Moominmama January 2009 Performance

Moominmama lost 1.39% in January. That's not bad considering the MSCI World Index lost 8.51% for the month. This is the portfolio breakdown:



And here is a new view in terms of asset classes:



Portfolio diversification worked pretty well this month (for a change).

When You Have $60 billion, Losing $4 Bllion isn't so Bad!

The Future Fund reported its results for the last quarter of 2008

Levitt on Credit Cards

Following up on my post about EFTPOS policies Steven Levitt is commenting on credit cards. Nothing much new there, but one of the commenters makes the very good point that taking cash payments also has costs to the retailer - having cash, making change, risking robbery, and spending time taking the cash to the bank and depositing it. But I guess, unless they banned cash payments altogether there is little marginal cost in taking a cash payment - as they have to do all those things already apart from give change.

Saving

Now that I am going to have a job I'm setting up a regular savings plan of $A500 a month from my salary to match the plan we already have going for Snork Maiden which is also now $A500 per month. I'm going to invest it in the CFS Diversified Fund in an account inside of my margin account at CommSec. I'm not going to be adding borrowed money to this investment but rather it will help reduce the loan to value ratio on my loan over time. If my job contract includes required salary sacrifice into superannuation (i.e. employee contributions to a retirement fund on top of the employer contributions) I plan to also set up salary sacrificing for Snork Maiden. Her employer currently contributes 15.4% on top of her salary to superannuation (the legal minimum is 9% in Australia).

Bank Santander Compensates Clients Hit by Madoff

Any chance Man Financial will do this for its clients who suffered losses (if relatively small) in RMF?

Happy Year of the Buffalo

Buffalo sounds better than Ox :) We should celebrate with mozzarella cheese :P

Second Round Interview

This morning I met my colleague who helped me with the grant application and began to work out the details. It'll take a little while to push everything through the notorious university bureaucracy. We don't even know yet exactly which program I'll be in though the overall school/college is determined. My flight is already booked to a conference in February and my colleague will see if he can get me onto the workshop schedule to give a short presentation about my planned project.

This evening I just received a message from the chairman of the department where I interviewed yesterday. he says he thinks I'm a good fit in his program and wants to do a second round interview including a seminar presentation. Either in early February or early March. I'd prefer March to give me more time and they have plenty of other people coming to give presentations in the meantime. Unless that looks like I'm not enthusiastic? I wouldn't be starting in their program till July.

I feel a bit nervous and sad for some reason and don't know why.

Interview

At least I was dressed smarter than my interviewers. I had my shirt tucked in :) Not sure how well it went, I should hear early next week if they want to pursue it further.

It felt like they treated the research funding I got almost as a negative as it would delay my potential start date with them. They were still talking about starting immediately though I couldn't start till after a second interview and seminar presentation and teaching starts on 22nd February and I need to prepare to teach a course at a new institution. At first the chairman said, well maybe we'll get you to give a seminar in our regular schedule some time in the year, I don't want to keep the position open for a year and maybe some other opportunity would come along for you in the meantime anyway. So I asked when he'd expect any of his U.S. based candidates to start. July (the start of the second semester here). So maybe I could start in July if we negotiate some arrangement with the other program? OK - maybe we'll ask you to give a seminar in March when we're finished interviewing the other more junior candidates.

I got across all the points I wanted to make. But I felt like I wasn't very articulate when talking about my research. I kept searching for the right words to use...

Tomorrow, Friday, I have a meeting to iron out the details of the research position.

Rear View Mirror Retirement Allocation Advice

Christopher Joye in an article in the Business Spectator today performs a retirement portfolio optimization using historical Australian data for 1982-2008 much like I did in in this post. But while I was asking what portfolio would have performed best in the past he is using the results to recommend the portfolio that superannuation (retirement) funds should adopt in the future. His conclusion - allocate heavily to residential property (a property class that no institutions in Australia invest in apparently for tax reasons) - government bonds, and cash. These asset classes have had the best risk adjusted performance in the past. If we know anything about investment theory it is that mean reversion is likely and that equities and commercial property will probably perform better in the next decade than in the last, while government bonds and Australian residential property perform worse.

Research Proposal Approved

I just heard that my research proposal was approved. We haven't got any details yet but we proposed that I work on the project for one year at either 3 or 4 days a week - i.e. I will get paid the same as a post-doc (about $A61k per year) but have a more senior position - "Fellow" - equivalent to a senior lecturer in the Australian system or an Associate Professor in the U.S.

On Thursday I have my long-delayed preliminary interview for the continuing position as senior lecturer.

EFTPOS Miminum Payments: A Silly Policy

On our way back from the Ford dealer where we put in an order for the missing bit of silver trim, we stopped off in the suburb of Dickson to have lunch at the Asian Noodle House. This is a great restaurant with good food at good prices, but when it came time to pay they told me there was a $30 minimum on EFTPOS cards, which are an Australian version of debit cards. So I had to walk a few blocks to the bank where there is an ATM and then back to pay. I don't mind walking much, even if it is 34C today, but I'm sure some customers mind a lot more. It's hard to get any hard numbers on the EFTPOS fees charged by banks to merchants - it could be somewhere around 40 cents per transaction. Credit card fees are higher, which is why Aldi, for examples, charges a surcharge for using a credit card - but no extra charge for an EFTPOS card. Now I suppose someone could come into the restaurant and order a $3 coke and then try to pay with an EFTPOS card, but that's going to be rare. It makes sense for the restaurant to either build the expected value of EFTPOS fees into prices or charge a fee for transactions with EFTPOS and credit cards rather than forcing the customer who spends $24 but has no cash to walk to the bank and back. I guess the restaurant thinks it is so good that it can afford to do this.

Car Repairs: $550 or $1250

The back of our car got run into a stone wall - like most car accidents it happened close to home - in the driveway of our apartment building... The panel above the right rear wheel was dented in and lots of paint was now on the wall rather than on our car. We'd accumulated a couple of other holes in the paintwork on the rear bumper. One had happened on our wedding day when my brother was driving our car and backed it straight into the neighbors car in the underground car park.

