the stock (using a 90-day lookback period again) was 1.98%, or an annualised volatility of 31.4% . While it is a tad on the higher side, it is okay considering the annual return of 51.5%.

Now, traditional quantitative finance models have all used a lognormal distribution to represent stock prices, which implies that the distribution of stock price returns is normal. Under such an assumption, the likelihood of a 18.9% drop in the value of Facebook (which is what we saw on Thursday) is very small indeed.

In fact, to be precise, when the stock is returning 0.204% per day with a vol of 1.98% per day, the an 18.9% drop is a 9.7 sigma event. In other words, if the distribution of returns were to be normal, Thursday’s drop is 9 sigmas away from normal. Remember that most quality control systems (admittedly in industrial settings, where faults are indeed governed by a nearly normal distribution) are set for a six sigma limit.

Another way to look at Thursday’s 9.7 sigma event is that again under the normal distribution, the likelihood of seeing this kind of a fall in a day is $math ~10^{-21}$. Or one in a billion trillion. In terms of the number of trading days required for such a fall to arrive at random, it is of the order of a billion billion years, which is an order of magnitude higher than the age of the universe!

In fact, when the 1987 stock market crash (black monday) happened, this was the defence the quants gave for losing their banks’ money – that it was an incredibly improbable event. Now, my reading of the papers nowadays is sketchy, and I mostly consume news via twitter, but I haven’t heard a single such defence from quants who lost money in the Facebook crash. In fact, I haven’t come across too many stories of people who lost money in the crash.

Maybe it’s the power of diversification, and maybe indexing, because of which Facebook is now only a small portion of people’s portfolios. A 20% drop in a stock that is even 10% of your portfolio erodes your wealth by 2%, which is tolerable. What possibly caused traders to jump out of windows on Black Monday was that it was a secular drop in the US market then.

Or maybe it’s that the lessons learnt from Black Monday have been internalised, and included in models 30 years hence (remember that concepts such as volatility smiles and skews, and stochastic volatility, were introduced in the wake of the 1987 crash).

That a 20% drop in one of the five biggest stocks in the United States didn’t make for “human stories” or stories about “one in a billion billion event” is itself a story! Or maybe my reading of the papers is heavily biased!

PostScript

Even after the spectacular drop, the Facebook stock at the time of this update is trading at 168.25, a level last seen exactly 3 months ago – on 26th April, following the last quarter results of Facebook. That barely 3 months’ worth of earnings have been wiped out by such a massive crash suggests that the only people to have lost from the crash are traders who wrote out of the money puts.

Direct listing

So it seems like Swedish music streaming company Spotify is going to do a “direct listing” on the markets. Here is Felix Salmon on why that’s a good move for the company. And in this newsletter, Matt Levine (a former Equity Capital Markets banker) talks about why it’s not.

In a traditional IPO, a company raises money from the “public” in exchange for fresh shares. A few existing shareholders usually cash out at the time of the IPO (offering their shares in addition to the new ones that the company is issuing), but IPOs are primarily a capital raising exercise for the company.

Now, pricing an IPO is tricky business since the company hasn’t been traded yet, and so a company has to enlist investment bankers who, using their experience and investor relations, will “price” the IPO and take care of distributing the fresh stock to new investors. Bankers also typically “underwrite” the IPO, by guaranteeing to buy at the IPO price in case investor demand is low (this almost never happens – pricing is done keeping in mind what investors are willing to pay). I’ve written several posts on this blog on IPO pricing, and here’s the latest (with links to all previous posts on the topic).

In a “direct listing”, no new shares of the company are issued, the stock gets listed on an exchange. It is up to existing shareholders (including employees) to sell stock in order to create action on the exchange. In that sense, it is not a capital raising exercise, but more of an opportunity for shareholders to cash out.

The problem with direct listing is that it can take a while for the market to price the company. When there is an IPO, and shares are allotted to investors, a large number of these allottees want to trade the stock on the day it is listed, and that creates activity in the stock, and an opportunity for the market to express its opinion on the value of the company.

