Category: finance

Upside and downside of bankruptcy

I sometimes think of my mobile phone going out of charge as being similar to filing bankruptcy – if the phone is at 1% battery, the loss is “linear” – all I need to do is to plug it back in and once it’s charged again it’ll function as it used to. There is no “non-linear” loss.

Phone going from 1% to 0% changes that, though. Now, even if you were to plug in the phone as soon as it has gone to 0%, you cannot switch it on till it gets back to some level of battery (that’s the case with my current and earlier androids. Not sure about other phones). Thus, you have a non-linear extra cost because you let the phone hit 0%.

It is similar to bankruptcy in that once you file for bankruptcy you are suddenly piled on with additional paperwork and costs and even if you were to “get charged up”, there will be additional costs that you will have to bear that you wouldn’t have to had you managed to find a plug (funding) when you were close to blackout (bankruptcy) but not yet there! This is the downside of bankruptcy – it imposes non linear costs.

But then there is an upside also – maybe this is a different kind of bankruptcy, but this is one that has upside. Maybe the bankruptcy that I’m going to talk about now is what is called as “Chapter 11” in the US while what I described earlier is like “Chapter 7” (do you know that US bankruptcy law is inspired by the Mahabharata? In the great Mahabharata war, the two sides had 7 and 11 regiments respectively. And since it was a disastrous war, the numbers 7 and 11 were picked up by the US bankruptcy lawmakers to name their different kinds of bankruptcy).

So there are times when I have a lot of things to do. I would have bitten off more than I could chew. And I find that I have so many things to do that just thinking about all the things I have to do in that limited time mess up my mind and not allow me to do any of them. It is at such points in time that I sometimes “declare bankruptcy” – declare that I’m not going to do any of the things that I’m supposed to do.

Now, the pressure is off. Since I’ve decided I don’t want to do anything, whatever I do after that is a bonus. Now I can take up these tasks one by one and do more than what I would have had I not decided to declare bankruptcy. There is some downside of course – some tasks might remain incomplete, but importantly more gets done than if I’d declared bankruptcy!

This is the good side of bankruptcy!

High Frequency Trading and Pricing Regulations

It all began with a tweet, moments ago. Degree Raju, a train travel attempter (I don’t know how often he manages to actually travel since he never seems to get tickets) tweeted this:

It is an apt analogy. The reason high frequency trading exists is that there is regulation on what the minimum bid-ask spread needs to be – it needs be at least 1 cent in the US, and at least 5 paise in India (if I’m not wrong). If the best bid (quote to purchase a stock) is at 49.95 and the best ask (quote to sell a stock) is at 50.00, there is nothing you can do to get ahead of the guy who has bid 49.95 – for regulations mean that you cannot bid 49.96!

The consequence of this is that if you want to offer the best bid, at a price close to 49.95, there is no option but for you to be the first person to have bid that amount! And so there is a race among all possible bidders, and in order to win the race you need to be fast, and so you co-locate your servers with the exchange, and so you (and your co-runners) indulge in what is called High Frequency Trading (this is a  rather simplified explanation, and it works).

Tatkal ticket booking has a similar pricing anomaly – the cancellation charges on Indian railways are fixed, and really low. Moreover, fares are static, and are not set according to demand and supply. More moreover, the Indian Railways suffers from chronic under-capacity. The result of all this together is that if you need to get a railway ticket, you should be the first person to put a bid (at a fixed price, of course) for that ticket, and so there is a race among all ticket-buyers!

In case the pricing of railway tickets was more flexible – either dynamic pricing according to demand, or higher cancellation charges (as I’ve noted here), this mad race (pun intended) to buy tatkal tickets would not be there. The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if agents want to get servers co-located with IRCTC servers so that they can procure tickets the fastest.

With HFT in stock prices, if only there were no limit on the minimum tick size – let’s say that a bid or an ask could just be any real number within a reasonable (say 6-digits?) precision, then in order to have the best bid, you need not be the fastest – you can compete on price!

Thus, HFT in stock markets and tatkal ticket booking are two good examples of situations where onerous regulations have led to a race to be the fastest.