Anyway, it needed repairing and we drove to a local industrial area where most of the crash repairers are located. One of the biggest who is approved by our insurer said it would cost $1200 to $1300 (all figures in Australian Dollars). He couldn't do the job until after the 29th of January and it would take a week. The excess on our insurance is $500 and then making a claim would reduce our 45% no claim bonus. Not sure whether this was a good plan we drove round to the guy who inspected our car prior to purchase (for free) and where we'd already got one service (as we promised in return for the free inspection). He had a "mate" in the neighboring town just over the state boundary who could do it in the shed in his backyard. We drove straight there. His estimate: $550, in cash and he could do it right away. At any reasonable discount rate this made sense. Given the damage was non-structural - just a gouge in the side of the car - and this "bloke" was recommended by our friendly mechanic I agreed to the repair - we left the car with him and took the bus the ten miles home on Friday lunchtime.

Sunday morning he phoned us up with the job complete apart from a cosmetic piece of silver trim we can get at the Ford dealer and stick on ourselves supposedly. The car looks great.

Janus US Short-Term Bond Fund

This is the other bond fund in my Mom's portfolio. It has done very well in recent years, though it didn't do much just after we bought it in 2003. I am trying to get access to Janus World's website to get more info - they haven't yet sent me a password but I managed to get the charts above from UBS's website. If it is similar to the short-term bond fund marketed in the US then it is heavy in US government issues which explains its strong performance recently. I'm thinking of selling half and putting it in Man-AHL Diversified, a managed futures fund that we only have a small allocation to at the moment (2.2%). Such a move move would take the allocation to Man AHL up to 7.5% and to the Janus bond fund down to 5.3%. The overall bond allocation would go down to 23% from 27% and the alternatives allocation up from 19% to 24%. Maybe I'd leave a bit in cash...

The rationale is that US interest rates are very low and many people are talking about a US bond bubble. On the other hand I think we should retain some exposure to US bonds and this fund seems pretty good. On the other hand, it is a short-term bond fund and so should be relatively little impacted by a rise in interest rates. And would be impacted in a good way if new bonds they buy have higher yields in the future?

Buy High, Sell Low

Investors in TFS Capital's Market Neutral Fund continued to buy high and sell low as a group in the four months ended October 31st, as I've documented for previous periods. The gap between average buying and average selling prices was greater that in the first six months of the year at 81 cents (vs. 41 cents). More than ten times as much was also received in early redemption fees (for shares held less than six months). The total shares in the fund continued to increase very significantly at 28.6 million vs. 17.4 million at the end of June. The fund now has twice as many shres as in mid 2007 even though the number of shares on issue declined significantly in the second half of 2007.

HFRI vs. HFRX

Here are the HFRI hedge fund indices for December and 2008 which differ quite a bit from the HFRX results I posted before. HFRI tracks around 2000 hedge funds while HFRX only tracks 55. The HFRI data go back to 1990, HFRX only to 2003. HFRX is available on a daily basis, HFRI monthly. HFRI indices are equal weighted rather than capitalization weighted, while HFRX is calculated by "representative optimization" - "Constituents are weighted according to HFRX Methodology in order to achieve representative performance of a larger universe of hedge funds."

Anyway, HFRI shows a positive performance overall for December and some of the subindices like convertible arbitrage didn't do as badly in 2008 as indicated by HFRX, though they still did badly.

Final Credit Suisse Indices for December and 2008 are also now available:

Invesco Sterling Bond Fund

This is my Mom's largest single investment at 12.6% of the portfolio. It wasn't planned this way. I instructed Citibank to buy a given amount of this fund in US Dollars. They bought the same number in Sterling. Soon after that we ditched Citibank. The fund had been doing great when we bought it in November 2005:



But this year it severely underperformed its index. On top of that Sterling has declined against the USD so we lost more in USD terms but that's an unfair comparison as this money was likely to be kept in Sterling or Euro investments in any case. The reason for this year's poor performance is of course the corporate bond market which is 80% of the fund:



So, I guess we'll hold on and wait for corporate bonds to recover?

Man to Sue over Madoff

Man Investments will sue over its Madoff related losses. Don't know if it will do any good but that's better than nothing.

Wordle

This is a graphic of this blog created using Wordle. I posted a couple of these created by Paul Kedrosky earlier.

Breaking the Buck was the Problem

A discussion of Bernanke's speech yesterday argues that it was the impact of the Lehman collapse on the Reserve Money Market Fund and the consequent run on all money market funds that caused the September-November collapse in financial markets and that the other impacts of the Lehman collapse were not significant.

Social Class and Choice

A comment I posted on "Graceful Retirement" as part of the ongoing discussion about Meg's blogposts:

"I'm not too sure about the correlation you make between being born poor and choices. Poorer parents might not have very high expectations for their children but those children's opportunities are often limited by going to bad schools and hanging out with an unambitious crowd of friends. Children who have money to back them up can do things like graduate degrees in non-professional fields, being an artist, working for NGOs etc. without worrying about increasing their net worth. So I think it cuts both ways. I grew up what I considered lower middle class in England - compared to most of my middle class friends we had a smaller house, car etc. My Mom had a degree in classics and training as a nurse (came from a working class background in Australia and studied on scholarship). My Dad came from a relatively wealthy family in Europe but was a refugee/prisoner/factory worker in the Second World War and then gradually built a career as an engineer without a formal degree. So I think we had higher social class attitudes than our actual income/wealth. My parents were definitely ambitious for us to get well educated and my Dad was somewhat concerned that we don't study something he considered useless but there wasn't big pressure to follow some particular type of career etc. I ended up as a professor - I studied geography which my Dad thought was "useless" and economics and just followed the do what you like and are good at route without worrying much about the money. My brother studied civil engineering and then later switched to computer programming."

Endowment Style Portfolios for December 2008

When I tried to optimize the performance of the asset mix used for the portfolios in my post about endowment style portfolios by maximizing the Sharpe ratio using historical data I ended up with a 100% allocation to the real estate fund. But this fund lost 7% in December. Now the optimal allocation is 9% managed futures, 4% hedge funds, 66% real estate, 20% bonds, and 1% gold. It has a beta of 0.03 to the MSCI stock index. No stocks of course as they have returned too little with too much volatility in the last 12 years. A portfolio with 1/7 in each of these assets plus Australian Dollars has about the same returns historically but double the volatility (but 1/3 the volatility of stocks still). It would have returned 2.7% in December in USD terms (it has a beta of 0.28 to the stock market)

P.S.

