(This discussion keys off some press reports that a comment in an email about not hedging volatility was a key part of the case, while statements at other times said the portfolio was hedged. The following was written a little strongly to find fault with such a prosecution. However, its useful in shedding some insights on the case. The indictment itself, read later, and linked to further on, suggests a more complicated case than just this comment. Nonetheless, the question of technicalities may not disappear even if an attempt is made to sidestep them in preparing a prosecution case. The type of portfolio and hedge fund under discussion was by its nature going to take Askin Capital Management type risk on. It was dealing with illiquid instruments with leverage. That means a melt down scenario is possible.
The problem with criminal cases in complex transactions of this kind is that different people can see things differently. The basic lesson is that prompt civil regulatory supervision is better than late criminal prosecution. The following may be unfair to the prosecution case or perhaps not. That’s the thing with these types of cases. You can flip flop over these cases just as much as hedge fund managers flip flop over their hedge strategy, position, models, hedge ratios, estimates, methodology, and statements to clients. The legal analysis of the case can flip flop as much as the managers of a hedge fund, or the clients can in their thinking. That’s why the parties involved should try to build a good system up front to communicate. Criminal prosecution is not the best way to achieve that result. Cases like this are 99 percent education and 1 percent the rest.
Just as a hedge fund manager or modeler may feel sick to the stomach that they made a fundamental mistake in understanding, so can a prosecutor, defense lawyer or witness. Cases where you get sick from realizing your understanding has changed are not goods for criminal prosecution. Just because a fund washes out doesn’t mean there was fraud. Leveraged bets on illiquid instruments can wash out is obvious from history such as Askin Capital Management and LTCM. That is a matter of education for all parties concerned more than criminal prosecution. Someone who looked up the history of these melt downs of the past should have realized the same possibility applied to a hedge fund making leveraged bets on CDO’s. The investors could have figured that out from Google and Wikipedia. Bear was involved with both LTCM and Askin Capital Management.
If a fund is difficulty, and the fund tries to raise more money, what it represents about the actions of its principals is important. Are they taking money out while saying they are putting money in to induce others to put money in even when the fund is worthless? Whether that is alleged or true is a question to be considered with care. Whether that is part of the case or not readers can determine on their own from the indictment and reports. Its not asserted here that this was alleged or that there is evidence of it.
)
Everyone in this case couldn’t pass an exam on what hedged means. When someone says hedged without qualification, it means delta hedged, i.e. against market level.
Example. A fund sells call options on SPX and buys SPX so its delta neutral. They say they are hedged. That’s standard speak.
Are they hedged against volatility? No. You can say its hedged and 5 seconds later says its not hedged against volatility. Its not a contradiction, because when you say its hedged w/o saying specifically against what, it means against market level but doesn’t include volatility hedged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greeks
Q: Are you hedged.
A: Yes. (only means delta hedged)
Q: Are you vega hedged?
A: No.
Q: Are you delta hedged.
A: Yes.
Hedged can mean hedged against some variable or parameter indicated by context or by prior discussion or understanding. If someone says hedged to customers, he is not speaking about being vega hedged. How many customers know what vega is?
Can these prosecutors pass a test on the Greeks in Black Scholes? They have no idea what the words mean or how they are used in context. They should be given an instant on the spot written exam on different meaning of hedged and their answers posted on the internet. Then the indictment should be dropped.
http://schulzkelaw.com/lessons-from-bear-stearns-indictments-dont-trust-anybody-or-anything/#comment-66
Why don’t they investigate Russia’s Plagiarism Files?
http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/russias-plagiarism-files/
When Russia uses information about people’s past and gets benefits, then that’s worth investigating at least to just expose it even without prosecution.
The hedge fund managers are not professors who teach option pricing or write text books.They are not writing exam answers in these e-mails. They likely can’t define basic terms in calculus like limit, derivative, integral, etc. Neither can the prosecutors, judge, jury or witnesses. Nor can supervisors at DOJ.
