Hedge Fund CIO: “The Biggest Market Player Is 15x Leveraged; That’s Why When It Starts Going Wrong, You’re Out”
“Wanted to make sure you’re seeing this,” texted a PM from one of those multi-manager monstrosities.
“8 standard deviation move in the Momentum Factor in 5-days,” he added. I heard his heart pounding all the way from Australia.
“Guys who defended positions in the Q4 selloff all got fired, so the message is real clear – when things start getting weird, take immediate corrective action.” And I imagined the quiet panic consuming firms that leverage their capital at multiples that would make a Lehman risk manager blush.
Hedge Fund Arrowgrass to Return Capital, Close After Fresh Redemptions
“I’m more convinced than ever that one of these days, this kind of 8 standard deviation event is going to crash the market,” he texted, having puked his position without the slightest idea why the move had even started.
- Factor Definitions (Momentum): Momentum is the empirically observed tendency for rising asset prices to rise further and falling prices to keep falling. For instance, it was shown that stocks with strong past performance continue to outperform stocks with poor past performance in the next period with an average excess return of about 1% per month. Momentum signals (e.g., 52-week high) have been shown to be used by analysts in their buy and sell recommendations. The existence of momentum is a market anomaly, which finance theory struggles to explain.
- Factor Definitions (Value): The value factor is based on a belief that stocks that are inexpensive relative to some measure of fundamental value outperform those that are pricier. the best-known work on the value factor was carried out by Fama and French in their 1992 paper (The cross-section of expected stock returns), which concluded that low price-to-book ratio was the most predictive definition of value.
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