Felix Salman has a very smart take on JP Morgan's trading troubles. (This couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people btw. While everyone has been baying for Lloyd Blankfein's blood in the blast couple of years, Jamie Dimon got to play the wise statesman until now..)
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/14/jamie-dimons-failure/ --------------------------snip Iksil’s trade was fundamentally bullish, which would make sense for a trade designed to offset a fundamentally bearish hedge. Of course it wasn’t a perfect offset — there’s no such thing as a perfect hedge. Traders making multi-million-dollar bonuses don’t get paid to design perfect hedges, in any case. Iksil was being paid to put on a trade which would make money for the CIO, even as it was also hedging existing positions. As with all imperfect hedges, however, especially when they’re big and public, the market can always move against you in exactly the way you don’t want. We don’t know the details of Iksil’s trade, but let’s say that the big underlying position was a bearish position in cash bonds, while Iksil’s trade involved a bullish position in the CDS market. In April, the cash and CDS markets stopped mirroring each other, and started behaving very oddly — you’d see bullish moves in cash bonds, combined with bearish moves in the CDS market. That combination, it seems, turned out to be the one thing that JP Morgan wasn’t hedged against, and the losses in the CIO started mounting rapidly. How did Iksil’s trade go so horribly, massively, wrong? Partly it’s because his position was so big and so public. When hedge funds worked out what he was doing, they managed to get the word out, using stories in Bloomberg and the WSJ. And then it was just a matter of watching the market do what it always does, when it smells blood: I’m told that Boaz Weinstein’s Saba, for one, made a lot of money taking the other side of Iksil’s trade. Taking a much bigger-picture view, however, what was really going on here was that JP Morgan had hundreds of billions of dollars in excess deposits, thanks to its too-big-to-fail status. And rather than lending out that money and boosting the economy, Jamie Dimon decided to simply play with it in financial markets, just as a hedge fund would. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