The hedge fund managers use terms loosely because they aren’t text book writers or professors who write exam questions on what hedged means. So their ideas of what it means are wrong in the first place. They have minds full of mush. They can’t pass a test on rigorous calculus definitions or option math or anything. Neither can the prosecutors, judge, jurors, witnesses, etc.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFCLTwIuFqM4&refer=home
Ralph Cioffi, 52, and Matthew Tannin, 46, were charged June 19 with misleading investors by saying two funds were thriving while knowing subprime-mortgage investments threatened their collapse. Investors in the funds lost $1.6 billion.
Cioffi said in another e-mail that a fund’s loss in February was the result of a failure to properly hedge market volatility, prosecutors said. The following month, he told investors “we were effectively able to hedge.”
In one case, they might have meant hedged against market levels, delta hedged, and in another they are talking about hedged with respect to volatility, i.e. vega hedged. No one means vega hedged when they say hedged unless the context clearly indicates it. When speaking to the general public, you would never talk about hedged as meaning hedged against volatility, i.e. vega hedged.
This is like the Thomas C. Butler case and the Buffalo Art professor case. Its worse than the Martha Stewart case.
The prosecutors should be given an exam in basic calculus, option pricing, and mean variance portfolio analysis. Their answers then should e posted on the internet. The same for the judge, jurors and witnesses. None of them could likely pass an exam on what the words mean or what the concepts are.
So if a fund is delta hedged and not vega hedged it can say its hedged without that being out of line. Most people don’t know what vega hedged means and would have a difficult time going into specifics.
A mortgage fund might be approximately delta hedged in a vague sense if it was long and short mortgage back securities or was long some such as IO’s or PO’s that hedged some particular risk. With mortgages there are so many risks to hedge, that any fund taken at random will be partially hedged for some and less so for others. So a fund taken at random might loosely be called hedged in the sense that there was some reduction of some risk by the different positions in the portfolio when netted out. Yet other risks might be accentuated. The term hedged by itself is vague.
No portfolio is hedged totally. Even cash is subject to currency risk and inflation. Hedged lacks the specificity to be the basis of a criminal prosecution. This is a mistaken case. As the case goes on, the prosecutors will have a different understanding then when they started. But then they won’t back down. This is a case where the court does its job by taking as hard a line against the prosecution in everything as possible.
Timeline
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=agnF2IL2OCyE
Traders and investors flip flop on investments every few seconds. That applies from individuals to professional fund managers because its part of human genetics.
Kahneman Tversky
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=_0H8gwj4a1MC&dq=Kahneman+Tversky&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=YBbd4UX20L&sig=oppifDhgLZTq-ZntJfEpW59KP28&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=13&ct=result
Anyone who owns investments and looks at the market more than once a month will feel the same emotions as described by the fund managers. It means nothing to say such things in an email or private conversation.
http://badger.som.yale.edu/faculty/ncb25/tversky.pdf
You can see a video of Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize lecture on this.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-lecture.html
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/press.html
Daniel Kahneman has integrated insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research. Kahneman’s main findings concern decision-making under uncertainty, where he has demonstrated how human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard economic theory. Together with Amos Tversky (deceased in 1996), he has formulated prospect theory as an alternative, that better accounts for observed behavior. Kahneman has also discovered how human judgment may take heuristic shortcuts that systematically depart from basic principles of probability. His work has inspired a new generation of researchers in economics and finance to enrich economic theory using insights from cognitive psychology into intrinsic human motivation.
He would be a good witness for the defense. LTCM lost money too.
Kahneman is saying the human animal uses heuristics not formal math. These hedge fund managers, like most people in financial services, probably couldn’t pass an exam on nit picky definitions of delta and vega hedging. They even more likely couldn’t pass on precise calculus definitions of limit, derivative and integral. Stochastic calculus would be out of the question.