And all this ties in with this old theory I have which says that the underlying reason for most financial innovation is stupid regulations. Swaps were invented because the World Bank could not borrow with floating (or was it fixed?) interest rates. CDOs became popular because AAA rated instruments required lower capital provisioning than home loans. Such examples are plentiful..

Narendra Modi should short the Nifty

The common discourse is that businesses like Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, and that India’s economic growth would get back on track if he were to become PM following the elections this summer. For example, this view was articulated well by my Takshashila colleague V Anantha Nageswaran in an Op-Ed he wrote for Mint last Tuesday, where he spoke of a “binary outlook for India” – either economic growth under Modi or further populism and stagnation under a Third Front.

Based on this view being the consensus, one can expect that the Indian stock market would go up significantly in case of a Narendra Modi victory, and would tank in case the Modi (and/or his party BJP) ends up doing badly. So what should Modi do?

He should short the stock markets, and fast. He needs money to run his campaigns, and he might be taking funds from friends and well-wishers, who expect some kind of payback in kind if/when Modi becomes PM. The question, however, is how he will pay them back in case he fails to become PM!

He will not have the power to pay back in kind. There is only so much he will be able to do as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. And given that he has got a lot of fair weather friends over the last couple of years, some of them might be disappointed that he didn’t become PM, and will ask for immediate payment. So how does Modi service these debts?

A part of his campaign budget should go into shorting the Nifty – perhaps by means of buying puts (with a May expiry – not sure they’re traded yet). This way, in case of his victory, he will end up losing his premium, but he will be able to pay back his creditors in kind, since he will be PM. In case he loses? The markets will tank anyway, and he will end up making a packet on these puts, which can then be used to pay back his current well=wishers!

Easy, no?

The Congress Party is a bubble

I think the congress party is a bubble. From what I’ve observed of the party in the last 10-15 years, they have no real ideology other than “loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family”. In other words, they have grown and flourished significantly without having any strong fundamentals. Which means they are in a bubble.

Let’s say you are a congressman and for whatever reason you were pissed off with Rahul Gandhi following his interview with Arnab Goswami on Monday. Now, because the uniting ideology in the party is “devotion to the family”, you cannot come out in criticism of the family or one of its members. If you do, you get hounded by other Congressmen, whose loyalty to the party is chiefly due to loyalty to the family.

Now, imagine a large number of congressmen think thus. If they had a way to communicate to each other about their displeasure with the family, they would come together and raise a no confidence motion against the party leadership. However, the problem is that no Congressman wants to let it be known in the party that he doesn’t like the family, for he can be accused of betrayal and removed from the party. Hence he keeps his thoughts to himself. That he keeps his thoughts to himself means that other congressmen who feel the same way also keep their similar thoughts to themselves, and the general discourse is that all congressmen are loyal to the family.

So why is “the family” is so powerful in the Congress? The answer is that the family is powerful because Congressmen think the family is powerful. A congressman thinks that his career in the party will be furthered if he is seen as being loyal to the family. So irrespective of his opinion, he puts up a facade of being loyal, and that increases the value of being loyal to the family!

A commodity is said to be in a bubble if its price is being driven up solely because other players in the market think that its price is going to be driven up, without the fundamentals being in favour of an increase in prices. You can think of “the family” of the Congress as one such commodity. Congressmen like to praise the family (i.e. go long the commodity) because they think everyone else in the Congress is doing the same, and thus the “price” is going to increase.  You can see the cycle of positive reinforcement that is at play here.

Like all bubbles, the Congress Party bubble is also bound to burst. And like other burst bubbles, this one is likely to end badly for the party – a split in the party cannot be ruled out in the period immediately after the bubble is burst.

The problem with bubbles, however, is that you don’t know when it will burst – anyone who can predict when a bubble can burst would be an extremely rich person. And you don’t want to be shorting a stock thinking the bubble might burst, only for the bubble to continue. And so you continue to dance, for the music is still playing.

Studying on coursera

In the last one year or more I’ve signed up for and dropped out from at least a dozen coursera courses. The problem has been that the video lectures have not kept me engaged. I seem to multitask while watching these videos, and the sheer volume of videos in some of these lectures has been such that I’ve quickly fallen behind, and then lost interest. I must, however, admit that many of these courses haven’t been particularly challenging. In courses such as “model thinking” or “social network analysis” I’ve already known a lot of the stuff, and thus lost interest. Modern World History (by Philip Zelikow ) was more like an information-only course which I could have consumed better in the form of a book.

