The crisis isn’t with the hedge funds, but the banks
As most hedge fund managers will insist, it wasn’t their models that went wrong, it was the market. “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” observed Keynes, and he was right. Quants are suffering as their investors run for the hills.
But if you have the money, you can make a pile.
And that’s just what some people are intending to do. The flip side of rational markets theory is that irrationality in the market is what makes you money. Which is why right now, if you’ve got the dash and the cash, you’re laughing.
New York-based Amida Capital, is planning to set up a special one-year fund, according to a letter to potential investors;
…to capitalise on near-term opportunities caused by summer 2007 delivering, structured products collapse, and model-driven unwinds.
Gartmore announced it had raised an extra $200m on Monday for it’s star fund Alphagen Tucana.
And it’s not just young Turks who are taking advantage. The biggest quants in the markets are “shrugging off concerns” says the FT and setting up new funds. The totemic Renaissance Technologies is launching a $50bn quant fund next month and DE Shaw - another quant giant - is pulling forward the launch of two new funds by four months.
Even the managers of troubled funds know there’s money to be made. Queens Walk Capital, of the Cheyne family, was one of the first funds to hit trouble back in Q1, but its outlook now is rosy, insist its operators. In their results, published Tuesday:
The company is seeing an increasing number of attractive investment opportunities in the European and UK specialised finance area as liquidity in the asset-backed markets is reduced… The investment manager is well positioned in terms of available capital to take advantage of these opportunities.
Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, Synapse’s ABS fund shut down, even though it had no subprime exposure. Its key sponsor, the beleaguered German bank Sachsen, pulled its chips from the table. But Synapses’ manager, Mark Holmon, was adamant that the market had more opportunities than pitfalls. He told Bloomberg:
We are going to look at starting new funds…There are enormous opportunities in the ABS market caused by this enormous deleveraging and we intend to return with a fund that can exploit them.
Bankers will call it hubris, but the prevailing mood is that the problem is not with the hedge funds and their models, but the banks and their liquidity. For while those models may be leading to big losses at the moment, for funds which can stay solvent there may well be big gains in the future when markets snap back - a Martingale market.
So while there’s still plenty of greed left among the hedge community, the banks are tanked on fear.
Perhaps it’s that dislocation which is throwing up some of the staggering asymmetries in the market right now. Shares, for example, are rallying while commercial paper is turning yellow and banks are hardly talking to each other. On the one hand confidence seems restored, while on the other, it’s totally misplaced.