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Goldman schockiert mit neuer Analyse
Die Hypothekenkrise könnte weitaus dramatischere Folgen für die US-Wirtschaft haben als zunächst angenommen: Ein Bericht der Investmentbank Goldman Sachs kommt auf einen gigantischen Schadensbetrag. FTD.de, Dec 5,2007

 

Banken steuern auf 
Liquiditätsengpass zu 
Von Hans G. Nagl
Nach den Verwerfungen auf den Märkten für die sogenannten Covered Bonds haben zahlreiche Kreditinstitute in den vergangenen Tagen große Emissionen abgeblasen. Dem Bankensektor droht nun ein neuer Liquiditätsengpass - Handelsblatt, Nov 23,2007

 

How Much is $38 Billion? 
by Eric J. Fry 
Business on Wall Street has never been better! Oh sure, earnings have 
tumbled, entire divisions have disappeared and tens of billions of dollars of 
shareholder wealth have vanished from the balance sheets of leading lending 
institutions. Nevertheless, bonuses at the five largest Wall Street firms 
jumped 9% above last year's record-setting tally. 
"Never in the history of Wall Street have so many earned so much in so little 
time," a Newsday columnist remarked one year ago. The columnist was referring to the then-record $36 billion in year-end bonuses that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns dispensed to its employees at the end of 2006. 

 

U.S. Banks Face $10 Billion More Writedowns: Analyst
Large U.S. banks and brokerages will suffer additional writedowns
of more than $10 billion in the fourth quarter as deteriorating credit 
trends continue to undercut the value of subprime mortgages and
related securities, a Deutsche Bank analyst said. CNBC, Nov 2,2007

 

Gold Futures Climb Above $800 as Credit Concerns Spark Demand for Haven Gold rose 2 percent to close above $800 an ounce in New York for the first time since Jimmy Carter was president on demand from investors seeking a haven from declines in the dollar and U.S. assets. Silver also gained. Bloomberg, Nov 2,2007

Copper Futures Cap Biggest Weekly Loss
in 11 Weeks as Inventories Climb Copper dropped, capping the biggest weekly loss in 11 weeks, as rising inventories spurred concern that demand may be dwindling. Bloomberg, Nov 2,2007

 

Citigroup Stock Plunges On Worries About CapitalThat's a stretch. But speculation that the largest U.S. bank might need to cut its dividend to boost relatively low capital levels is sending some shareholders to the exits. It also helped trigger a huge selloff on Wall Street. CNN November 2,2007

Citigroup reached toptick on December 28,2006 and the secondary top occurred on May 23,2007. JPM reaxched top on May 07,2007 and secondary top on July 17,2007. See Charts>>>

Professional brokerage-house equity-allocation strategists tend to recommend a heavy weighting in stocks just before the market falls and a lighter weighting just before the market advances. This is normal behavior, which itself helps to set the market's highs and lows. 
(Conquer The Crash, 2003, Robert R. Prechter) 

 

Die Experten

Tabula rasa bei der UBS

Immobilien

Montag, 1. Oktober 2007

Die Krise auf dem amerikanischen Hypothekarmarkt reisst die UBS erstmals seit neun Jahren in die Verlustzone. Die grösste Schweizer Bank gab Abschreibungen von vier Milliarden Franken und einen Verlust von bis zu 800 Millionen Franken im dritten Quartal bekannt.

Wer in den letzten Tagen glaubte, die Hypothekar-Krise in den USA sei bereits Geschichte, wird nun eines besseren belehrt. Höchstkurse an den Finanzmärkten und eine Trendumkehr bei den Immobilienmärkten, das passt einfach nicht zusammen.

 

 

 

 

Herding Psychology and Financial Markets

As primitive tool of survival, emotional impulses from the limbic system impel a desire among individuals to seek signals from others in matters of knowledge and behavior and therefore to align their feelings and convictions with those of the group. The desire to belong to and be accepted by the group is particularly powerful in intensely emotional social settings, when it can overwhelm the higher brain functions. The less that reality intrudes on the thinking of a group, the stronger is its collective conformity. Dependence most easily substitutes for rigorous reasoning when knowledge is lacking or logic irrelevant. In a realm such as investing, where so few are knowledgeable, or in a realm such as fads and fashion, where logic is inappropriate and the whole points is to impress other people, the tendency toward dependence is pervasive. Trends in such activities are steered not by decisions of individual minds but by the peculiar collective sensibilities of the herd. In the 1920s, Cambridge economist A.C. Pigou connected cooperative social dynamics to booms and depression. 

His idea is that individuals routinely correct their own errors of thought when operating alone but abdicate their responsibility to do so in matters that have strong social agreement, regardless of the egregiousness of the ideational error. In the realm of finance, as R.N. Elliott phrased it, Pigou maintained “that an error of optimism tends to create, throughout the community, a certain measure of psychological dies and gives birth to an error of pessimism.”  In Pigou’s words, “Apart altogether from the financial ties by which different businessmen are bounded together, there exists among them a certain measure of psychological interdependence. A change of tone in one part of the business world diffuses itself, in a quite unreasoning manner, over other and wholly disconnected parts.”  

“Wall Street” certainly shares aspects of crowd, and there is abundant evidence that herding behavior exists among stock market participants. Myriad measures of market optimism and pessimism 4 show that in the aggregate, such sentiments among both the public and financial professionals wax and vane concurrently with the trend and level of the market. This tendency is not simply fairly common; it is ubiquitous. Most people get virtually all of their ideas about financial markets from other people, through newspapers, television, tipsters and analysts, without checking a thing. They think, “Who am I to check? 