Given that I’ve had bursts of signing up for courses and then not following up on them, for the last six months I’ve avoided signing up for any new courses. Until two weeks back when, on a reasonably jobless evening during a visit to my client’s Mumbai office, I decided to sign up for this course on Asset Pricing. And what a course it has been so far!

I went to bed close to midnight last night. I watched neither the Champions League final nor Arsenal’s draw at West Brom. I was doing my assignments. I spent three hours on a Sunday evening doing my assignments of the coursera Asset Pricing course, offered by Prof John Cochrane of the University of Chicago.

I’ve only completed the assignments of “Week 0” of the eight-week long course, and have watched the lectures of “Week 1” and I’m hooked already. I must admit that nobody has taught me finance like this so far. In IIM Bangalore, where I got my MBA seven years ago, we had a course on microeconomics, a course on corporate finance and a course on financial derivatives (elective). The problem, however, was that nobody made the links between any of these.

We studied the concept of marginal utility in Economics, but none of the finance professors touched it. In corporate finance, we touched upon CAPM and Modigliani-Miller but none of the later finance courses referred to them. There was a derivation of the Black-Scholes pricing model in the course on derivatives, but that didn’t touch upon any other finance we had learnt. In short, we had just been provided with the components, and nobody had helped us connect it.

The beauty of the Chicago course is that it is holistic, and so well connected. The same professor, in the same course, teaches us diffusions while in another lecture uses the marginal utility theory from economics to explain the concept of interest rates. In an assignment he has got us to do regressions and in some others we do stochastic calculus. Having seen each of these concepts separately, I’m absolutely enjoying all the connections, and that is perhaps helping me keep my interest in the course.

And it is a challenging course. It is a PhD level course at Chicago (current students at the university are taking the course in parallel with us online students) and my complacency was shattered when I got 3.5 out of 11 in my first quiz. It assumes a certain proficiency in both finance and math, and then builds on it, in a way no finance course I’ve ever taken did.

Also what sets the course apart is the quality of the assignments. Each assignment makes you think, and make you do. For example, in one assignment I did last night I had to do a set of regressions and then report t values and R^2s. In another, I had to plot a graph (which I did using excel) and then report certain points from the graph. Some other assignments make sure you have internalized what was taught in the lectures. It has been extremely exciting so far.

Based on my experience with the course so far, I hope my enthusiasm will last. I don’t know if this course will help me directly professionally. However, there is no doubt that it keeps me intellectually honest and keeps me sharp. I might not have had the option to take too many such courses during my formal education. I hope i can set this right on Coursera.

Gold: Currency or Commodity?

In today’s Hindu Business Line, S Gurumurthy of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch has an insightful article on the Indian affinity for gold. In this, he talks about gold being the preferred form of savings among the poor and mentions that the preferred form of financing for poor and/or rural households is the “gold loan” (loan issued keeping gold as collateral), often arranged by an informal moneylender. He argues that attempts to regulate gold imports are futile and what instead needs to be done is formalization and regulation of the gold loan industry.

The question one needs to answer when trying to regulate gold is whether it is a currency or a commodity. Or, to “segment along another axis”, whether it is a “conventional asset” or “financial asset”. The thing with “conventional assets” (as opposed to financial assets) is that demand decreases as price increases (most goods and services fall under this category). “Financial assets” on the other hand see the reverse relation – price increases are usually followed by an increase in demand.

Conventional wisdom which governs gold regulation in India (and elsewhere) is that it is a commodity, and a conventional asset. Gurumurthy’s argument is that it should rather be treated as a currency or a financial asset.

The concept of gold being a currency is not new. In fact, if you look at the way currencies were traditionally traded (by the “gold standard”) gold was a de facto currency. The gold standard can be described as gold being the only convertible currency, which could be converted to any national currency at a fixed rate. In the era of the gold standard, it can be argued that all international transactions were effectively priced in gold, and only notionally paid for by means of a national currency.