So on the one hand, we have formal math and its application to option pricing. Mortgage pricing and math depends on numerical maths quite likely beyond the ability of the hedge fund managers to explain. Even if they could get Black Scholes right on an exam, getting mortgage pricing and prepay models right is very unlikely. What is hedged in context of mortgage securities is really a high level math and financial theory and econometrics question that would be a small group to do properly. Why they pay these guys might be a good question, but that’s a separate one.
You have a collision between formal math from ordinary calculus up to stochastic calculus and other parts of math, financial theory, market practice, and heuristics. So what the word hedge means is context and individual dependent. The prosecutors have put their foot into the wrong place. They have jumped to get these guys because they make a lot and lost a lot. So they pick on emails that are taken out of context.
Even in context, the fund managers don’t have the precision knowledge of math, finance, econometrics, market instruments, etc. to define what hedged means for a portfolio of mortgage backed securities. To do that correctly in writing applying all these fields correctly is not something many people could do. Few could do it in a casual e-mail exchange. Hedge fund managers are operating on heuristics of the Kahneman type, not on all the math definitions. So its meaningless to bring this criminal case on the term hedged and what they meant.
Moreover, to the listeners, hedge is variable in meaning, because the understanding of all these subjects is variable. Most listeners couldn’t pass an exam on what hedged means with respect to Black Scholes let alone mortgage backed securities. Neither could the prosecutors. If they presented witnesses on what hedged means for a portfolio of mortgage backed securities they will see that the jurors, judge, themselves, and the defendants can’t follow it. They will all go to sleep. Which is where this indictment should go.
mortgage backed securities pricing models hedged
This search brings up this page which has a list of papers available to read.
http://www.hedgefund-index.com/s_mortgagebs.asp
The prosecutors could read these papers as a start. At the bottom is a disclosure of risks of hedge funds. They should read that closely.
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http://investing.businessweek.com/businessweek/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=1347364&symbol=BSC
BACKGROUND*
Ralph R. Cioffi serves as Co-Chief Executive Officer of Everquest Financial Ltd. Mr. Cioffi serves as a Senior Managing Director of Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc.(�BSAM�). He has been with BSAM since 1985. From 1985 to 1991, Mr. Cioffi worked in institutional fixed-income sales where he specialized in structured finance products. He served as the N.Y. head of fixed-income sales from 1989 to 1991. From 1991 to 1994, Mr. Cioffi served as Global Product and Sales Manager … for high-grade credit products. He was involved in the creation of the structured credit effort at BSAM and was a principal force behind Bear Stearns� position as a leading underwriter and secondary trader of structured finance securities, specifically CDOs and esoteric ABS. Mr. Cioffi founded and has been managing the High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund since March 2003. He serves as Director of Everquest Financial Ltd and Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. Mr. Cioffi is a member of BSAM’s board of directors. He is a member of the international business management and administration honor society, Sigma Beta Delta. Mr. Cioffi holds a B.S. degree in Business Administration with distinction from Saint Michael�s College, Vermont.
This shows clearly he has no ability to pass a basic knowledge test on what delta hedging, Vega hedging are for Black Scholes and certainly not for mortgage math hedging. If a mortgage quant were to talk with Cioffi, the quant would not assume Cioffi understood basic calculus terms, Black Scholes, or portfolio theory in any but a superficial sense.
Anyone who learned all the math, finance, mbs structure detail, prepay models, interest rate models, market detail, portfolio theory, and the math definitions in their correct versions would be close to crazy anyhow. The same for anyone who could understand it. That’s why they are called nutty professors. Then add market vol and Kahneman stuff on top of it, and emails could say anything when written by senior managers who have a vague idea of these things but couldn’t precisely explain any of it on paper to suit a math or finance professor.
