Hedge Fund Performance- Managed Futures is doing well

Early estimates indicate the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index (“Broad Index”) will finish down approximately 0.71% in November (based on 69% of returns received).

The overall hedge fund industry is expected to post modest losses in November, which is welcome news after two of the lowest months of performance on record. Continuing downward trends in US Treasury yields, commodity and currency markets led to positive performance for the Global Macro and Managed Futures sectors and helped mitigate the losses from other sectors. While several sectors capitalized on the month-end equities rally in which the S&P saw its largest weekly gain since 1974, the move does not appear to have been a main driver of performance due to its short duration.

Managed Futures was the best performing sector in the Broad Index, finishing the month up an estimated 3.21% (with 90% of funds reporting). In addition, three other sectors appear to be ending the month in positive territory, including Dedicated Short Bias, Equity Market Neutral and Global Macro.

Commodity and Interest Rates Head Lower

The continued commodities bear market benefited the Global Macro and Managed Futures sectors as short positions in the commodities sector led to gains for the month. Oil prices dropped below $50 a barrel from October highs, and were down almost $100 a barrel from previous levels this summer.

Yields on 10-Year Treasury Bonds dropped to record lows, falling below 3% in November. Some analysts currently forecast a further decline in yields if the U.S. Federal Reserve lowers interest rates in December as expected. If Federal Reserve efforts to improve market conditions by providing liquidity for asset-backed securities through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) are successful, a possible investment shift from treasuries to other securities could begin to create opportunities in the Relative Value sectors as well.

Next 6 months view- still short

Recently my view on the S&P had been that it
would bounce around between 800 to 1000 with some downside drift. I still hold on to that view except I am a bit more bearish now. The other shoe consisting of the real side of the economy hasn't dropped.

More gloomy views

I expect anybody competing with Home Equity Loans lines of credit, student loans, credit cards, Installment loans to post much bigger defaults numbers since credit was so cheap over the last few year and the lenders must have lent to the same group of customers with the same reckless abandon.... 0 % financing etc.

Credit Cards: I expect more credit card firms to go bankrupt. When I scan the credit card firm numbers it seems there are "trading losses" that are quite large in magnitude... for example it seems Capital One Financial had losses on the order of 3 Billion this quarter from trading but overall made 1 Billion dollars... this is worrying...

Commercial Real Estate: Dennis Gartman, in his letter, talks about how he expects bad times to come for commercial real estate... malls etc. and I agree. With many stores closing a lot of the malls will become unprofitable and commercial real estate will suffer tremendously.

Private Equity: A lot of private equity funds will have problems raising money, or closing, or even GETTING the money they have been promised. Additionally, the portfolios they had with high leverages and high multiples on these land deals- hotels, entertainment, restaurants etc. are all rapidly becoming worthless. These are the "shadow lenders" in the economy. When the cheap credit goes away they will suffer a lot and it will take time before the extent of suffering is made public and known.

So I expect some sort of a meltdown from the real recession on the above mentioned parts of the
economy...

However, let's hope I am totally wrong....
My trading Performance:
I am toying with putting up my trading performance for this year on the web. My positions are small but I run them seriously. If anyone's interested or has a view on if I should put up my trading numbers please let me know via the comments section

cheers

Waiting for "Black Friday" numbers

I don't have a clue about what the "Black Friday" numbers will look like. Sure the consumers want to buy less, but the stores, who know the consumers' reluctance to open the purse strings, are constrained for liquidity. These stores have to get rid of inventories and also face liquidations. Thus it is possible that the sales numbers may paint a falsely positive picture of the economy. It is also possible that the numbers are terrible.....

Anyway, below are Mr. Dennis Gartman's Rules of Trading. It is interesting to see how many are "momentum" related. Also, there are some self contradictory ones here :) .... I will wait for the astute readers to point that out. Overall, these rules are still worth a read..

Trading Rules (by Dennis Gartman)

1. Never, Ever, Ever, Under Any Circumstance, Add To A Losing
Position... Ever! Adding to losing positions will lead to ruin. You can count
on it. Ask the Nobel Laureates in Economics at Long Term Capital! (Disposition Effect)

2. Trade Like A Mercenary Soldier: As Jesse Livermore said, it is not
ours to be bullish or bearish, but to be right.

3. Mental Capital Trumps Real Capital: Capital comes in two types;
mental and real. Holding losing positions costs measurable real capital, but
immeasurable mental capital. (Very very true)

4. We Are Not A Business Of Buying Low And Selling High; We are,
however, a business of buying high and selling higher. Strength begets
strength, and weakness further weakness almost always. (Momentum)

5. In Bull Markets One Can Only Be Long or Neutral, and in bear
markets, one can only be short or neutral. This may seem self-evident, but
very few understand it, and fewer still embrace it. (Don't try to catch a falling knife as they say. Interestingly Mr. Gartman himself has been trying to catch the proverbial knife in the recent equity market..... He has declared the bear market to be over several times.)


