Unstructured Finance

By Matthew Goldstein

 When you think of Cleveland, finance isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.

 If you’re old enough or a rock-and-roll historian, you might say DJ Alan Freed (and i don’t mean DJ as in electronic dance music).1 Or maybe, the old adage  “mistake by the Lake” comes to mind.

But the Cleveland Fed is breaking some new ground with its new and improved financial stress index. In time, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cleveland Financial Stress Index becomes a regular go to index for traders–especially macro and volatility types. And it probably won’t be long before someone is modeling some algo to track the CFSI performance if it hasn’t already been done.

The first notable innovation with the Cleveland stress index which previously had been published monthly, is now being updated daily. The daily updates will give economists and traders a better real-time look at what is going on in the financial landscape with risk building up in the system.

It’s worth noting that the better-known St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index is updated weekly. The Kansas City Fed Financial Stress Index is updated monthly.

Scanning Goldman Sachs’s newly published interactive annual report on Monday, Unstructured Finance had to do a double-take upon seeing American International Group highlighted as a client success story.

Yes, that’s right. AIG.

Goldman’s site features a 3-minute, 47-second video with two investment bankers, Devanshu Dhyani and Andrea Vittorelli, talking about their work on various AIG deals to help repay the U.S. government.

It also has photos of bankers around the globe who were involved with AIG stock sales, stock buybacks and assets sales, including Chris Cole, co-chairman of investment banking; Yan Liu, Ed Byun Dan Dees and Phyllis Luk, bankers based in Hong Kong; and Michael Tesser and Terence Lim, bankers based in New York.

Sometimes it seems that insider trading cases are all about hedge funds. After all, the overwhelming majority of the federal government’s multi-year crackdown on insider trading has netted dozens of traders and analysts working in the $2.25 trillion hedge fund industry.

But this week’s escapades involving a former top audit partner at KPMG and his golfing buddy are reminder that the temptation to profit from inside information exists in many industries and professions.

Still, senior hedge fund reporter Svea Herbst-Bayliss reminds us in the following post,  a recent survey found a good portion of people who labor for hedge funds harbor private doubts about the integrity of their colleagues. If the numbers expressed in this survey are anything close to accurate, law enforcement should be busy for quite a while longer.

The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference – the annual hedge fund blowout better known as SALT, is a month away. And the official agenda for the three-day bacchanal, which sees thousands of hedge fund investors, allocators and hedge fund hangers-on descend on Las Vegas in the second week of May, has been released.

Many regular SALT-goers will tell you, of course, that as the event has grown in popularity its official agenda has become but one part of the conference. A sideshow to goings-on inside the Bellagio are the unofficial meetings going on outside, in the hotel’s poolside cabanas.

But SALT gate-crashers – a growing group of people who don’t pay for tickets to the conference but rock up to the Bellagio to network poolside with SALT’s paying guests – will be disappointed to know that the cabanas are a costly and official part of the event this year. The bungalows were all scooped up by SALT organizers, according two people familiar with the plans, and offered to guests for $20,000 for duration of the conference, as part of a sponsorship package that includes branding and passes to attend the event.

Ronald Reagan famously said that the “nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” But according to a report from SNL, the government may actually help banks when it forces them to add directors to their boards. Every bank CEO’s worst nightmare is having the government name directors to his or her board. Usually, banks pack their boards with clients or prominent people that offer prestige and potential business leads, but little substantive oversight. At the smaller banks that SNL is focusing on, that often amounts to people like the owner of the local car dealership, or the owner of the local golf equipment seller. (For a stereotypical example of a community bank’s directors, consider the board of Smithtown Bancorp, which was sagging under the weight of failed loans before being taken over by People’s United Bank in 2010.)
The Treasury, on the other hand, tends to appoint people with actual banking experience, who can do what board members are supposed to do: keep an eye on management for the benefit of shareholders. The government only does so for banks that have lost their way: the Treasury has the right to name directors to boards of banks that received bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and that missed six quarters of dividend payments. Typically, these appointees are bankers with more than 20 years of experience.
By SNL’s reckoning, the banks with Treasury-appointed directors have racked up median stock gains of 50.38 percent since taking on the new board members, compared with a median gain of 28.22 percent in an index of bank stocks.
Of course there may be other reasons for this outperformance – for example, it may be that small bank stocks in general have outperformed larger bank stocks over the relevant time frame, or that relatively weak banks have been in greater demand from value investors betting on an improving economy. But it may also be that the government has found a fix for the principal-agent problem at banks that have stumbled into trouble.