Following the discussion in the comments I want to say that this isn't intended as a serious exercise in choosing a portfolio allocation but as a kind of thought experiment about what would have historically been the best portfolio with perfect hindsight. I'm pretty skeptical also about so-called "forward looking" portfolio optimizations too. They need to make some pretty strong assumptions. But all of this can be useful inputs into developing a portfolio allocation that works for you.

Preliminary Credit Suisse Indices for December 2008

Yesterday I reported on HFRI's indices for December 2008. Today Credit Suisse/Tremont released preliminary results for the month. Credit Suisse's indices are capitalization weighted while HFRIs are not (I think). Credit Suisse estimate their index rose 0.3% in December. They also include managed futures (which did well) and short bias funds (which did not). Their estimates for convertible arbitrage and distressed securities show less severe losses for December and the year. Of course, their equity market neutral category shows a big loss for the year, while HFRI does not. This is due to the Madoff funds that were included in the Credit Suisse Index.

Hedge Fund Indices for December

By comparison the MSCI All Country World Index rose 3.67% in December but lost 41.85% for 2008. Macro - the strategy made famous by the likes of George Soros - was the most successful both for the month and year - while convertible arbitrage has been significantly worse than being long stocks in 2008 and in December.

SuperAlphaFund

Superfund is now offering a fund in Australia. This company, which originated in Austria, offers managed futures products to retail investors in many countries around the world.

The fund is invested 37.5% in managed futures, 37.5% in a market neutral stock trading program and 25% in Australian cash equivalents. They plan to hedge returns into the Australian Dollar. Minimum investment is $A10,000 which compares favorably to the Macquarie and Select Funds managed futures products. Fees are steeper than most hedge funds with a 3% management/administration fee and a 27% performance fee with no hurdle. The fund is not a FIF. It seems that they plan on paying all fund income out in order to avoid entity level taxation.

Comparing the Quadriga B managed futures fund that Superfund offers in the US to Man's AHL Diversified Fund we find that between November 2002 and November 2008, Quadriga returned 1.92% per month but had a monthly standard deviation of 11.4%. Man AHL returned 1.40% per month but with a much lower standard deviation of 4.9%. In other words, the Man fund is higher quality. Quadriga had a correlation of 0.06 to the MSCI World Index while Man had -0.10. The correlation between Quadriga and Man is high at 0.73. I don't have any data on their stock trading program.

Bottom line is I wouldn't recommend this fund at this stage except to someone who was very heavily into managed futures and wanted to diversify across managers to reduce risk.

CALPERS Allocation

CALPERS (the California state retirement fund) provides detailed information on their asset allocation. CALPERS has much more of a traditional US allocation than the other portfolios I've examined. The top part of the table now shows Moom and Moominmama's allocations (updated for January) the Australian and Californian public retirement funds, the three Ivy Leagues, the average US university endowment and the Australian Future Fund. The lower part of the table shows the "distance" between the four selected portfolios at left and the the portfolios listed across the table. Moom is most dissimilar to CALPERS, Moominmama, and Yale and most similar to PSS(AP). Moominmama is most dissimilar to Moom and most similar to PSS(AP), CALPERS, and the typical US university endowment. PSS(AP) has a similar level of dissimilarity to all the portfolios but is most dissimilar to Princeton, Yale and CALPERS and most similar to Harvard and the Future Fund. CALPERS is most dissimilar to Moom and most like the average US university endowment.

If you'd like me to analyze any other portfolios or make any comparisons let me know.

Duration and Stock-Bond Allocation

Interesting discussion from John Hussman about changes in "duration" and the optimal allocation between stocks and bonds in a portfolio. Duration for bonds is the sensitivity of the bond price to a change in interest rates. Bonds with distant maturities are much more sensitive than short-term bonds and therefore more volatile. Hussman also talks about a duration for stocks which is the sensitivity of stock prices to changes in the discount rate applied by investors to company's cash flows. He argues that this is equal to the reciprocal of the dividend yield.

Anyway, the lower the duration of an asset the more an investor with a given time horizon can allocate to it. Given the increase in stock yields and the fall in US Treasury yields recently investors should allocate more to stocks and less to treasuries. This is an alternative argument for valuation based market timing.

BTW I checked the CREF Bond Market Fund's holdings and less than 10% is in long-term treasuries. So there is no reason to dump that fund based on the high prices of long-term U.S. bonds.

Moominmama December 2008 Performance

Moominmama gained 0.73% in USD terms for the month but individual investment results were all over the place partly due to big movements in currencies. As you can see, Sterling was down 9% and her local currency up 4%. Unfortunately, the biggest posiitve movers were some of the smallest positions.

SIPC Testimony on Madoff and Lehman Brothers

SIPC actions and testimony look like good news for small investors with Madoff. The SIPC sent out claim forms to 8000 Madoff investors. So they should get at least $500,000 back. More than that has been identified in assets of the brokerage firm that is being liquidated. This says nothing explicit at all about investors in the feeder funds. I suspect they (including my exposure of about $A50) get nothing?

Alternative View of December 2008 Performance

Turns out that it's pretty easy to compute the table above from my existing spreadsheets. Maybe this is a better way of presenting the contributions of investments to the monthly result than the position level approach I've used up till now.

EBB, EBI, and EAIT

Received the documentation and forms for the revised version of the planned EBI delisting today. I'm going to withdraw 6000 of my 8707 shares from EBI and apply for shares in the new unlisted EAIT. The number that I'll keep in EBI is exactly the number that I was going to withdraw from EBI in the previous delisting proposal. No redemption of EAIT units will be allowed till the end of this year. Keeping EBI shares allows for some liquidity and reduces my EAIT stake to 5% of net worth (at the NAV value). The plan is to gradually wind up EBI and distribute the proceeds. My impression is that a big chunk will be distributed this year and then the remainder over the next few years. There can still be some hitches in this process mainly concerning financing. Currently EBI holds $1.57 in assets for every $1 in equity. This is accomplished through a swap provided by Macquarie Bank. Macquarie still hasn't said whether this financing arrangement will be maintained for EBI once EAIT is delisted and Laxey Partners become the effective investment manager for EBI. Financing for EAIT is in place (subject to some conditions).