These people are supposed to be experts.” Many people are emotionally dependent upon the ticker tape, which simply reports the aggregate short-term decision-making of others. This dependence is nearly universal, even among long-term investors. Financial markets induce a form of hypothesis in most people. Outwardly, they appear rational. Inside, their unconscious is in control. They are driven to follow the herd because they do not have firsthand knowledge adequate to form an independent conviction, which makes them seek wisdom in numbers. 

The unconscious says: You have too little basis upon which to exercise reason; your only alternative is to assume that the herd knows where it’s going. In 1987, three researchers from the University of Arizona and Indiana University conducted a sixty laboratory market simulations using a few as a dozen volunteers, typically economists students but also, in some experiments, professional business men. Despite giving all the participants the same perfect knowledge of coming dividend prospects and then an actual declared dividend at the end of the simulated trading day, which could vary more or less randomly but which would average a certain amount, the subjects in these experiments repeatedly created boom-and-bust market profile. The extremity of that profile was a function of the participants lack of experience in the speculative arena. Head research economist Vernon L. Smith came to this conclusion: “We find that inexperienced traders never trade consistently near fundamental value, and most commonly generate a boom followed by a crash….” 

Groups that have experienced one crash “continue to bubble and crash, but at reduced volume. Groups brought back for
a third trading session tend to trade near fundamental dividend value.” In the real world, “these bubbles and crashes would be a lot less likely if the same traders were in the market all the time,” but novices are always entering the market.  While these experiments were conducted as if participants could actually posses true knowledge of coming events and so-called fundamental value, no such knowledge is available in the real world. The fact that participants create boom-bust pattern anyway is overwhelming evidence of the power of the herding impulse. It is not only novices who fall in line. It is a lesser-known fact that the vast majority of professionals herd just like the naïve majority. http://www.socionomics.net

 

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Fantasy Island 
By Bill Bonner 

You thought the housing crisis was bad in the United States? Wait 'til you see what happens in Britain. 

We thought some new top in conceit had been reached when we saw last week's cover of Country Life magazine in London. 

"Why everyone loves England," was the headline. 

While, the gentry's rag exalts Britain's geographic particularities, the headline might be useful for any publication in the country. The travel press could use it in every issue; everywhere you look, vacationers find something to like about England. The tabloids pull it out to describe illegal aliens sneaking aboard ferries in order to make their way into Britain's robust service industry. And in the financial press, too, that everyone loves England is a practically indispensable headline; it explains why property prices always go up...and why Britain's economy can never go down. 

To put it plainly, we spend the next few minutes explaining why the headline may soon get a rest. 

Today's worldwide boom has been the greatest ever. Its leading industry is finance. And the financial capital of the world is right here in London. 

Ben Bernanke explained the broad outlines of it in his speech in Berlin earlier this week. Over the last few years, he said, oil producers made more money than ever. So too, Asian exporters booked huge surpluses. They were making so much money they didn't know what to do with it all, ending up with a "glut of savings." 

Ben Bernanke didn't mention it, but this wash of foreign savings was further pumped up by an extremely liquid and extremely abundant reserve currency – the dollar. Since Paul Volcker left the Fed, dollars gushed into the world financial system, like sewage into a Chinese lake. And then, whenever the flow threatened to weaken, central bankers rushed to open the valves even wider. 

What to do with all this money? The stars lined up...the heavens smiled. And nowhere was the smile wider and more sincere than over Wall Street's counterpart in Britain, the City. Many rich people moved to London to spend their fortunes. Others turned to London to help hold onto them. What better way to invest it than through London's sleek financial intermediaries? What cooler way to separate a man from his money than with a good accent and an aloof, slightly contemptuous air? 

The money flowed; Britain flourished. But in Britain as in America, it was a strange, fantastical boom – fueled almost entirely by credit, the financial industry...and by foreign money. While the City slicker made his millions, the average Englishman got his own portion of ruinously good luck. His house went up 200% in the last 10 years...twice as fast as houses in America. And now the poor man is delusional; he thinks it will never end. 

"The City generates so much wealth," he says. 

But what the financial industry really generates is wealth for a few and debt for many. And now, according to Grant Thornton, British debt has surpassed total GDP – a milestone. Most of the debt is in the housing sector, which has pushed up prices in Britain far higher than those in America, and made the U.K. even more vulnerable to a downturn. The ratio of housing prices to disposable income – a fairly stable figure in the United States – is a rollercoaster in Britain. Today, it is at its highest level ever...with the last major peak in '89. And Fitch estimates that U.K. house prices are 20% overvalued, and that Britain is one of the three most vulnerable to a house price crash/correction (after NZ and Denmark). 

In America, the National Association of Home Builders says market conditions are the worst in 27 years. Its index of prospective buyers – a leading indicator – is at its lowest level ever. Housing has held up consumer spending and consumer spending has held up the economy. Owners "took out" equity (Mortgage Equity Withdrawal or MEW) in order to continue spending. (Wages actually went down slightly since 2000). Figures are only available through the first quarter, but they show MEW dropping almost in half from a year previously. That represents an amount of money nearly equal to America's entire GDP growth. 

In America, the subprime borrower loses his house...and the whole economy sags along with housing prices. 

