Teil 1 der Serie steht in # 2700
How Funds of Funds Hurt Bear's Hedge Funds By Jim Cramer Street.com Columnist 6/26/2007 8:11 AM EDT
(Fortsetzung):
Enter the fund of funds. Or I should say, the funds of funds. These are pools of capital put together by shrewd individuals and banks that search out funds for their consistency. They love a fund like the one Ralph Cioffi was running for Bear Stearns (BSC) -- the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund -- because it creates no surprises. If it did, these funds would pull out and pull out fast.
A bunch of these funds, including a powerful one from Barclays (BCS), asked Cioffi to put a ton of money, thought to be $500 million, to work with his strategy. In the hunt for an even-bigger return, the funds urged him to set up a second fund (which became the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund) that would buy paper -- shorthand for bonds of mortgages, autos and corporates -- that had lesser ratings, where the potential default was greater.
Some of these were baskets of baskets of loans, called CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), that gave you diversification among a whole set of loans. (I am going to leave out how they work because what matters is that they are just a diversified set of loans of all kinds, with the diversification created to lower risk, just like diversification of stocks.)
Cioffi took in the money in August 2006. Coincidentally, that was a market peak for these kinds of instruments. Think of Cioffi as a guy who bought Nasdaq stocks back in 2000 on margins that were greater than what you can do with stocks. That was the Dumb fund, as I like to call the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund. Now consider a Dumber fund that only bought dot-coms in 2000 -- that's the equivalent of the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund.
Say you get $500 million in each pool. You go to banks and brokers. You "repo" money [Sicherheiten- A.L.] to each of these banks, meaning that you take, say, $50 million to Merrill and get $500 million in return.
So Dumb fund goes and does the equivalent of buying a Nasdaq 100 basket and, to continue the analogy, Dumber fund gets even more concentrated and buys stocks in TheStreet.com's Internet Index (DOT) basket. You could see how someone could say, "Look, the Nasdaq 100 has all kinds of stocks in it, and TheStreet.com DOT has all kinds of dot-coms in it." If you did either strategy from 1998 on, you looked like a genius.
Ralph Cioffi looked like a genius to some of these investors.
Almost immediately, things went south with both of Cioffi's baskets.
What you may not realize when you borrow these sums, as the Dumb and Dumber funds did, is that the lenders are not idiots. They may have been portrayed as idiots through most of the coverage of the resulting mess at Bear Stearns, because they seemed to have been completely blindsided, but in a few weeks' time we will learn they weren't.
Right now, though, I will look like a Pollyanna to the rest of the media about this issue for believing that they saw this coming. Tough. I like truth.
The lenders saw the collapse coming because they saw the scandals. They saw what happened with the now-bankrupt New Century Financial and they watched Accredited Home Lenders (LEND) collapse and they saw what was happening at Fremont General (FMT).
They watched the pieces of paper that Dumb and Dumber had bought lose value. The credit departments that monitor this stuff are tough as nails. They get paid if their banks get paid back. They don't care about commissions and fees -- and Dumb and Dumber generated a lot of fees. No, these departments only care about defaults.
As soon as the lenders saw the baskets start going south, they demanded more collateral than just the $50 million they each had. As they did, Cioffi sold off stronger assets -- the AAA paper in the Dumb fund and whatever was trading well in the Dumber fund -- to meet these margin calls.
Right now, what Cioffi is accused of doing -- and again, it's hard to know what he told investors and what he didn't -- is telling the investors in these funds (hot money, as they are called) that all was well. Remember, they wanted consistency, and I am sure Cioffi and his managers didn't want to let people down.
But they were doing just that.
The performance of both funds was abysmal, because they had bought most of the portfolios they held at the high, and even though many bonds held up in value for Dumb Fund, that was not the case for Dumber. Either way, Cioffi didn't value his funds right.
(If I had run this kind of money back at my old hedge fund, I would have valued the bonds at where they sold them and had an outsider vet the prices. But that's not how these funds were run.)
I could see how he wouldn't, because some of these bonds didn't trade. As long as you didn't have to sell them it didn't matter where you valued them. The more dishonest managers who engage in this practice just either do the equivalent of sticking their fingers in the air or use prices roughly equivalent to what was actually paid.
We stock people find this hard to believe because the prices of our assets are posted publicly every day. If Cisco (CSCO) is valued at $80 in the papers in 2000, it is hard to believe it is worth less than $80.
Bonds aren't like that, particularly these pools of bonds that don't trade all that often. So it's like making Cisco $80 to the buyer but $60 to the seller. If you don't have to sell, you can offer at $80. If you do have to sell, you have to hit the $60 bid.
Again, the media and stock players find this hard to believe. But if you have ever had to sell hard-to-understand-and-trade bonds, as I have, it is possible to value them highly, beyond reason, and make your investors feel good even when they shouldn't. Even when they should have reason to worry.
Did Cioffi lie? I don't know. Wishful thinking? More likely. Bonds do come back.
Now it gets more complicated and murky.
(Fortsetzung folgt morgen)
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