Archives of “hedge fund” tag

rss

Warren Buffett: How I Choose The Next Person To Run Berkshire Hathaway

  
Analysis, Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

“Four years ago, I told you that we needed to add one or more younger investment managers to carry on when Charlie, Lou and I weren’t around. At that time we had multiple outstanding candidates immediately available for my CEO job (as we do now), but we did not have backup in the investment area.

It’s easy to identify many investment managers with great recent records. But past results, though important, do not suffice when prospective performance is being judged. How the record has been achieved is crucial, as is the manager’s understanding of – and sensitivity to – risk (which in no way should be measured by beta, the choice of too many academics). In respect to the risk criterion, we were looking for someone with a hard-to-evaluate skill: the ability to anticipate the effects of economic scenarios not previously observed. Finally, we wanted someone who would regard working for Berkshire as far more than a job.

When Charlie and I met Todd Combs, we knew he fit our requirements. Todd, as was the case with Lou, will be paid a salary plus a contingent payment based on his performance relative to the S&P. We have arrangements in place for deferrals and carryforwards that will prevent see-saw performance being met by undeserved payments. The hedge-fund world has witnessed some terrible behavior by general partners who have received huge payouts on the upside and who then, when bad results occurred, have walked away rich, with their limited partners losing back their earlier gains. Sometimes these same general partners thereafter quickly started another fund so that they could immediately participate in future profits without having to overcome their past losses. Investors who put money with such managers should be labeled patsies, not partners. (more…)

Gasparino Says Goldman Settlement Likely To Be Between $1-$5 Billion (GS)

  
Analysis, Education, Global Indices
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Fox Business News’ Charlie Gasparino is reporting that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) will likely settle the civil fraud case brought against the firm by the SEC for between $1 billion and $5 billion.

Goldman (GS) has been accused of misleading clients with regard to a synthetic CDO that the firm structured at the behest of hedge fund Paulson & Co. and subsequently sold to a German bank. Paulson took the short side of the trade.

Above is the 5 minute Line chart ,Just while updating look its freefall in stock.

Just see my targets for these stock ,I had written last week.Search now.

Updated at 20:36/6th May/Baroda

Five Market Wizard Lessons

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

“Five Market Wizard Lessons” 
Hedge Fund Market Wizards is ultimately a search for insights to be drawn from the most successful market practitioners. The last chapter distills the wisdom of the 15 skilled traders interviewed into 40 key market lessons. A sampling is provided below:

1. There Is No Holy Grail in Trading
Many traders mistakenly believe that there is some single solution to defining market behavior. Not only is there no single solution to the markets, but those solutions that do exist are continually changing. The range of the methods used by the traders interviewed in Hedge Fund Market Wizards, some of which are even polar opposites, is a testament to the diversity of possible approaches. There are a multitude of ways to be successful in the markets, albeit they are all hard to find and achieve.

2. Don’t Confuse the Concepts of Winning and Losing Trades with Good and Bad Trades
A good trade can lose money, and a bad trade can make money. Even the best trading processes will lose a certain percentage of the time. There is no way of knowing a priori which individual trade will make money. As long as a trade adhered to a process with a positive edge, it is a good trade, regardless of whether it wins or loses because if similar trades are repeated multiple times, they will come out ahead. Conversely, a trade that is taken as a gamble is a bad trade regardless of whether it wins or loses because over time such trades will lose money. (more…)

Cost of Mistakes

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Overconfidence is a very serious problem, but you probably don’t think it affects you. That’s the tricky thing with overconfidence: the people who are most overconfident are the ones least likely to recognize it. We tend to think of it as someone else’s problem.

When it comes to investing, however, we all have a problem.

As we become more and more confident we become willing to take on more and more risk. Why? We start seeing risky behavior as, well, less risky. But the reality is that as the level of overconfidence increases, the cost of our mistakes increase as well. (more…)

The Great Trades Are Obvious

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

“The great trades don’t require predictions. The Soros trade of going short the pound in 1992 was based on something that had already happened — an ongoing deep recession that made it inevitable that the U.K. would not maintain the high interest rates required by remaining in the E.R.M. Afterward, everyone said, “That was incredibly obvious.”

“Most of the great trades are incredibly obvious. It was the same in late 2007. In my mind, it was clear that the financial system was imploding and that most market participants hadn’t noticed.”

– Colm O’ Shea, Hedge Fund Market Wizards

New Glossary of Finance Terms

  
Education, Humour
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

glossaryBonus:  A form of extortion whereby employees of a company extract either shareholder or taxpayer money for their own pleasure regardless of the success or failure of said company.

Derivatives:  Trading vehicles created by over-educated  finance professionals for whom speculating in stocks and bonds was not quite risky or volatile enough.

Bulge Bracket Firm:  A Wall Street investment bank that is literally “bulging” with off-balance sheet leverage and bloated pay packages for the architects of said leverage.  They used to be referred to as “Too Big to Fail”, circa 2007-2008; they are now extinct.

Credit Ratings:  These are fictitious opinions of health and financial strength that are sold to the highest bidder.  The business of assigning credit ratings to bonds is similar to the business of receiving payola at a radio station for playing a particular record more often than others.  