In Britain, it is the Buy-to-Let speculator who threatens to bring down the price structure. He buys his houses – on credit of course – and counts on rental income to pay off the loans. But lenders are now wary...investors are timid...and rates are rising. The spread of three-month LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offer Rate) over the UK base rate has leapt to a record high. Without fees for sticking bad credits on dim investors, the financiers' bonuses are bound to fall and so will the availability of cheap finance. At the margin, the BTL investor is no better off than an American subprime borrower or leveraged hedge-fund hustler. He will have to sell into a declining market in order to stay solvent. Result: falling prices, less MEW, softening sales, rising defaults, failing economy. 

A long string of good luck is hard to recover from. But when the Brits finally get over it, they'll find that everyone won't love England quite so much – not even the English themselves. 

Joel's Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of the national best sellers Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century and Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis

Source: The Daily Reckoning

Sept 14,2007

 

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Schwarze Kassen

Ansehen von Siemens-Chef Kleinfeld durch Affäre beschädigt 

Die Münchner Staatsanwaltschaft hat die fünf verhafteten Verdächtigen freigelassen, 
nachdem sie umfassend ausagten. Der Verdacht auf Untreue hat sich erhärtet - und 
die Affäre trifft messbar die Führung des Konzerns. Die Welt, 23.Dezember 2006 

Siemens-Kunden sind empört 
19. Dezember 2006

Bis vor kurzem stand der Name Siemens in Deutschland für Qualität, für innovative Produkte und für Tradition. Doch mit diesem positiven Bild in der Öffentlichkeit scheint es erst einmal vorbei zu sein.Der Skandal um schwarze Kassen hat viele Menschen verärgert. Besonders zu spüren bekommt das der PC-Produzent Fujitsu Siemens Computers. 

Umdatierte Optionen
Aktienskandal bringt Führung von McAfee und Cnet zu Fall 

Nach Apple hat es zwei weitere bekannte Firmen erwischt: Anti-Virenspezialist McAfee und das Medienunternehmen Cnet sind laut US-Börsenaufsicht tief in den Skandal um vordatierte 
Aktienoptionen verwickelt. Prompt rollen Köpfe. Die Welt, 12.10.2006

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Corporate Scandals

Hedge Fund Considerations

"In 1927-1929, banks formed affiliates for the purpose of exploiting intensively the diverse
opportunities for profit associated with successful stock operations. The additional gains
which accrued from guiding the price upward dulled the bankers' realization of the danger
in such tactics. Though the operation was obscured by the complexity of the process, the
bank was actually engaged in stock rigging. It was easier to advance further sums to assure
the success of the venture, than to write off an initial loss. Before the bank officials realized
the situation, they were so heavily committed that retreat was impossible."

This quote is from the chapter on "Pool Operations" in Ten Years On Wall Street, which came
out in 1932, three years after a Supercycle degree peak capped a 75-year stock market advance.
The S&P Hedge Fund Index gained just 0.13% in the first half of the year, and three funds
"liquidated" in June: Baily Coats, Aman Capital and Marin Capital Partners. Due to a shortfall
in trading revenues, Goldman Sachs' quarterly profits fell for the first time in ten years.

Some regulators see hedge funds "as beneficial, because they assist market liquidity and can
dampen volatility." In fact, it was Alan Greenspan's position as late as May when the 
Financial Times reported that he "extols the hedge fund's ability to make markets more efficient."
In June, however, Greenspan suddenly changed his tune. In an address to the International 
Monetary Conference in Beijing, he stated, "Most of the low-hanging fruit of readily available 
profits has already been picked by the managers of the massive influx of hedge fund capital."

"To hear from Mr.Greenspan, hedge funds are headed for a fall," reported the June 10 issue of 
The Washington Post. The market was unfazed by these remarks, as the Dow rallied a couple
hundred points over the next week. In mid-July, Greenspan offered an even more pointed 
assessment: "Risk takers have been encouraged by a perceived increase in economy stability. 
History cautions that the long periods of relative stability often engender unrealistic expectations
of its performance and, at times, may lead to financial excess and economic stress. Again, 
the market rallied."

The rally in the face of a Greenspan's latest warning, his last major Congressional address, signals
that Act III of the bear market is ready to commence. During the crash of 1929, the editior of 
The New York Times noticed that the "surrender of the professional pools, though they believed 
their positions to be impregnable," contributed greatly to the "successive convulsions" of the
crash. He added that it was , however, only proportional to the duration and extravagance of the
period of illusion." By this metric, the ensuing fall should outdo even that of 1929.

In July, the New York Mercantile Exchange announced a new financial instrument that is so 
purely speculative that it may well mark the highwater mark for derivative "innovation." The 
NYMEX now offers "same day options" in natural gas and crude oil. Each morning's option
buyers can bet on what they expect the near-month settlement price to be at the end of the
trading day. As Howard Simons at Bianco Research puts it, "The person who convinced the
CFTC of the commercial need behind such an option is very underpaid." Oil equities, shares
of stock that trade based on the price of oil, opened on the London Exachange yesterday. The
NYMEX and Philadelphia Stock Exchange are also developing similar "securities" that will
trade based of other commodities. Even commodities are equities now!

While these new trading vehicles may signal the peak, they are not the cause of the decline. As
Conquer The Crash explains, the danger is not with the instruments, but with the "overabundance
of dangerously inexperienced managers." 