In case of a direct listing, since it’s only a bunch of insiders who have stock to sell, trading volumes in the first few days might be low, and it takes time for the real value to get discovered. There is also a chance that the stock might be highly volatile until this price is discovered (all an IPO does is to compress this time rather significantly).

One reason why Spotify is doing a direct listing is because it doesn’t need new capital – only an avenue to let existing shareholders cash out. The other reason is that the company recently raised capital, and there appears to be a consensus that the valuation at which it was raised – $13 billion – is fair.

Since the company raised capital only recently, the price at which this round of capital was raised will be anchored in the minds of investors, both existing and prospective. Existing shareholders will expect to cash out their shares at a price that leads to this valuation, and new investors will use this valuation as an anchor to place their initial bids. As a result, it is unlikely that the volatility in the stock in initial days of trading will be as high as analysts expect.

In one sense, by announcing it will go public soon after raising its last round of private investment, what Spotify has done is to decouple its capital raising process from the going public process, but keeping them close enough that the price anchor effects are not lost. If things go well (stock volatility is low in initial days), the company might just be setting a trend!

Sweetshop optimisation on festival days

As I mentioned in my earlier post, while Varamahalakshmi Vrata is considered rather minor in my family, it is a rather big deal in my wife’s house. So I headed to a nearby sweetshop called Mane hOLige to fetch sweets for today’s lunch.

Now, this is not a generic sweetshop. As the name suggests, the shop specialises in making hOLige, also known as obbaTT, which is a kind of sweet stuffed flatbread popular in Karnataka and surrounding areas. And as the menu above suggests, this shop makes hOLige (I’ll use that word since the shop uses it, though I’m normally use to calling it “obbaTT”).

I had been to the shop last Sunday to pick up hOLige for a family gettogether, and since I asked for the rather esoteric “50-50 hOLige”, I had to wait for about 30 minutes before it was freshly made and handed over (Sunday also happened to be yet another minor festival called “naagar panchami”).

Perhaps learning from that experience, when heightened demands led to long wait times for customers, the sweetshop decided to modify its operations a little bit today, which I’m impressed enough to blog about.

Now, as the subtitle on the board above says, the shop specialises in “hot live hOLige”. They are presumably not taking VC funding, else I’d imagine they’d call it “on demand hOLige”. You place an order, and the hOLige is made “to order” and then handed to you (either in a paper plate or in an aluminium foil bag, if you’re taking it away). There is one large griddle on which the hOliges are panfried, and I presume the capacity of that griddle has been determined by keeping in mind the average “live” demand.

On a day like Sunday (naagar panchami), though, their calculations all went awry, in the wake of high demand. A serious backlog built up, leading to a crowded shopfront and irate customers (their normal rate of sale doesn’t warrant the setting up of a formal queue). With a bigger festival on today (as I mentioned earlier, Varamahalakshmi Vrata is big enough to be a school holiday. Naagar panchami doesn’t even merit that), the supply chain would get even more messed up if they had not changed their operations for the day.

So, for starters, they decided to cut variety. Rather than offer the 20 different kinds of hOLige they normally offer, they decided to react to the higher demand by restricting choice to two varieties (coconut and dal, the the most popular, and “normal” varieties of hOLige). This meant that demand for each variety got aggregated, and reduced volatility, which meant that…

They could maintain inventory. In the wake of the festival, and consequent high demand, today, they dispensed with the “hot, live” part of their description, and started making the hOLiges to stock (they basically figured out that availability and quick turnaround time were more important than the ‘live’ part today).

And the way they managed the stock was also intelligent. As I had mentioned earlier, some customers prefer to eat the hOLige on the footpath in front of the store, while others (a large majority) prefer to take it away. The store basically decided that it was important to serve fresh hot hOLige to those that were consuming it right there, but there was no such compulsion for the takeaway – after all the hOLige would cool down by the time the latter customers went home.

