"Question unchallenged assumptions" - Unknown/Anonymous
January 15, 2015 Leave a comment
A certain man with a healthy dose of mojo is believed to have coined/popularized the term ‘inhuman volatility’. The term seemed quite appropriate to describe recent action in oil land… then the Swiss Franch happened. Today. I’m writing this post for my own reference, and for posterity’s sake. I may followup and update this post with graphs/tables to illustrate the historical rarity of today’s move(s).
January 8, 2015 Leave a comment
Critique of my ‘Considerations for 2014′, as written originally here http://thelongshorttrader.com/2013/12/28/946/ )
Considerations for 2015
November 24, 2014 Leave a comment
Stanford Commencement Address 2005:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path. And that will make all the difference.” - Steve Jobs
November 2, 2014 2 Comments
”The moral of this story is that irrational markets can kill you,” said one Wall Street analyst who has dealt with both men. ”Julian said, ‘This is irrational and I won’t play,’ and they carried him out feet first. Druckenmiller said, ‘This is irrational and I will play,’ and they carried him out feet first.”
It seems the ability to take losses, and survive to fight another day (and preserve swagger/confidence amidst losses) is quite critical:
It’s not clear how the Soros funds performed by year end 2000 (or 2001), but the above from http://www.colorado.edu/economics/courses/econ2020/4111/articles/soros-fund.html seems like an excellent read, for the purposes of understanding taking losses (as soon as possible).
”The moral of this story is that irrational markets can kill you,” said one Wall Street analyst who has dealt with both men. ”Julian said, ‘This is irrational and I won’t play,’ and they carried him out feet first. Druckenmiller said, ‘This is irrational and I will play,’ and they carried him out feet first.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - May 22, 2000
NEW YORK — For months, through late 1999 and early 2000, the Monday afternoon research meetings at George Soros’s hedge-fund firm centered on a single theme: how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off of technology stocks.
Stanley Druckenmiller, in charge of the celebrated funds, sat at the head of a long table in a room overlooking Central Park. Almost as if reading from a script, he would begin the weekly meetings with a warning that the sell-off could be near and could be brutal. For the next hour, the group would debate what signs to look for, what stocks to sell, how fast to sell them.
“I don’t like this market. I think we should probably lighten up. I don’t want to go out like Steinhardt,” Mr. Druckenmiller said in early March as the market soared, according to people present at the time. He was referring to Michael Steinhardt, who ended an illustrious hedge-fund career in 1995, a year after suffering big losses.
Mr. Soros himself, often traveling abroad, would regularly phone his top lieutenants, warning that tech stocks were a bubble set to burst.
For all this, when the sell-off finally did begin in mid-March, Soros Fund Management wasn’t ready for it. Still loaded with high-tech and biotechnology stocks and still betting against the so-called Old Economy, Soros traders watched in horror when the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index plunged 124 points on March 15 while the once-quiescent Dow Jones Industrial Average leapt 320 points. In just five subsequent days, the Soros firm’s flagship Quantum Fund saw what had been a 2% year-to-date gain turn into an 11% loss.
“Can you believe this? This is what we talked about!” cried a senior trader amid the carnage. Others on the firm’s gloomy trading floor busied themselves calculating how much they had lost by aping Soros investments in their own accounts.
Aside from an April 28 news conference about the firm’s agonies and brief interviews afterward, the secretive Mr. Soros and Mr. Druckenmiller, long his No. 2, have said little about the period leading up to the humbling disclosure of the problems. An account pieced together from interviews with a dozen Soros insiders and managers of other hedge funds — private pools of investment capital — shows two longtime friends and colleagues increasingly at odds until it all became too much.
As the losses piled up, tension inside the firm grew, with Mr. Soros second guessing the traders who had made him billions of dollars in the past decade. Soros executives say they overheard heated arguments, as Mr. Soros pressed Mr. Druckenmiller to bail out of some swooning Internet stocks before they sank even further, while Mr. Druckenmiller insisted that the funds hold on.