In the right hands, many of the trading vehicles created over the course of the topping process
are excellent wealth generation and retention tools. One potentially lasting benefit of the long
topping process, for instance, is the creation of OneChicago, a new exchange that lists futures
on individual stocks. Among the advantages of OneChicago's new futures are low margin
requiremnts, small transaction costs and no uptick rule on the establlishment of short position.
As with S&P futures, single stock futures' absence of time premium decay is their main advantage
over options. The main disadvantage is that the risk of loss is not limited to the amount invested.
The main analytical point is that the extension of derivates has exceeded anything that the financial
architects of 1929 could have imagined in their wildest dreams. (EWFF, July 2005) 


Refco's collapse is the prototype for the new order on Wall Street. It certainly shows how fast
the fallout from bear market psychology canchange things. In just on business week, from October
10 to October 14, Refco, a world leader in the market for derviatives, went from a "$4 billion stock
market darling to carcass." Within another week it became apparent that Refco's bankruptcy mean
that , sadly, investors in some funds, such as Rogers International Raw Material Fund, "won't be
able to get their money out anytime soon." THis is why Conquer the Crash continually urged readers
to "arrange your finances and your life in order to survive the depression." (EWFF, October 2005)




HEDGE, I WIN...FAILS, YOU LOSE
by Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva

Amaranth:

1. Also called pigweed.
2. An imaginary flower that never fades.

Last week investors found to their chagrin that the Greenwich, Connecticut genus of the pigweed, is not only far from imaginary, it can fade out at lightning speed. Hedge fund Amaranth Advisors managed to lose $4.6 billion - about half its entire value - in a matter of just a few days through A sensational miscalculation of the price of natural gas futures in the spring of 2007. Today's news tells us the figure has now grown to $6 billion.

Star trader Brian Hunter bet the farm on the idea that the gap between the March 2007 natural gas price and the April 2007 would increase. Instead, it fell from about $2.60 per 1,000 cubic feet to about 80 cents, wipingout Amaranths' 20 plus percent yearly returns, in one fell swoop, to a 35% loss. Hunter, a Canadian, had made millions for the firm after natural gas prices exploded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He was thought to be so savvy about gas futures that his bosses at Amaranth let him work out of his home in Calgary, where he drove a Ferrari in the summer and a Bentley in the winter. The jazzy wheels matched the snazzy wheeling...and the honeyed dealing at the American energy fund, where 1.4% of net assets went for "bonus compensation to designated traders" and another 2.3% was doled out for "operating expenses." When an account made a net profit, the manager took care to cut himself up to 1.5% of the account balance per year in addition to a 20% cut of its net profits - less the traders' bonuses and operating expenses. But when the account lost money, the managers suffered no penalty, though the investors still remained on the hook for the operating expenses and possibly for trader bonuses as well. What kind of a gig is that? Where investors have to pay to play and then pay to lose, as well? What can investors be thinking when they see their accounts shrivel like anorexics on a fat farm while their managers grow sleek and prosperous in their Greenwich pads?

The hedge fund world is famously populated by math whizzes, each one claiming to have solved Poincare's Conjecture. But the important math of hedge funds is very simple: it's heads I win, tails you lose. 

The typical fund charges 2% of capital, plus 20% of the gains above a benchmark, often the risk-free rate of return - say around 5% today. So, a fund with a 10% return charges its clients 2% of capital...plus, another 2% (20% of 10%) for the performance. Even a fund that is able to do Twice as well as the benchmark - a difficult feat - only leaves the investor with a 6% return, net. A common pattern is that for four years in a row, the fund gets twice the return as the risk-free rate and every fifth year it suffers a 10% loss. When this happens, the fund managers do not send out a letter offering to share 20% of the loss. No, they are happy to take a percentage of the profits, but not the losses. So, in the four fat years, the fund builds up...with the managers taking their cut. But in the fifth year, investors take all of the loss, effectively magnifying it, making a dollar of loss equal to $1.25 of gain. 

The essential math is not only easy...it is perverse. As demonstrated by Amaranth, fund managers have every incentive to take wild gambles. If the gamble pays off, they become rich and famous. If it does not, they are still the same math prodigies they were before. It is like playing strip poker with a beautiful woman. When you lose a hand, you take off your shirt. But when she loses, she puts on a leather coat. Why do investors think they can get anywhere in such a game? The quick answer is that investors are not thinking. In the late stages of empire, thinking becomes a vestigial function - about as useful as an appendix...and as liable to be cut out in a crisis.

Instead, investors rationalize...and theorize...to justify the excesses and extravagances of the imperial economy. Why buy a hedge fund? Better returns, they say - though hedge fund returns have been so abysmally low that their money would have slept sounder tucked up in a cozy money market account. Different market, they argue - claiming that the new conditions demand provocative trading rather than stodgy buying-and-holding. 

Don't marry your stocks, they warn. Just shack up for a few months and unload them when the next hottie comes along; that's what the celebrity hedgies do. But filling your portfolios with fast moving floozies is no way to make money; they've all been on the street too long already...they're overpriced and overworked. And when the market goes down, they'll go down faster and further than more. The hedge funds have smarter managers, claim investors. And here, finally, they might have a point. Who but a real sharpie could have come up with such a clever scheme? Hedge fund clients might be dripping in red the past few years, but the fund managers themselves are in clover.

If vanity were gravity, Greenwich, Connecticut would be a black hole. The puffed-up twits who manage most hedge funds contribute to more unwarranted bluster per square foot there than in any place outside North Korea. Greenwich sucks in money from all over the financial world and turns it into...nothing.