In the meantime, the share price of EBB the current manager of EBI has skyrocketed from a low of 3.5 cents on December 8th to 12 cents at today's close and an intraday maximum of 14 cents. In response to an ASX query EBB stated that there is no news that the market is unaware of and that they will be announcing a positive operating profit for the financial year that closed 31st December. Actual P&L will be a loss due to writing off of intangible assets. The real news is that the various companies controlled by Steve Eckowitz have been selling shares in EBB including sales by Harsit Holdings of 17.7 million shares on 17th December and 14.9 million shares on 31st December. In total they have sold a net 34.3 million shares of the 48.8 million that they held last December. Ecko Investments sold essentially all of its 3.8 million shares - most of them in December and Pointyen Pty sold all its 225 thousand shares on 31st December. This seems to be due to margin calls related to ANZ from what I can tell. I suppose that traders think that the (forced) selling must now be over. Wingate Group's purchase at 4 cents a share is now looking like a brilliant move. I hold 20,000 shares with 10,000 bought on 17th December for 6.1 cents.

What is the Fed Up To?

Paul Kedrovsky's blog pointed to this blog by Woodward and Hall which has a very interesting post about the changes in the Fed's balance sheet. I just wish they'd explain more about what are the changes in monetary policy that has occurred that mean we need to interpret the Fed's actions differently than in the past. I guess one is paying interest on bank reserves? That would explain the huge increase in that variable.

December 2008 Report

Finally an up month, and a market beating one at that, in US Dollar terms at least. However, due to the rise in the Australian Dollar this month we lost in AUD terms and AUD net worth also declined.

Income and Expenditure



Expenditure was $5,181 ($A7,420). We bought a TV (Samsung 32", Full HD (1080), LCD, about $A,1400), some furniture (about $A400), a bike for Snork Maiden ($A750), and health insurance for her stepfather who will be visiting Australia (about $A350). Non-investment income of $6,465 due to the refund of Snork Maiden's China trip costs. Retirement contributions were $684. Before taking into account foreign exchange movements non-retirement accounts gained and retirement accounts lost money. They both gained in USD terms after taking into account the change in exchange rates.

Net Worth

Net worth rose by $10,158 to $205,660 or in Australian Dollar terms fell by $A4,202 to $294,558.

Investment Performance

USD returns were 4.12% vs. 3.67% or 1.06% for the MSCI and SPX respectively. In AUD terms we returned -2.41%.Using my preferred time series method, portfolio beta to the MSCI index was 1.36 with an annual alpha of 1.4%. Other methods now give a negative alpha. Individual investments made the following contributions to the result:



International and small cap Australian stocks made positive contributions. The top performer was the Challenger Infrastructure Fund which made an asset sale at carrying value during the month boosting confidence in its valuations. The fund is still trading at a massive discount to NAV. A similar positive valuation effect was seen for NDS following the European Union approving the buyout by News Corp and Permira. However, private equity funds MVC, 3i, and IPE all fell as did the TIAA Real Estate Fund and Everest Brown and Babcock despite the seeming resolution of the negative issues surrounding the fund.

Asset Allocation

At the end of October the allocation was 46% in "passive alpha", 60% in "beta", 1% was allocated to trading, 3% to industrial stocks, 5% to liquidity, 5% to other assets, and we were borrowing 20%. Due to the use of leveraged funds, our actual exposure to stocks was 104% of net worth. We regeared slightly. In November we were borrowing 17 cents for each dollar in equity; we are now borrowing 20 cents. When we take into borrowing by the leveraged funds we are invested in, borrowing per dollar of equity rose from 63 cents to 65 cents. Looking at asset classes:



Exposure to non-US foreign stocks rose due to market gains and purchases and exposure to hedge funds fell mainly due to the poor performance of EBI. We moved slightly towards our long-term asset allocation. The story of total assets (includes assets owned by leveraged funds) over the last few months is shown in this chart:



Our ownership of US stocks was particularly badly hit (13% of gross assets in August 4% now) due to market declines and subsequent margin calls.

Economics Text Analysis

Interesting word clouds generated by Paul Kedrosky based on session and paper titles from the American Economic Association meeting. I've only been to this conference twice - the first time because I was getting interviewed for jobs and the second because I was interviewing candidates. I maybe went to one session. It really isn't very interesting to me at all. The AEA is very undemocratic and each year's conference program is designed by the current year's President. So it might not be very representative of economics as a whole. All papers must be submitted way way in advance. You have very little chance of getting your paper onto the program unless you are part of an organized session and preferably one invited in advance by the President. This is diametrically opposed to say the Association of American Geographers where every submitted paper is accepted. The majority of people at the AEA meeting are there for job markets reasons in my impression. As the AAG meeting takes place in April it is too late for the North American academic job market which is extremely cyclical. Most decisions for the following year are made by March or April.

Goals for 2009

Unlike previous years I'm not going to set any quantitative financial goals for this year as there is too much uncertainty. On the investment management side I would like to:

1. Improve alpha to return to positive numbers or a more positive number depending on which method you use to estimate it.

2. Continue to progress towards a long-term asset allocation that is more like an endowment fund approach as the markets permit.

The major goal though is to get a decent job (3). In any case, I want to (4) continue the progress I've made on getting my academic research back on track (I now have 3 papers I've submitted for review). At the end of the year some should be accepted for publication and I should have that number under review again. If I can (5) make some progress on the business front of trying to do something with my trading models that would be good too. And finally (6) I want to lose some weight. Trying to eat better and get more exercise via cycling etc. will be the methods.