6. "Markets Can Remain Illogical Far Longer Than You Or I Can
Remain Solvent." J.M. Keynes. Illogic does often reign, and it is our duty
to learn to handle it as best we might.

7. Buy Markets That Show The Greatest Strength; Sell Markets
That Show The Greatest Weakness: Metaphorically, when bearish we
need to throw rocks into the wettest paper sacks, for they break most
easily. When bullish we need to sail the strongest winds, for they carry
the farthest.

8. Think Like A Fundamentalist; Trade Like A Chartist: The
fundamentals may drive a market and need to be understood, but if the
chart is not bullish, why be bullish? Trade when the technicals and
fundamentals, as you understand them, run in concert, one with the other.
(This is what separates theoretical economists from traders)

9. Trading Runs in Cycles; Some Good; Most Bad: In "good times,"
even errors turn to profits; in "bad times," the most well researched trade
will go awry. This is the nature of trading; accept it and move on.
(Interesting idea- Most traders have a style that can be linked to a mechanical trading strategy and sometimes those strategies do badly and sometimes well...)

10. Keep Your Technical Systems Simple: Complicated systems breed
confusion; simplicity breeds elegance. The great traders we've known
have the simplest methods of trading. There is a correlation here!
(definitely agree. Yet paradoxically you must seek complex markets to play in since there is a definite complexity premium)

11: In Trading/Investing, An Understanding Of Mass Psychology is
Often More Important Than An Understanding of Economics: Simply
put, "When they are cryin', you should be buyin'! and when they are yellin',
you should be sellin'!" This is psychology at work and its most elegant.
(Elegance is questionable but the risk premium story is intact. More amusingly, this contradicts the first few rules about momentum)

12. It Takes Buying And Lots Of It To Put A Market Up; It Takes
Only A Lack Of Buying To Put Any Market Down: Gravity is an amazing
force of nature; it is even more amazing in the world of investing.

13. There Is Never Just One Cockroach: The lesson of most markets
is that bad news follows bad... usually hard upon and always with
detrimental effect upon price, until such time as panic prevails and the
weakest hands finally exit their positions.
(fair enough as seen now)
14. Be Patient With Winning Trades; Be Enormously Impatient with
Losing Trades: The older we get, the more small losses we take each
year... and our profits grow accordingly.

15. Fear Turns To Greed At Break Even... And Vice Versa: Know
this; understand this; accept this and deal with it.
(Again very true... controlling emotions while trading is about 80% of it)

16. Do More Of That Which Is Working and Less Of That Which Is
Not: This works in life as well as trading. Do the things that have been
proven of merit. Add to winning trades; Cut or eliminate losing ones. If
there is a "secret" to trading (and of life), this is it.

17. All Rules Are Meant To Be Broken.... but only very, very
infrequently. Genius comes in knowing how truly infrequently one can do so
and still prosper, but when one must, one must!

Hedge Fund Performance Oct 08

Fund Type	Oct. 2008	Sep. 2008	YTD
Hedge Fund Index	-6.30%	-6.55%	-15.54%
Convertible Arbitrage	-12.59%	-12.26%	-29.59%
Dedicated Short Bias	9.66%	-6.08%	13.38%
Emerging Markets	-13.63%	-8.93%	-29.24%
Equity Market Neutral	-1.83%	-1.41%	-0.19%
Event Driven	-5.09%	-5.75%	-13.92%
Distressed	-5.66%	-5.18%	-14.11%
Multi-Strategy	-4.77%	-6.17%	-13.97%
Risk Arbitrage	-3.06%	-3.49%	-4.77%
Fixed Income Arbitrage	-14.04%	-6.80%	-23.99%
Global Macro	-5.13%	-6.63%	-7.10%
Long/Short Equity	-7.13%	-7.81%	-19.46%
Managed Futures	4.96%	-0.57%	11.99%
Multi-Strategy	-6.94%	-7.35%	-18.68%