In this respect, Amaranth is only following the hedge fund playbook. Deals for hedge bosses are so sweet that Warren Buffet claims the funds aren't really investment vehicles at all but compensation strategies - ways to keep star managers in their multimillion dollar digs while the funds themselves turn in lower and lower returns...sub-10% on average, and in some cases, pushing below 5%, according to the Hedge Fund Index. In fact, in 2005, some 848 hedges closed down their business, says one consultancy firm, Hedge Fund Research Inc. Is it just a case of too much of a good thing diluting the returns? Could be. 

When Alfred Winslow Jones coined the term in 1949, hedge funds operated on the margins of the investment world. "Hedge fund" then simply meant a portfolio of stocks with long and short positions, the shorts acting as a hedge against losses in the longs. Today, the term better describes the legal structure of the groups - private, and limited to a specific number of investors, with a minimum of $1 million in assets - and the actual strategies employed vary dramatically - from commodity trading to distressed investing. And today, hedge funds have spread like a tropical parasite so that there are now 8000 or so of them, infesting even institutional investors and pension funds, and sucking in total assets of about $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, hedge funds specifically engaged in energy trading - like Amaranth - have proliferated - soaring from about $5 billion to a stratospheric $100 billion. You'd think this would give at least the pros in the business some 
pause. Yet, Morgan Stanley, for example, pumped five percent of its $2.3 billion fund of hedge funds into Amaranth. And, Goldman Sachs' fund of hedge funds also admitted that an anonymous energy-related investment - guess who? 

Hubris and excessive risk run through the entire sorry episode. Hunter himself was borrowing $8 for every $1 of Amaranth's own funds, while taking positions ten times larger than veteran energy trader, Goldman, and twice the size of the next biggest trader. Hunter also expanded Amaranth's natural gas holdings so that they became half the firm's entire exposure, where they had once been only 7%. Like LTCM - the energy firm that blew up in 1998 - Amaranth held such large positions in the market that it could not unravel its positions. Like LTCM, Amaranth seemed certain it would never fail and boasted of its "fearlessness" on its website. Like LTCM, Amaranth was hazy about what it was doing and how...But unlike LTCM, the financial community is reacting with odd indifference to Amaranth's fiasco. Peter Fusaro, co-founder of the Energy Hedge Fund Center, which tracks 520 energy hedge funds, shrugs that Amaranth is "a hiccup." Amaranth's blow-up doesn't affect as many institutional investors and banks and other financial VIPs, as LTCMs did. Only its rich clients have to endure the pangs of portfolios sliced neatly in half. Maybe so. Maybe not. 

We think of the typical hedge fund manager. Not yet 30, no experience of a real bear market, let alone a credit contraction...the man thinks only of the new house he will build in Greenwich, Connecticut, if his bets pay off. He imagines that he will take his place alongside George Soros and the Quantum Fund. More likely, he will join Nicholas Maounis in the pigweed. (Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning)

 

 

Die Billionen-Bombe

Hedgefonds sammeln immer mehr Geld und spekulieren mit allem, was Profit bringt: mit 
Aktien, Devisen, Rohstoffen, sogar mit Schulden anderer. Niemand weiß, welche Risiken
sie eingehen. Deshalb sind sie selbst zum Risiko geworden, Experten warnen vor einem 
Domino-Crash. (Der Spiegel 39/2006, 25.92006) 

 

 

 

 

 

Quelle: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge-Fonds

HANDELSBLATT, Montag, 25. September 2006
Hedge-Fonds

Investoren fühlen sich von Amaranth düpiert 

Der amerikanische Hedge-Fonds Amaranth hat die Risiken auf dem Gasmarkt unterschätzt. Firmenchef Nick Maounis räumte in ein, dass "eine Serie von ungewöhnlichen und unvorhersehbaren Ereignissen" den Verlust von insgesamt sechs Mrd. Dollar verursacht habe. Nun prüft auch die US-Börsenaufsicht die Fehlspekulation des Hedge-Fonds.



NEW YORK / LONDON. Maounis entschuldigte sich bei seinen Anlegern und kündigte an, ihre Rückzahlungsforderungen zu überprüfen. Die US-Börsenaufsicht SEC untersucht, ob Amaranth seine Investoren bewusst über die Risiken im Unklaren gelassen hat. 

Der Hedge-Fonds hatte sich auf dem Gasmarkt verspekuliert und vergangene Woche etwa 65 Prozent seines verwalteten Vermögens von gut neun Mrd. Dollar verloren. Auslöser der Krise war ein Verlust von 560 Mill. Dollar am 14. September, der die Kreditgeber von Amaranth dazu veranlasste, ihre Sicherheitsforderungen (margin calls) deutlich zu erhöhen.

Das führte zu einer Kettenreaktion. Der Hedge-Fonds versuchte erfolglos, seine offenen Handelspositionen auf dem Energiemarkt zu verkaufen. Es habe "keinen Ausweg" gegeben, sagte Maounis. Die fehlende Liquidität vergrößerte die Verluste und zwang den Fonds dazu, andere Vermögensbestände zu Discountpreisen abzugeben, um die Forderungen der Banken zu erfüllen. Erst später konnte Amaranth seine Energiegeschäfte mit weiteren Verlusten an die Großbank JP Morgan und den Hedge-Fonds Citadel weiterreichen. Die Citigroup verhandelt dem Vernehmen nach über eine direkte Beteiligung an Amaranth. 