Department of the Treasury:  This is a government agency in charge of rescuing companies and executives who make bad decisions or investments.  Oh yeah, another minor function they serve is printing the nations currency.

Federal Reserve:  An institution that ensures the inflation and subsequent bursting of asset bubbles roughly every 7 years.

Hedge Fund:  A betting pool, similar to a group of employees or friends who all contribute their money to a pot and buy lottery tickets.  Only in this case, a few of the participants charge everyone else involved a fee for picking which lotto numbers they will play. (more…)

Damn Algorithms

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

What more is left to say at this point other than the fact that the hedge fund computers and their damnable algorithms have destroyed the integrity of the US futures markets. The sheer size, extent, ferocity and volatility of the moves that these pestilential computers are creating have rendered these markets basically useless for what they originally came into being for, namely, risk management for commercial entities.

—I am predicting here and now that unless something is done to corral these hedge funds, the futures market is going to become useless as a risk management tool for non-speculative entities.

—Maybe we all should just go the hell to sleep and wake up in a year and see if the chart has actually gone anywhere besides up and down like a stinking yo-yo.

Human decisions blamed for market rout

  
Analysis, Education
#  #  #  #

Human decisions to sell stocks may have been behind the August rout for equity markets after all, with hedge fund and mutual fund managers selling in response to turbulence and fears for the Chinese economy.

The conclusion, based on work by strategists at JPMorgan, is a riposte to those who have attempted to blame esoteric trading strategies such as “risk parity” for the size and speed of the summer correction.

“Discretionary managers were likely the ones responsible for the recent equity market sell-off,” said Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, global asset allocation strategist for the bank, in a note to clients.

Macro hedge funds and balanced mutual funds, both of which can invest in a variety of asset classes, took abrupt steps to reduce the risk of stock market losses during the month. The aggregate equity beta of portfolios, a measure of the relationship between equity index movements and those for individual investment funds, declined sharply in August.

The bank also found betas for so-called long-short hedge funds, stock market specialists, declined sharply in August as managers reacted to volatility by paring bets. JPMorgan’s work is based on a regression analysis of index movements, such as the HFRX, a hedge fund benchmark, as a proxy for fund holdings. (more…)

Key Lessons For All Traders

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Find a Trading Method That Fits Your Personality

Traders must find a methodology that fits their own beliefs and talents. A sound methodology that is very successful for one trader can be a poor fit and a losing strategy for another trader. Colm O’Shea, one of the global macro managers I interviewed, lucidly expressed this concept in answer to the question of whether trading skill could be taught:

If I try to teach you what I do, you will fail because you are not me. If you hang around me, you will observe what I do, and you may pick up some good habits. But there are a lot of things you will want to do differently. A good friend of mine, who sat next to me for several years, is now managing lots of money at another hedge fund and doing very well. But he is not the same as me. What he learned was not to become me. He became something else. He became him.

Trade Within Your Comfort Zone

If a position is too large, the trader will be prone to exit good trades on inconsequential corrections because fear will dominate the decision process. Steve Clark, an event driven manager, advises, you have to “trade within your emotional capacity.” Similarly, Joe Vidich, a long/short equity manager warns, “Limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment.”

In this sense, a smaller net exposure may actually yield better returns, even if the market ultimately moves in the favorable direction. For example, Martin Taylor, an emerging markets equities manager, came into 2008 with a very large net long exposure in high beta stocks in an increasingly risky market. Uncomfortable with the level of his exposure, Taylor sharply reduced his positions in early January. When the market subsequently plunged later in the month, he was well positioned to increase his long exposure.

Had Taylor remained heavily net long, he might instead have been forced to sell into the market weakness to reduce risk, thereby missing out in fully participating in the subsequent rebound.  (more…)

Jack Schwager’s “Hedge Fund Market Wizards” in Two Paragraphs

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

READANDLEARNNearly every professional Trader will agree that Jack Schwager’s “Market Wizards” series is required reading. And his latest in the series, Hedge Fund Market Wizards, continues the same tradition of excellence. I’ve nearly finished my first read-through. If you are time constrained (and who isn’t) and/or you haven’t yet picked up the book, I may be able to save you some time by offering this brief mock introduction to each Trader that nearly describes every interview in the book:

Over the past 10-15 years, Trader X has achieved an [insert mid-teens to mid-twenties]average annual return. While this return may not sound that impressive, consider that Trader X has never had a drawdown larger than [insert impressive sounding single-digit number]percent! However, Trader X’s Sharpe Ratio is extremely high. How could this be? Well, a shortcoming of the Sharpe Ratio is that it makes no distinction between upside and downside volatility and therefore understates the Trader’s true performance because volatility has been heavily skewed to the upside (which, presumably, most investors wouldn’t have a problem with).

How has Trader X achieved such an impressive Return/Risk track record? He lazer beams extreme focus to risk controls and never risks more than [insert some minuscule number]percent of his total portfolio on any individual trade.  Combining these risk controls with his attention to seeking out asymmetric trading opportunities that have the potential to yield trading gains far in excess of the maximum risked to enter the trade is what separates Trader X from his pedestrian competitors.

There ya go, you’ve basically read all 15 chapters of Hedge Fund Wizards.

Now what do you think you need to focus on?

Go to top