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/2007/Part_3/index.html
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/2007/Part_3/Paper36.pdf
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/2007/Part_3/Paper41.pdf
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/2007/Part_3/Paper42.pdf
http://www.math.cam.ac.uk/teaching/pastpapers/2006/Part_3/Paper39.pdf
Real world MBS hedging math is far more complicated than what is on these exams. These exam papers should be exhibits to go into the jury room. The witnesses should explain that MBS hedging is far more complicated than what is on these exams.
Black Scholes homework solutions
mortgage hedging prepayment
Mortgage hedging with a realistic prepay and interest rate model is too complicated for even the Cambridge exams. How can a jury or judge handle this in a criminal case?
If they knew how to explain this to jurors it would be available in stores. If such explanations are not in book stores, they are not going to be produced at trial. That means its a denial of due process of law to try this case. That’s because the ability to explain all this at the level jurors can understand doesn’t exist anywhere. That means you can’t try the case. If you can’t explain it, you can’t try it. If you could explain it at that level, it would be available in book stores already.
Any MBS portfolio will contain some natural hedging of some risks, because there are so many. No MBS portfolio is hedged against all risks. No portfolio is. Becoming more precise than this requires the ability to articulate math, financial theory, market practice, prepay and other models, etc. the way that calculus education does it for undergraduate students. That has only been done for Black Scholes and a few other parts of finance and not for MBS models.
==
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/the-team-behind-the-bear-stearns-charges/
In the cases of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, their chief adversary is Benton J. Campbell, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. And according to The Wall Street Journal, prosecutors from that Brooklyn-based district may become the foes of many more financial executives.
In some ways, the Eastern District is an unlikely source of white-collar crime prosecutions.
(Still, as Slate also points out, Mr. Benton’s work there didn’t exactly lead to successful prosecutions. Not a single Enron broadband executive tried by Mr. Benton’s team has landed in jail.)
http://www.slate.com/id/2193936/?dbk
Meet Bear Stearns’ ProsecutorA relatively obscure U.S. attorney brings the subprime mortgage saga into a new, criminal phase.
By Chadwick Matlin
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2008, at 4:42 PM ET
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20bear.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
Published: June 20, 2008
In the spring of 2007, as the mortgage market came unglued, two Bear Stearns executives shared their growing fears in a series of e-mail messages to each other about the perilous condition of the giant hedge funds they oversaw.
“This is not about mismanagement of a hedge fund investment strategy,” said Mark J. Mershon, the head of the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at a news conference Thursday. “It is about premeditated lies to investors and lenders.”
Sure about that? Sure you wouldn’t do better trying to go after Russia keeping track of plagiarism by professors? When you find the hands of Russia on something, the chance you can prove something is really wrong may turn out to be higher.
http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/russias-plagiarism-files/
http://www.nysun.com/business/us-sees-crime-in-the-credit-crisis/80408/?dbk
Others watching the case say the prosecutors’ case appears weak. “The defendants told investors that the market offered great ‘buying opportunities’; well, at the time it was true, irregardless of whether these hedge funds were very good vehicles to actually make those purchases,” a professor of law at Columbia Law School, Merritt Fox, said. “There is a doctrine called puffing, where those selling securities put things in a good light, which is perfectly legal unless they say something dishonest.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aA9pBzndci6I
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-on-bear-stearns-indictment.html
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/bearindictment.pdf
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The indictment makes it clear that the prosecution strategy is to emphasize the statements made while the funds got into trouble in 2007 and then eventually collapsed and lost their value. This relies on showing that the defendants had knowledge of fund value or specific information at variance with what they said sufficient to be fraud. This can be complicated. Specific statements alleged that the defendants said they were putting in money or had money when they didn’t are easier to prove and are another part of the prosecution’s strategy.
This post is draft and preliminary. This is subject to substantial change or removal. This is hypotheses, speculation or opinion. All statements should be restated as questions. Nothing should be interpreted as asserting anything negative of any person. Comments and corrections welcome. All other disclaimers apply.