Die kurzen Erklärungen von Maounis - Fragen durften nicht gestellt werden - ließen viele Investoren ratlos zurück. "Ich weiß jetzt nicht mehr als vorher", sagte David Deutsch, Chief Investment Officer des Pensionsfonds von San Diego County. Der Fonds hat 175 Mill. Dollar in Amaranth investiert. Die Anleger sind verärgert, weil das Management des Hedge-Fonds noch kurz vor der Schieflage außergewöhnlich große Risiken in seinen Handelspositionen bestritten hatte. Zudem gab Amaranth die Verluste erst an jenem Tag bekannt, an dem die Frist für Investoren ablief, ihr Geld nach dem dritten Quartal zurückzufordern.

Der Hedge-Fonds muss jetzt nicht nur die Untersuchung der amerikanischen Börsenaufsicht fürchten, sondern auch Klagen düpierter Anleger. Die SEC will offenbar darüber hinaus die Beziehungen zwischen Hedge-Fonds und ihren Brokern unter die Lupe nehmen. Wickeln die Fonds ihre Transaktionen über eigene Broker ab, könnte das nach Meinung der Börsenaufsicht zu Interessenkonflikten führen, da die Finanzmanager dann einen Anreiz hätten, das Handelsvolumen nach oben zu treiben. 

Auch in London will die Finanzaufsicht FSA für mehr Transparenz in der Branche sorgen. Nach den Plänen der FSA müssen Hedge-Fonds ab November so genannte Side Letters melden. Dabei handelt es sich um Sondervereinbarungen mit einzelnen Investoren, die unter Umständen andere Anleger benachteiligen können. Ein Side Letter kann einem bestimmten Investor beispielsweise zusichern, dass er geringere Management- und Performance-Gebühren bezahlen muss. Solche Sonderregelungen sind bei Hedge-Fonds im Gegensatz zu den herkömmlichen Publikumsfonds grundsätzlich erlaubt, fallen aber in einen rechtlichen Graubereich. Auch die US-Wertpapieraufsicht SEC hat bereits ihre Besorgnis angemeldet.

Past Bubble Experience Was Different

The Daily Reckoning

London, England

Wednesday, September 27, 2006


Bernie Ebbers' number is up...when it comes to numbers, anyone could make the same mistake - they are very slippery...

Hunter was long - and now investors are short $6 billion...the Panic of 1837 and other financial disasters... 

Poor Bernie Ebbers. His number's up. The man drove up to the Oakdale Correctional Complex in Louisiana yesterday. He got out of his Mercedes and joined the former governor of the state, Edwin Edwards, in the federal pen. Hizonner faces 10 years in the hoosegow for extorting money out of riverboat casinos. Ebbers got 25 for his role in a telecom scandal. Accountants working under his direction took some whole numbers out of  the operational columns, they say, and slipped them into the capital budget. Both men did naughty things, we don't deny it. But putting poor Bernie behind bars for a quarter of a century for some financial hanky-panky seems excessive. When it comes to numbers, after all...anyone can make a mistake. The things are downright slippery. Just look at poor Brian Hunter. He would tell you. The man was making $75 to $100 million per year, as an ace energy trader. He was so good that even the savviest players in the industry wanted in on his game. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs had invested money with Hunter's employer, Amaranth Advisors, the $9 billion hedge fund that blew up last week. 

What went wrong? Hedge funds are supposed to be good at numbers, after all. They hire people with advanced degrees in mathematics simply to Make sure they've calculated the odds correctly and offset their risks with their expectations in a logical manner. "Somebody was not monitoring this correctly," 
said one pro, referring to the extraordinary bet that Hunter placed on gas prices, a bet so large that at one time, he held about 10% of the global market in natural gas futures. 

As far as we can tell, these are the numbers in a nutshell: Hunter was long. And investors were short as much as $6 billion. "It appears we have had a major malfunction," might have been another way to put it. But that famous understatement has already been taken. That was on January 28, 1986...with 50 million TV viewers watching. It was the day the spacecraft Challenger exploded into smithereens. Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman described the NASA catastrophe as an institutional failure. The scientists and engineers at NASA, he charged, has been upstaged by bureaucrats who had been allowed to "pervert standards."

That's why we can't help but feel sorry for Brian Hunter. Like Ebbers, he came from nothing to make a fortune. He went to college in Alberta, where he was a star at mathematics, of course, specializing in financial models. But the poor 32-year-old had barely gotten used to being extraordinarily rich and extraordinarily talented, when a very ordinary little slip-up with numbers derailed his extraordinary career. We are reminded of the now legendary Nick Leeson whose rags-to-riches rise also came apart over some mundane, barely noticed figures...figures of eight, in his case. Leeson, the working class son of a plasterer, who failed his final math exam, made such an impression at Britain's prestigious Barings Bank that he was quickly promoted to the trading floor and then given a new operation in futures markets on the Singapore Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) where he began pulling in millions for Barings by gambling on the movement of the Japanese stock market (Nikkei Index). The whiz kid seemed to have it altogether. By the end of 1993, he had made more than £10m for Barings - nearly 10 percent of its total profit that year.

What Barings didn't know was that Leeson, by now both Chief Trader and also in charge of settling accounts in the office (jobs that were usually done by different people), was hiding his mistakes in an account, numbered 88888, for which the company was liable. By December 1994, the numbers in 88888 had piled up...to over half a billion. A desperate Leeson then placed his most desperate bet - that the Nikkei would not fall below 19,000 points. It would have been a reasonable assumption under ordinary circumstances. But then came one of those fat tail events that give bell curves their shape - on January 17, 1995, a 7.2 earthquake hit Kobe in Japan and the Nikkei crashed by 7% in a week. Leeson's gambling spiraled out of control as he piled on more and more debt hoping to push the index back the other way. Most of the $1.3 billion he eventually lost for Barings came from trying to cover up what had happened. On the verge of turning 28, the whiz kid could take it no more. Leaving a scribbled apology, he fled with his wife to Borneo and then to Frankfurt, where he was caught. 