And so, as I handed over my token and waited (there was still a small wait), I saw people who had asked for hOLige on a plate getting it straight off the griddle. Mine was put into two aluminium foil bags somewhere in the back of the store – presumably stock they’d made earlier that morning.

Rather simple stuff overall, I know, but I’m impressed enough with the ops for it to merit mention on this blog!

Oh, and the hOLige was excellent today, as usual I must say! (my personal favourite there is 50-50 hOLige, if you want to know)

Brexit

My facebook feed nowadays is so full of Brexit that I’m tempted to add my own commentary to it. The way I look at it is in terms of option valuation.

While the UK economy hasn’t been doing badly over the last five years (steady strictly positive growth), this growth hasn’t been uniform and a significant proportion of the population has felt left out.

Now, Brexit can have a negative impact on two counts – first, it can have a direct adverse impact on the UK’s GDP (and also Europe’s GDP). Secondly, it can have an adverse impact by increasing uncertainty.

Uncertainty is in general bad for business, and for the economy as a whole. It implies that people can plan less, which they compensate for by means of building in more slacks and buffers. And these slacks and buffers  will take away resources that could’ve been otherwise used for growth, thus affecting growth more adversely.

While the expected value from volatility is likely to be negative, what volatility does is to shake things up. For someone who is currently “out of the money” (doing badly as things stand), though, volatility gives a chance to get “in the money”. There is an equal chance of going deeper out of the money, of course, but the small chance that volatility can bring them out of water (apologies for mixing metaphors) can make volatility appealing.

So the thing with the UK is that a large section of the population has considered itself to be “out of the money” in the last few years, and sees no respite from the existing slow and steady growth. From this background, volatility is a good thing, and anything that can shake things up deserves its chance!

And hence Brexit. It might lower overall GDP, and bring in volatility, but people hope that the mix of fortunes that stem from this volatility will affect them positively (and the negative effects go to someone else). From this perspective, the vote for Brexit is a vote of optimism, with voters in favour of Leave voting for the best possible outcome for themselves from the resulting mess.

In other words, each voter in the UK seems to have optimised for private best case, and hence voted for Brexit. Collectively, it might seem to be an irrational decision, but once you break it down it’s as rational as it gets!

VC Funding, Ratchets and Optionality

A bug (some call it a “feature”) of taking money from VCs is that it comes in with short optionality. VCs try to protect their investments by introducing “ratchets” which protect them against the reduction in valuation of the investee in later rounds.

As you might expect, valuation guru Aswath Damodaran has a nice post out on how to value these ratchets, and how to figure out a company’s “true valuation” after accounting for the ratchets.

A few months back, I’d mentioned only half in jest that I want to get into the business of advising startups on optionality and helping them value investment offers rationally after pricing in the ratchets, so that their “true valuation” gets maximised.

In a conversation yesterday, however, I figured that this wouldn’t be a great business, and startups wouldn’t want to hire someone like me for valuing the optionality in VC investments. In fact, they wouldn’t want to hire anyone for valuing this optionality.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, startups want to show the highest valuation possible, even if it comes embedded with a short put option. A better valuation gives them bigger press, which has some advertising effect for sales, hiring and future valuations. A larger number always has a larger impact than a smaller number.

Then, startup founders tend to be an incredibly optimistic bunch of people, who are especially bullish about their own company. If they don’t believe enough in the possible success of their idea, they wouldn’t be running their company. As a consequence, they tend to overestimate the probability of their success and underestimate the probability of even a small decrease in future valuation. In fact, the probability of them estimating the latter probability at zero is non-zero.

So as the founders see it, the probability of these put options coming into the money is near-zero. It’s almost like they’re playing a Queen of Hearts strategy. The implicit option premium they get as part of their valuation they see as “free money”, and want to grab it. The strikes and structures don’t matter.

I have no advice left to offer them. But I have some advice for you – given that startups hardly care about optionality, make use of it and write yourself a fat put option in the investment you make. But then this is an illiquid market and there is reputation risk of your option expiring in the money. So tough one there!