Six goals is plenty I think :)

2008 Summary

I will be doing a report for December, but after such a financially disastrous year, I'm not in the mood for a detailed analysis of the numbers for 2008 as a whole. In US Dollar Terms we lost more than half our net worth and in Australian Dollar terms more than 40%. These results were partly due to the general decline in the markets and partly due to me not understanding the scope of the crisis and re-equitizing when only part of the decline was complete. I thought the collapse of Bear Stearns was the peak of the crisis. I was very wrong on that score. If we'd kept the conservative stance we had at the beginning of the year through to October or November we would be in a pretty good situation now with maybe a 20-25% decline in net worth in USD terms I think. Maybe better. In Australian Dollar terms we might have been down just 10% or so.

Some of the damage is permanent in realized capital losses and some is hopefully temporary due to currently depressed asset values. We're looking at realized capital losses of $A71,000 so far this year, with about $A14,000 of realized capital gains partly offsetting that. At least we won't be paying any capital gains tax any time soon :)

I started the year trying to be a short-term trader using my quantitative models for predicting short-term market direction. While I am convinced the models have some validity I found it very difficult to trade on their basis both due to being based here in Australia with most of the market action occurring overnight in US markets and my general problems of discipline in trading. I may still look to work with someone else in implementing the models to run a managed futures fund. Though given the Madoff Scandal there is likely to be less interest in blackbox models now. I'll return to look at these again once I have a couple more academic papers submitted. If you are a fund manager and are interested in working with me on this let me know.

Now at the end of the year I've moved much more towards an asset allocation/rebalancing approach to investing with limited market timing. I'd still expect to reduce exposure as the market rises and more so if the yield curve inverts. But I'd re-equitize much slower in any future market slump and never get as leveraged as I did this time around.

The year ended somewhat positively with what seems to be a gain for the month in USD terms though at the moment it looks like we lost in AUD terms. There were some positive signs also on my career front with an upcoming screening interview at a university and I'm getting my research back on track and now have two papers under review at academic journals and more in progress. Having an active research "pipeline" is important in getting an academic job at a good university. The two personal highlights of the year were getting married and visiting China and Hong Kong for the first time. My mother and brother visited us in Australia - my mother's first visit back here since she left more than 45 years ago and my brother's first visit to the country of which he is a citizen. Another positive personal thing is that in the last couple of months I have gotten back to doing a bit of cycling. Hopefully I can lose some weight in the coming year. We also bought Snork Maiden a bicycle and we've been on a few short rides together.

Career Progress Report

The academic job I applied for (there are 3-4 positions available) got more than 250 applicants from around the world. They are now narrowing these down to about 40 who will get an initial half hour interview (most at a big academic meeting). I just heard from the chairman that I made it into the 40. So I'll be having a short interview in a couple of weeks time when he gets back from the conference. After this round they'll likely select about 12 for a full on-campus interview which in the academic world last 1-2 days and includes a seminar presentation.

I'll have to think about how to prepare - Last time I did an interview was back in early 2002. And should I wear a suit and tie?

U.S. Cheque Funds Available

We were told that there would be a 21 day hold on the proceeds of the U.S. cheque we deposited. But today (the first time I checked) the Commonwealth Bank site says that all that money is included in our "Available Funds". So I transferred $A1000 to our CBA credit card. The site didn't object to the move. The other moves I have planned are to Commonwealth Bank subsidiaries too. In line with the savings policy I plan to transfer another $A1000 to my margin loan, $A1000 to Snork Maiden's Colonial First State account and $A1000 to my CFS account. I plan to invest her contribution in a bond fund for two reasons: 1) To allow some liquidity in the account in case we need to withdraw some money; 2) A bond fund will move the allocation in the account a bit nearer our planned overall target allocation. After this move the planned allocation in her account will be:



In other words: 60% in stocks with double the allocation to Australian stocks as to foreign stocks and the remaining 40% split between hedge funds, real estate, and bonds. This allocation will be achieved by the following allocation to funds:



You won't get the asset allocation by adding up the percentages in each fund as the first two funds are geared. Overall the account effectively borrows 20 cents for each dollar of equity. I'll submit a new regular savings plan on this basis too soon. The new plan will also increase the regular savings amount to $A500 per month following an increase in her salary.

I'll put my contribution in the CFS Geared Global Share Fund. This makes sense as though we are at target weighting in non-US foreign stocks we are underweight US stocks and we're very overweight large-cap Australian stocks.

Depositing a U.S. Check in Australia?

We received a check for just over $US3,000 for Snork Maiden's costs getting to and attending the conference in China in October. I'd like to turn it into Australian Dollars if possible. Tomorrow I'm going to see if Commonwealth Bank can do this at a reasonable cost and delay. Otherwise we'll have to mail it to her account in the U.S. But the only way to convert it to Australian Dollars is for her to then write me a US check which I would then mail to the US and then I'd do a transfer to one of my brokerage accounts and then finally I could do a wire transfer back to Australia. I don't think TD Banknorth HSBC would agree to do a wire transfer to Australia with us the account owners not present in the U.S. Or maybe they would? Anyway, let's see what CBA have to offer first.

Net Asset Values of Infrastructure Funds are not Exaggerated

Often I read in the media that the values of real estate and infrastructure assets owned by listed and superannuation funds are exaggerated. That really these funds couldn't realise as much as the carrying values of the assets if they sold them. Today, Challenger Infrastructure Fund sold a £100 million stake in Southern Water at carrying value. Given this, this fund is extremely undervalued. NAV was estimated at $3.75 per share in June but the shares were last trading at only $1.60. Given the fall in the Australian Dollar and this sale at carrying value, it is unlikely that the NAV has fallen from this last reported figure.