The numbers then looked pretty bad: The futures market was in shock, a 233 year-old bank to the Queen was bust; more than a thousand bank Employees were out of jobs; and investors were wiped out. And all for a string of single digits. Ordinary insignificant set of numerals - 88888. 





Hedge-Fonds - die neue Börsenmacht 

Ein Gespenst geht um in der deutschen Wirtschaft, das Gespenst der Hedge-Fonds. Aggressiv seien sie, wollten Unternehmen zerschlagen, heißt es. Die Realität sieht jedoch anders aus.

Hedge Fonds rütteln derzeit die deutsche Wirtschaft auf. 

mm/ret/rob FRANKFURT. In den Vorstandsetagen der Dax-Konzerne breitet sich die Furcht vor aggressiven angelsächsischen Investoren aus. Mittlerweile kontrollieren die Hedge-Fonds 20 bis 25 Prozent des deutschen Aktienmarktes, fünf Prozent mehr als im vergangenen Jahr, schätzt die US-Investmentbank Lehman Brothers. 

Bei Daimler-Chrysler sollen die Fonds bereits die Aufspaltung des Konzerns planen. Ähnliche Gerüchte und Spekulationen machen bei Linde, Man und der Commerzbank die Runde. "Das sind Realitäten, auf die sich die Konzerne einstellen müssen, die bequemen Zeiten der Deutschland AG sind endgültig vorbei", sagt Christian Spieler von Lehman Brothers.

Wozu die Spekulanten fähig sind, hat der Fall Deutsche Börse gezeigt. Im Frühjahr 2005 verhinderte vor allem der britische Investor Chris Hohn mit seinem TCI-Fonds die Übernahme der Londoner Börse LSE durch den deutschen Konkurrenten. TCI zwang die Frankfurter, einen erheblichen Teil ihrer Barmittel auszuschütten. Vorstandschef Seifert musste auf Druck der Aktionäre seinen Hut nehmen. Kein Zweifel, die Macht der Hedge-Fonds wächst: 1998 kontrollierten sie nach Schätzungen von Merrill Lynch ein Vermögen von 375 Mrd. Dollar, heute sind es bereits 1,3 Bill. Dollar, bis 2008 soll die Summe auf 3,1 Billionen steigen. 

Doch das ist nur die eine Seite der Medaille. Denn nur ein Bruchteil der Hedge-Fonds verfolgt tatsächlich die aggressiven Strategien, vor denen sich die deutschen Vorstände fürchten. "Natürlich müssen sich die Unternehmen mit dem Phänomen ernsthaft auseinander setzen, aber manchmal wirkt die Reaktion schon etwas übertrieben", sagt Peter Kollmann von Merrill Lynch. Er warnt vor Panikmache: "Wer ordentlich mit seinen Investoren kommuniziert, und wer keine groben Management-Fehler begeht, der bietet auch kaum Angriffsflächen."

Merrill Lynch hat den Markt genau analysiert und kommt zu dem Schluss, dass sich die Zahl der aggressiven "Event-Driven"-Investoren in den vergangenen 15 Jahren zwar verdreifacht hat, aber noch immer nur 15 Prozent aller Hedge-Fonds ausmacht (siehe Kasten). Event-Driven-Fonds steigen mit größeren Paketen mittelfristig bei Unternehmen ein, bei denen größere Veränderungen anstehen und versuchen durch Druck auf das Management oder seltener über die Öffentlichkeit wertsteigernde Veränderungen durchzusetzen. Dabei kann es beispielsweise um eine Aufspaltung des Konzerns gehen oder um die Ausschüttung von angehäuften Barreserven.




A Handful Who Know Better... and the "Hot New Thing" 
9/25/2006 
Source: Elliottwave International

So, obviously, energy was the "hot new thing." It's just that energy funds are now down 8.2% 
since crude oil peaked on July 14. Mutual fund investors have lost some $4.5 billion this year --
and counting. The natural gas trade-gone-wrong at Amaranth Advisors alone has seen 3M Co.'s
retirement fund lose $9.2 billion, and the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association
lose $7.2 billion.

 

 

Zwölf-Monats-Rückblick bei Deutschland-Aktienfonds birgt Überraschungen
Star-Fondsmanager enttäuschen die Anleger
Handelsblatt, 19.9.2006

Hedge-Fonds hat angeblich fünf Milliarden Dollar verwettet 

 

A Note on Hedge Funds: 
One common misconception in the marketplace today is that markets are awash in liquidity. What they are is rife with hedge fund operaters who are not shy about leveraging the dwindling liquidity that still exits to drive marktes from normal overbought or oversold levels to historically unheard of overbought or oversold levels. http://www.socionomics.net

 

Conquer the Crash notes "Hedge funds are only as good as their managers. Some fund 
managers use huge leverage and can "blow up," losing everything on a bad bet. One effect
of the countertrend rally has been to populate the world with an overabundance of dangerously 
inexperienced managers. Back in June when the little guy investors were finally "given the 
crack at hedge funds" and the first German hedge fund was announced, EWFF called it
"fair warning that the jig is up for hedge funds." A recent study by two finance professors at
Standford and Princeton reveals what a few savvy observers already know: most hedge funds
are nothing more than "momentum players, riding whatever market is moving in the moment."