Investors Seek Refuge in Money Market Funds in October, Adding a Net $38.4 Billion to the Funds Business

- The money market funds macro-group (+$169.1 billion) was the only macro-group attracting net flows in October, while stock and mixed-equity funds handed back $86.3 billion and bond funds
witnessed $44.4 billion of net redemptions.
- Large-cap funds (-$16.2 billion) continued to be the outcasts of the U.S. Diversified Equity (USDE) funds group, while small-cap funds (-$3.5 billion) managed to avoid the large losses witnessed by the other capitalization groups.
- In October the Mixed-Equity Funds macro-group (-$19.4
billion) suffered only its third monthly redemptions since July 2002. The mixed-asset target horizon funds group (+$0.9
billion) could not make up for the unprecedented net redemptions witnessed by the mixed-asset target allocation funds group (-$18.4 billion).
- In October the World Equity Funds macro-classification
(-$24.1 billion) suffered its worst monthly drawdown in over ten years, surpassing the previous month's record decline of
$20.8 billion.

What is the "right level" for equities?

What can the academics say besides - we don't know what the price should be. The MARKET decides that.

Short Answer: S&P around 600 won't be surprising and around 700 is fair value.

I thought about our most sacred academic cow of equity market ratios and wondered what it would tell me. The D/P ratio. Here D means the Dividend Yield and P is naturally the price. So this ratio measures the "yield" if you will of investing in equities. Obviously if prices increases the yield falls and vice versa.

Where is this D/P ratio these days? Has it come back to the historical average of around 4% or is it still low? If we want to come up with a target for the S&P I think we could do worse than saying this is the level of S&P that gets us a D/P ratio of 4%. That number has a pretty long history.... Roughly speaking it seems the level on stocks should be from 700 to 800 ( for a ratio of 4.5% to 4%). Naturally, in a scenario like the current one, the pendulum swings too far to the other side to give it a reason to rally! so say D/P swings to 5% - 6% not unnatural after such a risk inducing event. then we see the levels of around 580.
So my fellow student Manuel's idea of going in at 600 is not bad.

My highly complex quantitative rule of what price to offer for assets in distressed times: After many regressions and highly complicated maths, I have come up with my wonderfully quantitative rule of what price to offer when there is SERIOUS trouble around. The rule is 1/3rd. Just offer 1/3rd of what the value was. You will offer more for finance firms :) but overall for the S&P you would be doing fine.... Remember you are making a bid and letting the market COME to you. No rush to spend your valuable money in times like this.... I think you should use the strategy on cars, houses as well... If you are in a developing country then it the rule is 1/4th :)

D/P chart
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/directors_charts/ipage20.pdf

Interesting how commentators that I read are remarking on how the yield on equities has exceded the yields on the 10 year bonds after many years. However, no one is thinking of what the historically HIGH D/P ratios are... We are thinking of average D/P and then will act surprised when it is broken. No one cried wolf when the D/P ratio was 2.5 earlier...

My idea: It would be better to invest in India/China than the U.S. once this crisis is over
I thought about investments a little bit and it occurred to me that when the market starts recovering in the next 3-6 months or so ( if it does!) then I should invest in India or China. The exchange rate is quite favorable ( drop of 25-30% vs. the dollar from 39 to 51, and if the market recovers India's stock market that has gone down about 62% to 63% of what it was- from 21000 to 8000! these emerging markets have HIGHER betas and will recover more quickly. I believe their economic story anyway...Maybe I can figure out their D/P ratios...

If I could buy BRIC notes in the next 6 months I would. No need to rush in. Decide the price you want to OWN the thing at and leave a bid and let the market come to you.

My own trading:
I sold out of my S&P puts way too early- made a profit still but could have made more.... This is what happens when you don't have a crystal ball AND not enough contracts to average :).

Are we on track to becoming Japan? Please post some comments

Low nominal rates of interest

Want to "rescue" firms that have all become too big or too important to fail

Likely to have an interventionist government

Stock market over the last 10 years is flat/lost money in NOMINAL terms (In real terms i.e. when you take the time value of money or the interest rate into account, it has lost a lot of money)

These are some of the concerns I have. I need to think about this more deeply and figure out what the right things to look at are. I do think we have better corporate governance than Japan does,are quite risk taking as a country and our culture are quite different. However, the possibility of a long and gradual road to recovery cannot be ruled out.

If any of the visitors or readers has any comments/views/suggestions on whether we are in danger of becoming Japan and what are the key metrics to examine, please post some comments.

thanks