Transcript Slide 1
Liquidity
ALM or Market Risk ?
Jérôme Lebuchoux
Liquidity
Vague concept ?
Standard approach
Related to market liquidity on asset (volume, trades, prices, etc…)
microstructure
Major risk
Macro impact
Credit crunch
Crisis
Market liquidity
Classical approach for liquidity
Execution price depends on the volume
Execution
Take into account the asymmetry (buy and sell)
Optimal execution model for block trade
Allocation
Rebalance the portfolio according to the liquidity
Risk
Gap risk
Limits
It is a vision of liquidity related to buy / sell action
Market liquidity
The regulators are imposing new constraints
New pools of liquidity have emerged
New exchanges
Dark pool
Long term investors
This approach is not appropriate for many markets (Fixed income)
Is there something else ?
Market liquidity
Investors are not operating with the same objective nor under the
same rules
Pension funds
Hedge fund
Insurance…
The buy and sell are only the visible actions but behind every
operations there is a financing part
Cash
Margin
Borrow
Collateral
Examples
Buy a future at an exchange
Post the initial margin
Sell short a financial stock
Borrow the stock
Buy a swap
Post collateral
ALM liquidity
If there is no financing there is no investment
If one could not buy it may be able to borrow
If one could not sell it may be able to repo or post for collateral
Example : Corporate bonds
No price on secondary market
Accepted as collateral
Borrow money, post the bond as collateral and invest into new asset
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Spread position
Borrowing cost, repo market are good indicators for liquidity, it could
be used to get a long or a short position on liquidity on FI market.
Hedge Fund
Hedge Fund utility ?
Optimal Capital allocation
Diversification
Arbitrage
New risk profile
Liquidity provider
To the Market
To the investors
Facts
Old concept but a young industry
Asset Management industry has been hit by the crisis :
● Asset under management has been reduced.
● Performance was poor.
● Risk management has shown its limits
● Authorities are putting pressure for new standards and regulation.
● The confidence of the investors is low
Consequences :
● Revenues are declining
● Customers are more demanding
● The image of the industry is deteriorated
A step back
Main drivers of the asset management industry :
● Economy
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Growth of economy
Capital needs to sustain the economy growth and restructuring
● Demography
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Life expectancy
Human capital growth
● Globalization
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Free trade
Communication and mobility
● Politics
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Tax regime Labour / Capital
Social security vs individual savings
Hope
An evolution or a revolution ? :
● Only the first point (Economy) is directly impacted by the crisis
● There are second order effects on the other points
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Returns of protectionism
Nationalisation of the economies
Political instability…
● World AL balance has evolved (geographically, private/public…) but is
growing
A threat or an opportunity ? :
● Adequacy between the offer and the demand has been challenged
● Leaders are under pressure and Darwinism is ongoing
Our opinion:
The asset management starts restructuring
The window for change and opportunity is now
AUM & Actors
A steady increase of AUM and of number of HF until 2007…the crisis
changes the picture
Performance
The decorrelation of the HF performance with the indexes in
question
Alternative investment and liquidity crisis
The financial crisis impacts the HF industry
A performance issue
Weak and correlated performance
Limited number of strategies
Small capacity wrt performance impact
Poor liquidity
Limited financing facility
Illiquidity of the underlying
Investors on hold
Fall in AUM
Investors raise their standards
Liquidity risk
Hedge fund are
Long correlation in stable market and short the systemic correlation
Long the spread of liquidity between investors - market
Standard Liquidity indicators
Market impact
Number of days to close the positions
Features to manage the liquidity
Lock up
Gates…
Unfortunately the set up of the fund have been made according to
Market practice : Lock up
Emergency : Gates
But not wrt the “real” liquidity risk
An asymmetric risk / bubble
A toy example
Fund with a stock X in illiquid asset (price impact / NAV)
Buy an extra x of asset -> move the price up by y%
-> NAV of fund + y% on the full AUM
Sell x of asset
-> move the price down by -y% -> NAV of fund - y% on the full AUM
A liquidity trap / gap risk
buy
NAV
Tomatoes
fund
New investment
It is always easier to buy than to sell
Tomatoes
producer
A simple framework
Needs to move from a pure performance / risk model to an Asset and Liability
model (which is the difference between the P&L and the NAV)
Liability : Investors, fees, etc…
Asset : investment
Model of investors portfolio
Each investors and prospects are ranked wrt its category, size of investment and probability to invest
or redeem.
Today AUM : 100 M$, new potential investors : 5 M$
A simple framework
Model : simple copula with three parameters
One correlation intra category
One correlation extra category
One correlation existing / new investors
At a given date (1M or according to fund liquidity) we get the pdf of
the AUM
Avg AUM : 94 M$
Allocation model
Portfolio model
One risky and non risky asset, no rate and dividend, simple BS model
dX θ
dS
,
S
X0 x
dS
μdt σdW
S
One period model
At the end of the period the AUM is impacted by the redemption and the new investment
X Xεω
Rebalancing without impacting the portfolio risk profile
θεω 1
Where
εω is the growth of the AUM
Allocation model
Cost of rebalancing according to an average liquidity L
βθεω 1 L
Optimal portfolio
Utility function
θ ArgMin EUX, εω
Special case
ln Ux,ε λx βθε 1 L
Intuitive approach
The optimal allocation leads to an option on AUM
1 2 2 2
ln EUX, ε λT T βCall L - 1
2
The optimal allocation accounts for the hedge of the option
θ θ* cDelta L θε - 1 θ* :
μ
λσ 2
The optimal allocation could be seen as the classical allocation minus the risk
on the spread AUM / Asset
Simple model result
Target allocation in risky asset 55%
Beta : 10%
L : 20 %
% Change in risky asset allocation
If the proba of redemption increases, the investment in risky asset should
decrease
If the investors are “correlated”, the investment in risky asset should decrease
Combined model
We have looked at a single asset manager, now we explore the case of
multiple managers trading the same asset
N agents, they “share” the liquidity option, the impact on the given asset
1
UX, ε λX βCallL i i -1
N i
Two extreme cases for 2 agents (Proba redemption : 20, corr : 50%)
Same investors :
- 14.6%
Independent investors :
- 7,9%
Intuitive result : at the limit, if the investors are “random”, almost no impact
but if the investors are “shared” the risk is huge
Conclusion
The HF industry moved from “random” or “positive” flow of AUM to highly
correlated outflows
It is crucial to quantify and manage the investors risk
Key points
Better knowledge of investors
Diversify the strategies
Don’t be short of liquidity option
Extensions
Investors redemption / fund performance correlation
Multi period
Define optimal liquidity of the fund (lock up, gates)
Model the correlation to exogenous factor (demography, etc…)