By examining the CFTC data in this issue and in previous ones you can see exactly where many
of these "leveraged bets" are placed, and equally important, the coincidence with market turns.
Given the extent and breath of these extremes, they may well snowball into a "big bang." 
EWFF, December 2004.  http://www.socionomics.net

 

Allgemeine Schließung gefordert 

Fonds fürchten Massenflucht 

Die dritte Schließung eines offenen Immobilienfonds innerhalb nur weniger Wochen hat die Branche in
höchste Aufregung versetzt. Auch wenn Bundesbankvorstand Meister sagt, dass die "Rückflüsse noch
nicht Besorgnis erregend" seien, fordern einige Anbieter die Schließung aller Immobilienfonds.
Kein Anleger käme mehr an sein Geld heran. Handelsblatt, Freitag, 20. Januar 2006 

 

Wieder ein grossser Immobilienfond geschlossen
(FAZ, 19.Januar 2006)

Auch hier hat KanAm investiert 

19. Januar 2006. Die Fondsgesellschaft KanAm hat innerhalb von zwei Tagen ihren zweiten offenen
Immobilienfonds vorübergehend geschlossen. Diesmal ist der weitaus größere "grundinvest Fonds" 
betroffen, teilte das Unternehmen am Donnerstag in Frankfurt mit. Damit weitet sich die Krise in dem 90
Milliarden Euro schweren Markt für offene Immobilienfonds in Deutschland weiter aus.

"Die Panik in dem KanAm Grundinvest Fonds als Spitzenprodukt der Branche ist offenbar ausgelöst worden durch die Veröffentlichung einer überraschenden und sachlich nicht nachvollziehbaren Verkaufsempfehlung einer Ratingagentur", teilte KanAm am Donnerstag in Frankfurt mit. Die Ratingagentur Scope, die eine kritische Studie zu den Fonds vorgelegt hatte, wurde nicht namentlich genannt. Binnen 24 Stunden hätten Anleger Anteile im Wert von rund 700 Millionen Euro zurückgeben wollen, mehr als ein Fünftel des 3,2 Milliarden Euro schweren Fonds. Die Aussetzung der Anteilsrücknahme sei auf drei Monate befristet und diene dem Schutz der Anleger. Anders als bei dem im Dezember geschlossenen Fonds Grundbesitz-Invest der Deutschen Bank gebe es keine Bewertungsprobleme. 

 

Hedge fund losses mount, sparking investor jitters
Tue May 10, 2005
NEW YORK, May 10 (Reuters) - Losses at hedge funds that specialize in convertible arbitrage
mounted on Tuesday as some managers sold assets to return money to investors demanding to
get out after months of poor performance, investors and analysts said.

 

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Neuer Eklat an der Wall Street

13.April 2005 

New York (dpa) - Nach dem Skandal um irreführende Aktienanalysen wird die Wall Street von einem neuen Eklat erschüttert. Die Bezirksstaatsanwaltschaft New York Süd wirft 15 ehemaligen und aktiven Kursmaklern der New Yorker Börse NYSE Wertpapierbetrug über einen Zeitraum von vier Jahren vor.

Die Kursmakler sollen ihre Kunden zu Gunsten ihrer Arbeitgeber benachteiligt haben. Bei Verurteilung drohen in einigen Fällen bis zu 20 Jahre Haft und Geldstrafen von bis zu 5 Millionen Dollar oder dem Doppelten des durch die Straftat erzielten Gewinns.

Die Kursmakler bilden das Rückgrat des Parketthandels am wichtigsten Finanzplatz der Welt. Sie sollen das scheinbare Chaos des Handels ordnen, indem sie Kauf- und Verkaufsaufträge für die von ihnen betreuten Aktien abgleichen und gegebenenfalls selbst Aktien kaufen oder verkaufen.

"Es war ihre Pflicht, den Handel fair abzuwickeln und die Interessen ihrer Kunden vor ihre eigenen zu stellen", sagte Bezirksstaatsanwalt David Kelley. Zu den Beschuldigten zählen Mitarbeiter von Fleet Specialists (Bank of America (NYSE: BAC - Nachrichten) ), Van der Moolen Specialists USA (Van der Moolen Holding), Bear Wagner (Bear Stearns), LaBranche und Spear, Leeds & Kellog Specialists (Goldman Sachs). Ihnen wird vorgeworfen, den jeweils besten Preis nicht ihren Kunden angeboten, sondern für den Eigenhandel genutzt zu haben. 14 der 15 Beschuldigten hätten sich den Strafverfolgungsbehörden gestellt, einer halte sich in den Niederlanden auf.

Die US-Börsenaufsicht SEC leitete zugleich Zivilverfahren gegen 20 Kursmakler ein, unter denen sich auch die 15 Beschuldigten des Strafverfahrens befinden. An den fast zweijährigen Ermittlungen war auch die US-Bundespolizei FBI beteiligt.

 

Socionomics Insight>>>

DAX >>>

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The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
And The New Science of Socionomics
by Robert R.Prechter, 1999 

 

The Science of History and Social Prediction Best-selling author Robert Prechter’s revolutionary two-book set, Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction spells out a historical correlation between patterned shifts in social mood and their most sensitive register, the stock market.It also presents engaging essays -- representing over 20 years worth of research -- correlating social mood trends to music, sports, corporate culture, peace, war and macroeconomic trends. http://www.socionomics.net

 

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