During the worst of this period, it happened that the Soros offices were consumed by a powerful burning smell as electrical work on the floor above kept starting small fires and setting off deafening alarms. The smoke and racket and the dizzy headaches they caused seemed “like a divine message,” recalls one Soros executive of the bizarre office scene. “We almost wished it would burn down.”
By the end of April, the Quantum Fund was down 22% since the start of the year, and the smaller Quota Fund was down 32%. Mr. Soros had stated in a 1995 autobiography that he was “up there” with the world’s greatest money managers, but added, “How long I will stay there is another question.” Now came an answer. Both Mr. Druckenmiller and Quota Fund chief Nicholas Roditi resigned. Mr. Soros unveiled a new, lower-risk investing style — completely out of character for him — and conceded that even he found it hard to navigate today’s murky markets.
“Maybe I don’t understand the market,” a reflective Mr. Soros said at the April 28 news conference. “Maybe the music has stopped, but people are still dancing.”
Messrs. Soros and Druckenmiller are just the latest legendary investors whose reputations have been affected by this unusual market. Two others, Warren Buffet and Julian Robertson, suffered for not embracing the late-1990s fads of tech stocks and momentum investing, as those approaches proved winners while blue-chip investing languished. Mr. Buffett stuck it out and has seen his Old Economy stocks make something of a comeback. But Mr. Robertson gave up on his Tiger Management hedge fund in March — just as the winds were shifting.
No pedestal was higher than Mr. Soros’s. A Hungarian refugee from the Holocaust, Mr. Soros, now 69 years old, started as a stock-picker in the late 1960s, graduating to “macro” investing, or betting on the broad trends that move stocks, bonds and currencies across the globe. His style was to wait for big changes in the markets, then take advantage with aggressive moves.
He turned the reins of Soros Fund Management over to Mr. Druckenmiller in 1989 to concentrate on philanthropy, though he continued to keep close tabs on the funds. The firm continued to rack up huge gains, creating awe among competitors. Its funds grew so powerful, using borrowed money to magnify their results, that their investments moved markets, and their giant bets could be self-fulfilling.
In the summer of 1992, it became known that Soros funds were selling the British pound short, betting on a decline. Hearing this, other investors quickly started doing the same. “We didn’t like the pound either, but when we heard that Soros was selling, we reinforced our positions,” recalls Ezra Zask, who made several million dollars from the trade for his own, smaller hedge fund. Such piggyback trading helped Soros funds rack up $2 billion in gains and earn Mr. Soros the label of “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
Just a hint of what Soros funds might be doing had impact. One morning in the summer of 1993, Gary Evans, then head of emerging-market bond trading at Kidder, Peabody & Co., heard that Soros funds were buying Peru’s currency. He ordered his traders to buy Peruvian bonds, barking that “Soros is getting in — something must be going right there.” Peru’s currency rallied, and Kidder’s bonds jumped about 500% in six months.
The rumors didn’t even have to be true. In late 1997, Hamburg Tang, sitting on a Wall Street trading desk, began getting panicked calls from currency traders saying the Quantum Fund was attacking the Malaysian ringgit. Mr. Tang’s group held more than $100 million in bonds of Malaysian companies, and he cursed Mr. Soros under his breath as they fell steadily for a month, Mr. Tang recalls. Mr. Druckenmiller has since said that the Soros funds actually were buying, not selling, Malaysia’s currency during that time.
Beginning a couple of years ago, though, this outsize influence began to wane. As global markets swelled, Soros assets — even at the $22 billion they then totaled — no longer could move markets so easily, nor necessarily give the firm access to the best information. Power shifted toward money managers such as Janus Capital, once a third-tier mutual-fund group but now a huge one because of its hot performance.
And the Soros funds had some fumbles. They have lost more than $1 billion in the past two years betting that Europe’s new common currency would rise. Instead, the euro has fallen 24% since its introduction Jan. 1 last year. In addition, despite their big-picture focus, the Soros funds haven’t profited from the doubling of world oil prices over the past year or so.
But tech stocks proved their Waterloo. During the first part of 1999, Soros funds were betting big against Internet stocks, in keeping with Mr. Soros’s view that the Internet craze would end badly. As that craze instead kept gathering force, the Quantum Fund found itself down 20% by last July. Mr. Druckenmiller, who was concentrating on investments such as currencies, took back the reins of the stock portfolio. But, calling himself a “dinosaur,” he looked for help.