Michael Steinberg, the SAC Capital Advisers portfolio manager who was arrested at the crack of dawn last Friday morning probably envies former Goldman Sachs trader Matthew Taylor’s rush-hour surrender to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday.

While Steinberg was led away in handcuffs as a Wall Street Journal reporter took shaky video footage of the scene outside his door at 6am, Taylor sauntered into FBI headquarters in New York on his own, at 8:30am, having had plenty of time to collect his wits with a cup of hot coffee.

The difference between Steinberg’s dramatic arrest and Taylor’s quiet surrender highlights a theatrical strategy the FBI and prosecutors use for big cases. It does not bode well for the other potential targets in the high-profile insider trading investigation into Steven A. Cohen’s $15 billion hedge fund, which increasingly seems to be the primary focus of the government’s attempt to go after wrongful trading in the hedge fund industry.

By Matthew Goldstein

SAC Select may not have been one of SAC Capital Advisors’ best-known portfolios during its brief trading history. But the computer-driven trading program may have been one of the more controversial at Steven A. Cohen’s hedge fund.

Setup by a number of SAC Capital’s algo- savvy traders, including Neil Chriss, who left SAC in 2007 to found Hutchin Hill Capital, SAC Select was designed to piggyback on the trades on some of the hedge fund’s top portfolio managers. SAC Select, which at its peak in 2008 managed about $4.2 billion in hedge fund assets, was discontinued sometime in 2009 or early 2010. The strategy was intended as an added investment benefit for long-time SAC Capital clients.

But SAC Select was always controversial within Cohen’s empire because portfolio managers essentially viewed it as a platform simply copying some of their best ideas, say several people familiar with the strategy. Two people familiar with it said it “pissed off” the human traders at SAC.  Cohen is said to have countered that the computer program was not much different then PMs at SAC being regularly required to share their best “high conviction” trading ideas with Cohen each week.

Reuters reported on Friday that the Federal Reserve is taking a closer look at precisely how Wall Street CEOs get paid. This week, the SEC released correspondence between itself and Morgan Stanley that sheds some more light on the topic, and suggests that the Fed isn’t the only one questioning how bonuses are calculated. The SEC gets good marks for effort here, but the final result may leave Morgan Stanley shareholders unsatisfied.

The correspondence is pretty jargon-filled so here is a simpler version of what was said, in Unstructured Finance’s own words:

SEC: You say you don’t set any specific targets for bonuses, but then you cut CEO James Gorman’s pay 25 percent  because his performance wasn’t up to snuff. So, uh, how do you figure out that math? (June 22, 2012)

Something must be in the water over at 399 Park Avenue, where Daniel Loeb’s hedge fund Third Point is headquartered. His Third Point Ultra fund has already gained 12.42 percent this year through the 13th of March, according to data from HSBC’s Private Bank.

The portfolio added 3.3 percent alone between March 1 and March 13. By comparison, hedge funds have returned about 4 percent year-to-date, according to HSBC.

The roughly $1.7 billion Ultra portfolio is a levered version of the firm’s flagship Offshore fund, which manages about $5.7 billion and has gained 8.5 percent over the same period.

By Matthew Goldstein

It’s no secret that housing in the U.S. has become an investors market, especially if it’s an investor with cash to burn.

For more than a year now, we and just about everyone else in the financial media have been writing about how Wall Street-backed firms are looking to buy-up the wreckage of the housing bust on the cheap and rent out those homes until the time is right to sell them for a sweet profit. And it should come as no surprise that much of that buying is being done with cash because it’s the easiest way for an investor get a deal done quick.

Recent stats from the National Association of Realtors shows that 32 percent of all single family homes in the U.S. are being bought with that cash. But that’s not just foreclosures; it also includes homes listed by brokers. It’s a testament to how much money institutional investors like Blackstone and American Homes 4 Rent have been able to raise from high-net worth investors and others. all of whom are chasing yield in this low-yield world.