"22 December 2008, Sydney - Challenger Infrastructure Fund (CIF) today announced that it has sold £100 million of Southern Water (representing one-third of CIF’s stake). The stake will be managed by UBS Global Asset Management, the manager of the UBS International Infrastructure Fund, on behalf of a major institutional client. Financial close occurred on Saturday, 20 December 2008. The sale price of £100 million (approximately $221.4 million1) for CIF’s equity interest was completed at the 30 June 2008 Net Asset Valuation (NAV). Proceeds from the sale will be utilised to repay 50% (or £50.4 million) of the redeemable preference securities (RPS) on issue, fund an on-market buy-back of CIF securities and potentially fund future opportunities within CIF’s existing assets or fund further capital management initiatives. CIF also announced an estimated interim distribution of 12 cents per stapled security for the six months ending 31 December 2008. The interim distribution, which will be fully funded from operating cash flow, ensures a clear alignment of securityholder returns with the underlying performance of the fund’s assets. Chief Executive of CIF, Steve Bickerton said: “Over the course of 2008 CIF has undertaken a number of capital management initiatives designed to maximise securityholder value. The first example was the sale of three minority assets at a collective premium to NAV earlier this year, highlighting the embedded value in the portfolio and reducing CIF’s net proportional debt by over $1.1 billion. The sale of a third of our interest in Southern Water at NAV is another example of CIF’s capital management efforts, resulting in de-risking and de-leveraging of the fund and a further $560 million reduction of CIF’s proportional net debt. “The sale of a third of Southern Water at NAV is a pleasing outcome for CIF, particularly in current volatile equity and financial markets. The transaction has given CIF financial flexibility to undertake an on market buy-back, repay 50% of the RPS and furthermore arm CIF with the capacity to fund future opportunities from within our existing assets. CIF will continue to actively manage its capital position for the benefit of securityholders,” concluded Mr Bickerton."

Markopolos and Madoff

The report which Harry Markopolos submitted to the SEC in 2005 with his suspicions about Madoff is pretty amazing. This is how the SEC responded. They addressed the most minor aspect of the issue.

Australian vs. Foreign Shares

The chart shows the MSCI All Country World Index converted into Australian Dollars and EWA including dividends converted to AUD. From an Australian perspective, Australian shares have outperformed unhedged foreign shares over the last 12 years. But they have also been more volatile. I also show a couple of diversified portfolios with 33% and 50% foreign shares. The mix with the maximum Sharpe value is 100% Australian shares. Of course, the portfolio without an overweight to Australian shares on a global basis will be indistinguishable from the foreign share index.

These results show why, in addition to the tax benefits, Australian investors might rationally overweight Australian shares very dramatically in their portfolios.

Though hedged foreign shares follow a very different time path than unhedged ones, the Sharpe Ratio is still maximized by a 100% allocation to Australian shares if we consider this option as well.

Australian Managed Fund Distributions Fall Dramatically

This isn't a surprise at all but I just checked our distributions from Colonial First State which were paid on 14th December. Snork Maiden received $18.53 (distributions from Platinum International and BT Property) and I received $32.55 (from CFS Global Resources which was automatically reinvested). Her last distribution was $205.17 in June when she had far fewer units. I received $4,500 just from the Global Resources Fund back then. I'm not expecting much in the way of distributions any time soon due to all the capital losses the funds have received.

Record Low Returns for U.S. Large Cap Stocks

According to this chart, at the end of September the ten year return on U.S. large cap stocks was as low as it had been only four times before:



And now the return is negative.

But I'm a bit puzzled - how could the 10 year average return in 1932 be so high?



Clearly the Dow was lower than in 1922 then and even with a 5% + dividend yield it's hard to see how the returns could have been as high as shown on the chart above? This chart from Jeremy Siegel also shows what appear to be positive returns in that period, though not as high maybe?



Perhaps the explanation is that by the end of 1932 stock prices had risen around 50% from the bottom which occurred in July (see Yahoo historical data which start in 1928 unfortunately) and Goetzmann's data are annual year end numbers? But at the end of 1922 the Dow was just below 100 and at the end of 1932 at 60. A negative 5% yield. Did dividend yields average more than 10% over this period? If we use annual averages for 1922 and 1932 (about 80 and 64 respectively) we might be getting close to Goetzmann's supposed numbers but the dividend yield still doesn't seem high enough:



Conclusion, the Dow could have shown positive 10 year returns in 1932 but probably not as high as shown in the first chart in this post.

Man Investments Exposure to Madoff

A lot of visitors to this blog have been searching for various combinations of Madoff and Man Investments and its products. It turns out there is a connection between the two. Man's RMF division had 1.5% of assets invested with Madoff. 40% of our investment in the Man OM-IP 3Eclipse Fund is invested in the RMF Dynamic Program. So we lost about $A50 in the Madoff debacle.

AS is typical of Australian PDS's (prospectuses), all that is stated in the document is that the fund invests in 40 hedge funds. There is a description of the types of funds but nowhere the names of the actual managers. Australian managed funds invested in shares never tell you what they are invested in either. Colonial First State does give the ten largest positions in its quarterly performance reports. But that's it. U.S. prospectuses and fund reports give very detailed information of this type.



Moominmama seems to have zero exposure, as she is invested in the Man-AHL program but not the RMF program. It doesn't look like her UBS hedge funds had any exposure either.

Everest Brown and Babcock have clarified that they have no exposure either.

EBI's Performance

As I've reported, Everest Brown and Babcock Alternative Investment Trust (EBI.AX) has been in a lot of strife with investors. The main issue has been the discount of the stock price to NAV. The company proposed to delist the fund as a solution to that problem. But some large investors wanted to appoint a new manager or wind up the fund instead. Just how bad is the underlying investment performance of the fund?

Using the U.S. risk free rate, the beta and annual alpha of EBI's NAV relative to the Credit Suisse Tremont Hedge Fund Index were 1.68 and -4.32% for the life of the fund. Results for the HFRI index are almost identical. Using the RBA's cash rate instead the statistics are 1.66 and -2.72%. The high beta is expected due to the fund being leveraged into a portfolio of hedge funds via a swap facility provided by Macquarie Bank. I think that the correct risk free rate to use is the U.S. risk free rate. This is as the underlying funds are denominated in US Dollars and I assume Macquarie's swap is in terms of USD. Assuming fees of 1% + a 2% annual performance fee (20% annual performance * the 10% incentive rate) over the first two years of the fund when gains were positive means an average fee of 2.33%. On the face of it this indicates about 1.5% a year of negative skill. I wouldn't call this a disastrous situation though it's clearly not good that they don't at least earn their fees.