`Mr. Druckenmiller recruited Carson Levit, a respected money manager who grew up in Silicon Valley and didn’t mind paying sky-high prices for tech stocks. Mr. Soros, however, put Mr. Levit through a grueling eight-hour interview, disagreeing with him time and time again. By the end of the session, Mr. Soros said: “Stan obviously wants to bring you in, but I’m still nervous,” Mr. Levit recalls. “He looked at me like I was sort of a nut.” Still, Mr. Levit was hired to help manage the biggest part of the Soros stock portfolio, soon to be dominated by tech stocks.
And Mr. Druckenmiller warmed to them. Attending Allen & Co.’s annual summit conference of corporate chieftains in Sun Valley, Idaho, last July, he heard a lot of talk about how technology was changing the whole economy. Soon the Soros funds were buying these stocks and selling short some Old Economy stocks. It worked: The Quantum Fund came all the way back to finish 1999 up 35%.
But this meant holding stocks with exorbitant valuations. At one point in February, while watching biotech firm Celera Genomics Group skyrocket, Mr. Druckenmiller turned to a trader and said, “This is insane. I’ve never owned a stock that goes from $40 to $250 in a few months.”
Though he did a bit of selling at the beginning of 2000, he held on to most of those inflated tech stocks, betting that “the Nasdaq rally was in the eighth inning, not the ninth inning.” Few underlings challenged him. “Stan admitted to me that he didn’t quite understand the entire story and was uncomfortable with valuations,” says Richard Eakle, an outside money manager who took part in Soros internal conferences this year. “But everyone was intimidated by Stan. It was a group of yes-men at the meetings.”
So when the hurricane hit in mid-March, the Soros funds were leaning the wrong way: holding lots of tech stocks and shorting the Standard & Poor’s 500 and Old Economy names such as Goodyear and Sears. The market got so volatile it was hard for traders even to figure out their exposure.
Mr. Soros weighed in. “George accelerated the amount of time he was talking to us,” says Mr. Levit. “He was always cordial, but he had a different view and he wasn’t too happy.”
The Soros-Druckenmiller dissension came to a head over VeriSign, an Internet-security company that the funds bought at $50 a share last year and rode to $258 by late February. At Mr. Druckenmiller’s behest, the funds doubled their bet on VeriSign to $600 million in early March, after a visit by VeriSign Chief Executive Stratton Sclavos. The CEO wowed Soros executives with talk of what a pending acquisition of Network Solutions could do, say people familiar with the visit.
VeriSign was at $240 when Mr. Druckenmiller doubled up. As the Nasdaq quaked, the stock fell to $135 by early April. Mr. Soros told his deputy, “VeriSign is going to kill us. We should take our exposure down.”
“No,” Mr. Druckenmiller replied. “This is different than other Internet plays.”
It wasn’t. VeriSign’s shares fell to $96 in April, before coming back to $125 now.
The mood in Soros offices turned bleak. To relieve the tension, traders began to throw Koosh balls around, and Mr. Druckenmiller headed for the gym. But much of the day, he sat slumped in his office, silently watching the market. He had long talked about getting out of the business, but the 47-year-old executive, said to be worth about $1 billion, couldn’t bring himself to do anything.
On vacation with his family at his Palm Beach, Fla., home at the end of March, he couldn’t stop thinking about his troubles. He turned to his wife, Fiona (niece of Morgan Stanley strategist Barton Biggs), and said: “Money is supposed to be enjoyed, but if I can’t enjoy two weeks with my kids, what’s the point of it all?” a witness recalls. He promised her that he would soon quit, saying that he felt jealous of his friend Mr. Robertson.
The discord with Mr. Soros was major part of it. Mr. Soros “rode Stanley, and it came to a head,” says a friend of Mr. Druckenmiller. “A guy of Stanley’s stature and personal wealth didn’t need it.”