Despite this background of gold being a currency, however, in India it is regulated as a commodity. Take for example, the customs duty on gold. Drawing an analogy, think of what would happen if a “15% customs duty” were imposed on US Dollars. In other words, every time I converted my US dollars into Indian Rupees, I would have to pay 15% of the value of the transaction to the government as “customs duty”. You might say that is absurd. However, that is exactly what is happening with the customs duty on gold, with the result that gold has started being imported via illegal channels.

The problem with gold is that world over it now behaves like a commodity (after the abolition of the gold standard). In India, however, it behaves more like a currency. Because it internationally behaves like a commodity, standard modern economics treats it as one, and the Indian regulations also treat it such. However, given that gold is (I agree with Gurumurthy) more of a currency than a commodity in India, none of these regulations have worked.

It is time regulators started thinking of gold as a currency and financial asset.

 

Investing

I made some money in the markets last week. I bought the Nifty (September futures) at around 5190 on the 28th of August and cashed out at 5660 on the 6th of September. A fair trade I think, considering that so far in my life I’ve been a fairly poor investor (despite having worked as a quant at an investment bank and a hedge fund). This trade, however, raised more questions than answers.

Firstly, the markets have gone up significantly after I sold out. I exited at 5660. The Nifty closed today at well over 5900. Last couple of days I’ve been wondering if I panicked and cashed out too early. I must admit that when I entered I had a target price of 6000. However, given the rather choppy nature of the Indian markets, I decided that the 10% appreciation in 10 days was enough and cashed out. To that extent, I didn’t stay honest to the strategy I entered the trade in.

However, the reason I decided to cash out when I did was that I thought the market was going to top out and a steep fall was imminent. From that perspective, it made sense to cash out when I did. Yes, I might have made more money had I hung on for another two trading days, but there was no guarantee that the markets would continue to rise. In that sense I was happy pulling out.

More importantly when I cashed out, I realized that I’m still an amateur at investing. When you are a professional investor, you look at investment vehicles in terms of opportunity cost. If you wanted to pull out of the Nifty, you would do so only if you could put your money in another investment which would give you superior returns to what the Nifty would in the subsequent time period (technically hard currency is also an investment!), after accounting for the transaction cost of switching. As far as I was concerned here, though, I still invest basically for kicks (don’t invest huge amounts). So it’s basically about spotting a potential boom, riding it and then moving out. Light touch investing.

There are times when I want to get back to the world of investment (as a professional). I have some unique ideas for fund management. Perhaps I should use my next break in billable work to flesh that out. For now, check out my only other post on investing – on why you should not track your portfolio too closely. 

Arbit Raj

“Email alarm made government close arbitrage window“, screams the headline in this morning’s Business Standard. Upon reading further, you will find that the said “arbitrage” opportunity in question consists of remitting rupees abroad now and then bringing it back as remittances once the rupee has depreciated further. There are so many things wrong with this approach that I can hardly get started.

1. Technically speaking, arbitrage refers to a situation where through a set of trades one can make riskless profit. The riskless point is important here. If I were to convert my rupees to dollars today and then convert the dollars back to rupees later, it would be arbitrage if and only if the price at which I would sell the dollars is guaranteed (as of today) to be higher than the price at which I buy dollars. If I buy dollars today in the hope that the rupee will depreciate, it is NOT arbitrage.

2. By calling this process “arbitrage” the government is admitting that the rupee is expected to drop further, and significantly in the coming months (the extent of capital controls being imposed now suggests this). This is bad signaling

3. Regulating arbitrageurs is futile, and can be counterproductive. Arbitrageurs are quick to spot any price inconsistencies in the market and ruthlessly exploit them by means of their trades. Thus, if it is expected that (say) the USDINR will trade at 65 tomorrow, it is arbitrageurs who make sure that this expectation is reflected in today’s price (through a set of spot-future currency trades). By trying to curtail the operations of arbitrageurs, the government is missing out on valuable price signals. In other words, they are beheading the messenger (a la the Khwarizmian Shah, and everyone knows what happened to his empire once he did that).

The measures the government has been taking in recent times to help prevent further depreciation of the rupee are so ad hoc and badly thought out that it would make eminent sense to call the current dispensation an “arbit raj”.

What should we do about the falling rupee?