A complication arises though because the fund is supposedly hedged into Australian Dollars so that the returns reported in Australian Dollars are the same (or close to the same numbers) as the underlying funds report in U.S. dollars. To do this we could short the US Dollar and go long the Australian Dollar which can be accomplished by buying Australian Dollar futures contracts (for example the contract traded on the CME). Apart from the change in the exchange rate this contract earns the difference between the Australian Dollar and U.S. Dollar risk free rate.* An average of 2.63% over the life of EBI. And then this needs to be mulitiplied by the leverage ratio which is roughly equal to the beta. Assuming a perfect hedge we would need to deduct this earning of 4.3% per annum from the estimate of alpha!

But looking at the annual report, EBI never had a full hedge (in forwards) and by December 2007 only had a very small hedge in place. So at this point I got really confused and thought up various scenarios none of which I'm clear about. Perhaps Macquarie is doing the hedge and pocketing the interest differential while charging Everest the Australian rate for the leverage in the swap. So Macquarie takes Everest's money adds a loan to it and invests it in US hedge funds then sets up a hedge to remove the currency risk, earns the interest differential on the hedge and pays back Everest the USD percent returns earned by the hedge funds but in Australian Dollars?

Maybe someone can help me out. I think the only real way to know is to see the agreement between Macquarie and Everest and that's not in the annual report. The annual report doesn't even say that the counterparty is Macquarie.

Here is how the fund's NAV stacks up against the index in USD:



* This is why the Australian Dollar contract normally has a price below the spot price and the two prices converge towards expiry.

Blog Traffic

I'm getting a near record daily number of hits (and we're only halfway through 16th December at the moment) due to my first post about Madoff being picked up by Abnormal Returns and the beginning of traffic via the Wikinvest Wire, which you're now seeing at the bottoms of my posts. They've picked up my story about gold and the Australian Dollar. Articles from other blogs are linked to my posts and my posts appear in the same lists of further reading on other blogs.

The record visit level came on April 3rd, 2008 when I posted about Madame X's portfolio. Another notable peak occurred on May 13th when I posted about the U.S. and Australian Federal Budgets. Most of that traffic was sent by Madame X too!

Madoff vs. Equity Market Neutral Funds

The table shows the average monthly returns, standard deviation and Sharpe Ratio for the Fairfield Sentry fund that was "invested" with Madoff and Credit Suisse/Tremont's Equity Market Neutral hedge fund index for the last 12 years. Based on this, Fairfield returned the same as other market neutral funds with about 3/4 of the volatility.

But the big problem with this analysis is it seems that Madoff related funds, at least recently, constituted up to 40% of this index. So it seems that the average market neutral fund is a lot more volatile than the index has been showing. If we assume a constant 40% share for Madoff the market neutral index returned 0.81% per month with a 1.20% standard deviation for a Sharpe Ratio of 1.55. So Madoff's returns were twice as smooth as the adjusted index. Assuming imperfect correlation between those funds the typical fund would be more volatile than that 1.2% monthly standard deviation.

Fairfield Sentry has a beta of 0.09 and an annual alpha of 5.5% relative to the reconstructed index. If you invested directly with Madoff you'd have "made" about 3% a year more than this.

Here are the total return indices for the reconstructed index and Fairfield:

Effect of Madoff on the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index

Credit Suisse/Tremont Equity Market Neutral Index loses 40.45% in November:



Up to the end of October the index was pretty much flat for the year. The attached commentary states that they wrote down all the Madoff related funds to zero for November. Does this mean that they constituted roughly 40% of the market neutral index?

Seems to me that it would make more sense to just remove them from all past periods too?

Madoff

A lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how they knew that Madoff's scheme was obviously a scam. I got the returns data from the Fairfield Sentry fund which was invested in Madoff from Nomura's 3x Leveraged Product factsheet:



Does this look obviously like a scam? The returns are nowhere near as smooth as many media reports claim. One interesting feature is a decline in returns over time which could be related to increased difficulty in paying distributions and redemptions but hedge funds in general have seen declining returns. There is also an apparent reduction in the variance of returns.

The average monthly return from October 1996 to the present was 0.749% with a monthly standard deviation of 0.622% and a Sharpe Ratio of 2.506. This is a slightly higher return and a slightly lower variance than the TIAA Real Estate Fund. The reason that the latter fund is so smooth is that it receives a constant stream of rent payments and only slowly revalues its properties. But for a strategy depending on the stock market this does seem suspiciously smooth. The Credit Suisse Tremont Hedge Fund Index returned 0.728% with standard deviation of 2.205% in the same period. CREF's Bond Market Fund returned 0.463% with s.d. of 1.073%. Man-AHL returned 1.631% with a standard deviation of 5.257%. So this fund gave similar returns to the average hedge fund with less than bond market levels of volatility or just under half the returns of a managed futures fund with about an eighth of the volatility. No wonder Nomura's investors wanted to leverage into it! The returns have correlations of 0.23 to the MSCI World Index, 0.12 to the Credit Suisse/Tremont index and zero to the bond market. With these kinds of stats a Markowitz style portfolio analysis would tell you to put all your money in the fund as some clients seem to have done.

This total return index chart looks more obviously scamlike:



Yet another lesson to not put too much money with any one manager of anything but simple asset class exposures (that are well audited).

Gold and the Australian Dollar

It's commonly believed that there is a strong relationship between the Australian Dollar and gold. But is this true? I computed the monthly returns on gold (percent change in the gold spot price) and the AUD (percent change in the exchange rate to the dollar plus the monthly interest at the Reserve Bank of Australia cash rate) for the period from October 1996 to the present:



The correlation is 0.3 (equivalent to an R2 of 0.09). This isn't that high. The correlation between the returns on the Australian Dollar and the MSCI World Index is around double this. You would get more diversification from investing in a mix of gold and Australian Dollars than in investing in shares and Australian Dollars! The total return indices look superficially correlated:



(R2 is 0.90) but it is a somewhat spurious relationship.

Everest Babcock and Brown Alternative Investment Trust Changes Course Again

Everest Babcock and Brown Alternative Investment Trust (EBI.AX) changed course again, rendering my post from just a couple of days ago out of date. The fund has settled the legal dispute with Laxey Partners and will now follow two distinct tracks. Shareholders will be able to decide between swapping their units for units in an unlisted trust to be managed along the same lines as EBI by Everest Financial or to remain in the listed EBI which will be managed by a new manager and is likely to be wound up over time as hedge fund redemptions allow. All this is supposed to happen before the 30th of January. The main potential obstacle is Macquarie Group who are the provider of the swap that is used to leverage the underlying investments. NAV for November was also announced at $2.58 down 7.86% on the month. The stock currently trades for 80-90 cents.