On April 18, with the Quantum fund down 20% for the year, Mr. Levit greeted an agitated-looking Mr. Druckenmiller with a “how are you” at 7 a.m. “What do you mean, ‘How am I?’ We just blew up,” Mr. Levit recalls Mr. Druckenmiller saying. “I can’t believe we’re in this mess again.”
That day, Mr. Druckenmiller handed in his resignation, and Soros Fund Management began the process of selling off most of its holdings. Quantum is being renamed Quantum Endowment Fund, with a new strategy of safer investing to help Mr. Soros fund his charitable activities. Some outside investors are pulling out money, and the fund is down to $7.1 billion now. The founder will keep his money in various conservative Soros funds.
As for Mr. Druckenmiller, “It would have been nice to go out on top, like Michael Jordan,” he said at the news conference 10 days later. “But I overplayed my hand.”
October 15, 2014 Leave a comment
Straight from the Horse’s mouth (i.e. Jim Chanos):
I view macro and short selling as skill-based or alpha businesses, whereas equity long/short hedge funds tend to be more of a “marketing of beta” business. I am always amazed that investors will pay 2 and 20 for a manager that is always net long.
I have been saying that for 20 years. It is interesting because I run an alpha-based business and I am more sensitive to it than others. I sit on investment committees and I see it as an investor who advises these funds. When I ask why a lot of hedge fund compensation is simply embedded market risk, I get very uncomfortable, squirming, dodgy answers. Or no answers at all.
Look at 2013. It is crazy to see managers who were up 15 percent command huge checks, when the S&P was up 30 percent. Particularly since they were not balanced completely. They were 90 percent long and 30 percent short, or something like that. Not much alpha has been created by hedge funds, and
what was created has been taken by fees. This has been the case for a long time. In a way, short sellers might still be one of your great bargains out there, at 1 and 20 percent of the alpha. That is the closest I will get to a marketing pitch.
source: Steve Drobny, The New House of Money
A good friend of mine agrees. In his own words, “people confuse brains with a bull market.”
October 2, 2014 2 Comments
I Am a Short Seller
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu, Art of War
My name is Daniel, and I am a short seller. I became aware of this truth and came to accept it several years ago. I do not think I ‘chose’ to become one, nor did anyone ‘teach’ me to become one*. In this regard, I agree with Jim Chanos, Marc Cohodes, and others, who believe short sellers are not ‘made’, but rather ‘born’. You are one, or you’re not. Plain and simple. Since then, I’ve fully accepted and embraced the fact I’m a short seller. I’ve experienced my share of losses and victories, but overall, I’ve enjoyed the ride. I still have plenty more to learn about the art of short selling, and am cautiously optimistic I will get better with time. With that said…
*With that said, I am grateful for the on-going mentor-ship and friend-ship that several have provided me. I believe they have played a critical role in my maturation as an analyst, short seller, and overall investor. I also believe they have helped me grow, personally.
I Aim to Become an Excellent, Overall Trader and Investor
“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” - Confucius
There are three short sellers - I will refer to them as A, B, and C - who, in their own unique ways, have been encouraging me to strive to be an overall excellent investor (i.e. to learn to go long). Fortunately, this is a desire that I have finally begun to desire for myself. I do not know if I am meant to become competent/excellent at buying stocks, or if I am fated to be a ‘dedicated specialist’ for the rest of my life.
A - I thank A (over a series of conversations) for helping me develop a firm intellectual grasp of the risk/reward characteristics of going long vs. short. For example, the mechanics of a short or long position going against you, risk management, position sizing, scale-ability, the pressures of managing OPM, etc. The reasoning and philosophy underlying selecting longs, shorts, and building portfolios consisting of both. I also thank A for helping me see the need to learn how to buy/long things. A made it clear and convinced me that this is a MUST.
Finally, A made it clear to me that great long-term investing is about finding great businesses (preferably with great management), whereas short selling is about finding terrible people (preferably running terrible businesses).