So the more perceptive of you would have realized that the rupee is falling. And fast. At the beginning of the year, fifty four rupees bought a dollar. Now you need over sixty rupees. That’s a fall of over ten percent in half a year.

People argue based on differences in interest rates and interest levels between India and the United States, and India’s current account deficit, that the rupee deserves to depreciate. Some argue that the rupee should actually trade even lower. That is correct. What makes the fall of the rupee worrying, however, is that it has happened so quickly. No theories on trade imbalance or rates imbalance or inflation can account for the fall of ten per cent in half a year.

The issue, of course as everyone knows, is to do with capital flows. While India has run a persistent current account deficit, the continuous inflow of foreign investment into the Indian markets (either direct or indirect) had ensured that the rupee was relatively stable over the years. With India maintaining a high growth rate in the GDP over the noughties, the inflow was persistent. Things aren’t so good now, however.

India’s GDP is slated to increase at a paltry 5% this financial year. The growth story is seemingly over. And that is not all. Things aren’t looking great in other parts of the world also. Due to this concept of margin financing, sometimes when some of your holdings lose value, you are forced to liquidate other holdings in order to comply with “margin requirements” (we will not go into the technical details here). So with markets around the world not doing great, and India’s growth not as spectacular as it used to be, and with the country’s muddled policies (check out how difficult the government has actually made it to invest in India – irrespective of your nationality), investors started exiting. With some investors exiting, asset values dropped and the rupee dropped. Consequently other investors exited. And so forth. It did not help that there was nothing inherent in India’s government policies to hold them here.

So that’s the story so far. Question is what we should do going forward. As I mentioned earlier, there are two levers that can help shore up the rupee – the capital account and the current account. Within the current account there are two components – imports and exports. What normally happens when a currency depreciates is that exports become more competitive and go up further. Imports become costlier and thus reduce. On the current account front, thus, we have what is called as “negative feedback”.

Notice that in the past whenever an economy staged a recovery, it was generally preceded by a devaluation of the local currency. So since our currency is already devalued the stage is set for recovery, right? Unfortunately it’s not so simple. While it is true that our exports are now likely to be more competitive, fact is that Indian industry is not well placed to capitalize on that. Investment bottlenecks, labour laws and bureaucracy means our entrepreneurs haven’t been able to move fast enough to take advantage of the falling rupee and up exports. This can be borne in the fact that the Reserve Bank of India, which normally shies away from controlling exchange rates (as long as they are not too volatile), has issued several public statements on this matter in the recent past, and taken steps to prevent further fall in the currency levels. That the Central Bank has had to step in to protect the currency shows that we are in extraordinary times. The natural corrector to a falling exchange rate (increase in exports) is absent.

Matters are not helped, of course, by the fact that one of our largest imports is an asset – gold. Thing with asset prices is that unlike prices of “normal goods”, the demand for assets increases with price. When asset prices increase, people see “momentum” in the asset and want to get on to the bandwagon. So there goes part of another natural corrector to a falling exchange rate (less competitive imports).

So coming back to where we started off with – what should the Government do? While this is going to be a time-consuming process, what the government needs to do is to ensure that exporters can exploit the falling rupee. Reforms in this direction are not easy of course – since they require significant efforts in removing bureaucracy and making it easier to do business – which means we need significant administrative reform. There is also the small matter of possibly having to reform labour laws (while on the matter of labour laws, check out this paper by Takshashila Scholar Hemal Shah, who presents some easily implementable reforms in the labour law). While these are difficult things to implement, the fact that there is a crisis gives the government an alibi to push ahead with the reforms. PV Narasimha Rao had done that once in 1991. The problem now is that the government may not have political will given that elections are less than a year away. In this context, it would be advantageous to have early elections, for a new government with a fresh mandate might be more prone to taking tough short-term measures.

Currently, the government is trying its best to shore up on the other levers. Gold import is being curbed – except that it will be hard to implement since they will simply get diverted to the black market. The Finance Minister is traveling the world putting up a roadshow to get investments to India. That, however, is akin to putting lipstick on a pig since there is little in India’s fundamentals and current economic scenario to attract foreign investors. Even if some of these measures succeed, they will only lead to temporary respite to the currency. Fact is that for sustainable improvement in currency, tough reforms are mandatory.