As the 10% redemption offer has now been withdrawn, we will have $A7,000 less to pay off debt or make new investments.

Performance of Endowment Style Portfolios

In the final post of this series I look at the performance of an endowment type portfolio over the last 12 years. 10% is invested in the CREF Bond Fund and the remaining 90% split equally between the MSCI World Index, the Man-AHL Diversified Fund, the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index, and the TIAA-Real Estate Fund. As is the case with all the portfolios I've posted here the portfolio is rebalanced monthly. This is the Balanced Portfolio. The Levered Portfolio borrows 45 cents for each dollar invested. In other words, the managed futures and stock portion of the portfolio are geared by 50% (one dollar borrowed for each dollar invested). The unlevered portfolio returns 0.83% per month (10.4% p.a.) with a monthly volatility of only 1.78%. The levered portfolio returns 1.08% per month (13.7% p.a.) with a monthly volatility of only 2.58%. This volatility is roughly half that of stocks or managed futures and the return is more than double what stocks returned in this period. Beta to the stock market is 0.35.

These results look better in the last couple of months than Ray Dalio's All Weather Portfolio, which is one of my inspirations. The reason is that while the AWP only includes "beta sources" the portfolio proposed in this post has 45% of assets allocated to "alpha sources" (i.e. they produce alpha relative to the MSCI benchmark).

Implementing a strategy like this in Australia is probably going to require a self managed superannuation fund (similar but much more bureaucratic than a US IRA) for someone like me with half or more of net worth in superannuation as I haven't found a regular superannuation provider with a managed futures option or for that matter a hedge funds option. Funds like PSS(AP) have some money invested in hedge funds of course, but you can't increase that proportion. You can decrease it by also investing in some of their single asset class funds.

Hedge Funds vs. Managed Futures

In recent posts I have looked at the optimal allocation between stocks and managed futures and between stocks and a composite hedge fund index. The Sharpe Ratio maximizing choice of managed futures was between 55 and 75% of the portfolio depending on the sample of months used. When choosing between stocks and hedge funds though the Sharpe Ratio was maxmized when the whole portfolio was allocated to hedge funds. In fact it was even better to short stocks and go long hedge funds.

But what is the best choice between a generic hedge fund index and a managed futures fund? Using data on the Credit Suisse/Tremont Index and the Man-AHL Diversified Fund for October 1996 to October 2008 the Sharpe Ratio is maximized for an allocation of 30% to the managed futures fund and 70% to the Hedge Fund Index. This portfolio has only slightly higher volatility than the hedge fund index (2.31% vs. 2.14%) and a higher return (1.012% vs. 0.787% per month). By borrowing 72 cents for each dollar invested you could boost returns to the level of the managed futures fund - 1.54% per month with less volatility (3.97% vs. 5.16%) and a slightly lower volatility than stocks.

I've also run portfolio analyses including the MSCI, Man-AHL, Credit Suisse/Tremont, and the TIAA Real Estate Fund and CREF Bond Fund to represent two further asset classes. The maximum Sharpe Ratio was for a portfolio 100% in the real estate fund...

In the real world taking into account tax and other considerations, limitations on leverage (or safer forms of leverage), higher moment correlations, and likely higher future returns from stocks (than in this lost decade period) the best portfolio probably wouldn't be as extreme as these simple analyses indicate. But it would be very different from most people's portfolios and much more similar to the university endowment portfolios. I'll analyse some endowment type portfolios in my next post.

Savings Policy

From now on we'll split all savings 50:50 between paying off debt (margin loans and credit card) and making new investments (in Snork Maiden's and my own Colonial First State accounts). Just another form of diversification. We are due to receive a refund of a large part of the costs of the China trip and hopefully get the moneys from redeeming EBI.AX units. In total that is $A12,000 to be reinvested. All this is on top of our regular $A400 monthly contributions to Snork Maiden's account.

Australian Fund Updates

Allco Equity Partners (AEP.AX): The Liberman family got a margin call and now ANZ owns the 25% of the company that they used to own and which had hoped they could sell to the now bankrupt Allco Finance Group for net asset value (about three times the current share price). Steve Eckowitz at EBB also got a margin call a while back. These wealthy families don't seem to be any smarter than me :) In the meantime, the company was trying to terminate its management agreement with Allco and rebrand. The courts just ruled against it. They're looking to appeal of course. They have also hired UBS to look at ways of reducing the discount in the share price.

Platinum Capital (PMC.AX): The very bold attempt to raise more capital with a 1:1 rights issue only raised a small fraction of the planned amount. Only 13,436,583 of the possible 127,163,967 shares were taken up but some shareholders asked for additional allotments of 2,878,901 shares. So they raised 12% of what they hoped for. They also raised a bit more with dividend reinvestment and a "share purchase plan".

Everest Brown and Babcock Alternative Investment Trust (EBI.AX): The fund is embroiled in legal proceedings over the planned delisting and the postponed shareholder meeting. I'm still hoping to get my redemption money on 19th December (the period was extended from 12th December). The stock is trading at about 1/3 of NAV. The AFR reported that there are rumors that the fund that is bringing proceedings (Laxey Partners) is being forced to sell units in the market due to margin calls.

Everest Brown and Babcock (EBB.AX): Not a fund, but a fund manager. Babcock and Brown (BNB.AX, which is close to bankruptcy) sold a 20% holding in EBB.AX to the Wingate Group which apparently is backed by the Smorgon family of Melbourne. One wealthy investor who didn't get a margin call or go bankrupt apparently :) This is good news I think because the company's share price of 4-5 cents (Smorgon bought at 4 cents and have already made 25% on their investment notionally!) looked like the market thought they were heading for bankruptcy too. Given the apparent smarts of this investor that would appear to not be the case. But $A2 million is peanuts for them so who knows.