B - Whereas A really helped me build a solid intellectual foundation , B has helped me primarily “learn by doing”. B has periodically mentioned long ideas that get him really excited (they are not common), and articulated long theses in ways that I can understand and get comfortable. I would say that B is exceptionally good at buying event-driven / special situation longs that have high chance of winning regardless of the overall market environment. I think every single long idea he has mentioned has led to positive P&L (he rarely talks longs). I can’t think of a long idea he has mentioned that has lost money (at least up to the point of the ‘events’ and/or ‘triggers’ he has identified).
I don’t know if B realizes, but in an indirect way, I’ve also learned a lot about longs/investing by B’s comments on short selling. For example, B has often told me “that is not the kind of company you short”, “short sellers do not short ___” (I remember him saying this about Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla) … after observing the times he has said that, I’ve come to realize that these types of names that may seem like good shorts superficially, tend to actually be excellent longs in pullbacks. I don’t think B is saying they can’t work as shorts (from a trading perspective), but at best, they’re singles… not home-runs. So why waste time on them?
C - Like B, C has told me that I must learn to go long. He has warned that otherwise, there’s always the risk of going insane, or encountering financial hardship. Whereas A and B have fully engaged my head (when it comes to buying stocks), C has engaged my heart. I feel inspired to become excellent at picking longs, and therefore, become an excellent overall investor. C started out dedicated to short-selling. Over the course of time, he has proven to be an excellent investor. He is living proof that it can be done, and that inspires me. It can be done! C also told me something I suspected: I must find niches on the long side that I can put my heart into. Like shorts, I need to develop a personal passion for certain kinds of longs, and no one can teach me that. As a matter of practicality, C told me that it is far more desirable to focus on finding great businesses rather than statistically cheap(looking) ones.
Investing Lessons I’ve Learned the HARD WAY
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein
“Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” - George Soros
When it comes to researching longs, I’m probably a C- analyst (currently, speaking). When it comes to trading longs, B- (when it comes to researching and trading shorts, I’ll let others opine). Bear in mind, I was once an F- analyst and F- trader/investor in longs. In fact, most my longs between 2005-2008 were TERRIBLE. If you were short all my longs in that period, you would’ve made 80+% over that period. It took me a long time to realize, accept, and forgive myself of the mistakes I made. In fact, this process of introspection led me to realize I was a short seller.
Here are some of the (painful) lessons I’ve learned, on the long side:
The Present, The Future, and Prospective (Current) Long Opportunities
“The journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”
If I were to judge/grade my longs between 2010 - Present… NOT BAD. Definitely MUCH BETTER vs. my longs in 2005-2009. My P&L on longs has been positive over that time period. My batting average is way above zero (I think over 50%). My single biggest mistakes I’ve made time and time again on the long side in the last 4 years… not holding positions for sufficient time.
Some areas that interest me on the long side (I may be long or may initiate long positions in the following):
I am fully aware that most of the above are down/cheap(looking) for a reason, and face risk of additional impairment (perhaps even permanent impairment). That is why I am cautiously evaluating.
I am also seeking to divert my attention away from statistically depressed/cheap looking stocks, and focus on finding great businesses (and then determining if they are sensibly priced, or wait for opportunities to buy them at sensible prices). Admittedly, I have tended to focus more on whether a security is depressed rather than whether its underlying business is a great one that will remain great or perhaps even become greater, in time.
The impression I get from A, B, and C is that it is a better strategy to find great businesses, and then wait to buy them at sensible prices, vs. any other approach. Practically speaking, I think this will require spending less time observing securities prices, and more time observing the real world, people, and the world of commerce.
Time will tell if I am able to do this, and be able to get passionate about it.
September 16, 2014 Leave a comment
I considered going long Transocean (“RIG”) in fall 2011, and did so (briefly) for a trade. It would not have been a bad investment had I stayed on. I am re-visiting RIG as a long through the end of the year, and may initiate a long (and update this post) at any time. Per @mmtul:
RIG the pig, below ’08 lows. Well done! For the past 20 years, P/B range = 0.7 to 4.1. Currently 0.77. What do you think, Carl [Icahn]?
I initiated a long earlier today, and (accidentally via ‘fat finger’) put on a position 10x larger than I had intended. I closed it (fortunately, not at a loss) to re-evaluate. I may start building a long position tomorrow.
A few things that interest me and are worthy of further examination:
