Tag Archives: mutual funds

the Sequoia Fund (ii)

April 12, 2016 By in redemption in kind, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

large position sizes

At the end of June 2015, the Sequoia Fund had assets of $8.7 billion, of which 28.7% was in shares of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) and another 10.6% in Berkshire Hathaway.

How did these positions get so large?

a.  The portfolio managers chose to have nearly 40% of their fund in two names.  In fact, as VRX began to decline in the second half of last year, the managers bought more.

Don’t ask me why.  To my mind, following Bernard Baruch’s dictum to have all one’s eggs in one basket may have been ok for the renowned speculator way back when, but it makes no business or economic sense for mutual funds today.  According to the Wall Street Journal, two members of the board of directors of the fund resigned last year because they disagreed so strongly with the strategy.

b.  SEC diversification rules permit this.  The pertinent regulation has two parts:

  1.  The fund can’t make a purchase of a security if doing so would make its total holding in the security more than 5.0% of fund assets.  At the 5% threshold, the manager can allow the existing position to grow; he just can’t buy more.  Growth can come because the security is outperforming and/or because the total asset size is shrinking.
  2. 25% of the fund’s assets are exempt from rule 1.

The second provision is much less well-known than the first.  I’m not sure why the SEC wrote the rules the way it did (my guess would be lobbying from the fund management industry), but I can’t recall an instance where having a whopping position like Sequoia has with VRX didn’t end in tears.  And I can only recall two other cases, one involving a junk bond fund, another a Pacific Basin fund, where managers took such large bets with shareholder money.

More tomorrow.

 

what liquidity is to the SEC

September 29, 2015 By in liquidity Tags: , , , Leave a comment

As I mentioned in my Windows 10-plagued post yesterday, the SEC is considering new procedural and disclosure rules for ETFs and mutual funds about the liquidity of their positions.  The most controversial, as well as, to my mind, the most reasonable, is the idea of allowing funds to assess a premium to net asset value during times of unusually high purchases and apply a discount when redemptions are running high.

 

Liquidity itself, on the other hand, is not as straightforward a concept as it appears on the surface.  That’s not a reason for having no disclosure.  But it raises the question of how extensive the disclosure should be.

liquidity

The definition the SEC appears to be using is how many days it would take for a given fund to sell its entire position in a certain security without having an impact on the security price.  Let’s refine that a bit by saying that having no impact would mean that the stock moves in line with its market over the selling period (as opposed to just doesn’t go down).

Let’s take Exxon (XOM) as an example.  It has 4.2 billion shares outstanding and has been recently trading 17+ million shares daily.

For you and me, selling is a piece of cake.  Our 100 or 200 shares is a miniscule portion of the daily trading volume.  Also, no one on Wall Street knows–or cares–what we’re doing.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we own 1% of the company, or 42 million shares, which amounts to three days’ total trading volume.  What happens then?

Subjectivity and skill/deception come into play.

subjectivity

How much of the daily trading volume can we be before a broker notices that we’re doing unusual selling?  (Once that happens, he/she looks up our position size on a trading machine (mutual fund positions are disclosed quarterly in public filings at the SEC) and assumes we’re selling the whole thing.  The trader then calls his own proprietary trading desk, and all the traders at other firms that he/she’s friendly with.  Then the price moves sharply against us.)

In my working career, I mostly dealt with positions in the $50 – $100 million range, although some of my stocks have been more illiquid than that position size would suggest.  I always thought that I could be 25% – 30% of daily volume without moving the price.  In the XOM example, that would mean my position would take 9 -12 days to sell and would be classified, according to the SEC proposal, as sort of liquid.  A larger or perhaps more cautious manager might think the percentage of daily volume should be capped at 10%.  In this case, the same position would take 30 trading days(six calendar weeks) to unload and would be highly illiquid.

skill

The norm in the US is to separate trading sharply from portfolio management.  I’ve been lucky to have worked mostly with very talented traders, who could conceal their presence in the market.  I can remember one trader, however, that I inherited at a new firm who was almost inconceivably “loud.” Using him, every stock was illiquid (luckily for me a hapless rival headhunted him away after months of ugly trading results).

Organization size, not just portfolio size,  also comes into play.

organization size

Suppose I’m alone as a manager at my firm in having a 1% position in XOM.  That’s one situation. On the other hand, I might be one of five managers with similar-sized portfolios, each with a 1% position.  If we all decide to sell at the same time–perhaps influenced by internal research or by the most senior PM–the firm’s liquidity position in XOM is far different.  The stock is now very, very illiquid.  With conservative daily volume limits, it could take half a year to unload and ostensibly mega-cap liquid stock.

bonds

This is a whole other story, one that I don’t know particularly well.  However, corporate bonds, especially low quality bonds, can be extremely hard to sell.

It will be interesting to see what the SEC comes up with.

 

ETF and mutual fund problems last week

September 1, 2015 By in ETFs Vs. Mutual Funds Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Both types of fund, exchange-traded and mutual, had issues throughout last week in calculating their per share net asset values .

For fund management firms, the lack of end-of-day mutual fund pricing was a real pain.  For us as investors, however, the ETF consequences were far worse.

mutual funds

The best feature of mutual funds, in my view, is the guarantee that under all but the most extreme circumstances owners can buy in or cash out every trading day after the close at net asset value.   Last week, because of the computer failure at BNY Mellon, the funds that it prices didn’t have NAV information.  So they had to estimate NAV to do daily transactions.

Once they have precise NAV information, they can adjust the number of shares that buyers from last week actually have.  For people who have cashed out, though, it’s not so easy.  If a fund paid too little in a redemption, it must forward the extra to the seller once it finds out.  If, however, it pays out too much in redemptions, most sellers won’t voluntarily return the excess.  The fund may not even ask, either because it doesn’t want embarrassing publicity or because it knows the cost of suing the seller to get the money back will doubtless exceed the potential return.  The fund will presumably try to get BNY Mellon to make good any losses. Failing that, the fund management company has to pony up.

ETFs

ETFs are basically mutual funds that let designated brokerage firms handle the buying and selling for them.  This makes ETF expenses noticeably lower than those of a traditional mutual fund.  It also allows the ETF to trade all day, rather than once after the close.  These are the main ETF pluses.  The offset is that potential buyers and sellers have no assurance that brokers will be willing to transact at any given time and in the amounts they wish to.  We also have no guarantee that transactions will be at, or even near, NAV.  For those of us who are long-term holders or who place limit orders, neither shortcoming should be a big worry.

Then there was last week.

Last week, the ETFs normally priced by BNY Mellon had no current NAVs, only guesstimates.  This had two related consequences for investors:

–Brokers became reluctant to trade, since they couldn’t be 100% sure any bid-asked spread they made would be profitable on both sides (for most ETFs, they had to have had a reasonable idea, I think).

–And they widened the market they made from, say, + / – 0.5% around NAV to a lot more.  On Monday, for example, I decided to throw a long-time clunker in my portfolio overboard and replace it with an ETF.  I soon found that I could only buy at NAV +3%.  And even a small transaction at that price took half an hour to complete.

A lot worse than that happened, however.

The Wall Street Journal offers this account of ETFs during trading early Monday of last week:

“…the $2.5 billion Vanguard Consumer Staples Index ETF …plunged 32% within the opening minutes of trading. The Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF was halted six times over the course of 37 minutes early in the day, according to trading records.

The declines…were notable in that they exceeded the declines in the prices of their underlying holdings. In the case of the Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF, the value of the underlying holdings in the fund fell only 9%, according to FactSet. (my emphasis)”

Yes, Monday was a bad day.  But it wasn’t a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, of the type that occurs occasionally in a bear market.  This characteristic of ETFs–that market makers swing the bid price waaay down in times of stress–is one that all of us as investors should be aware of.  As far as I can see, it’s also something the ETF industry has deliberately de-emphasized.  I don’t think it’s a reason not to own ETFs in the first place.  But there will surely be times in the future like last Monday where the price for cashing out is 20%+ of the value of your holding.  So I think most people shouldn’t be holding only ETFs.  Trying to sell them in a market downdraft should only be a last resort.

 

 

 

 

the FT, Vanguard and Morningstar: active vs. passive investing

July 14, 2014 By in Academic Theories, index funds, indexing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Saturday’s edition of the Financial Times opens with a screaming front-page headline, ” $3.5 billion pulled out of Fidelity funds.”  

 …must have been a slow news day.  

The article goes on to explain that net inflows of individual investor cash into the stock market–both in the EU and the US–over the first half of 2014 have been going to index products, not to active managers. 

I can see several good reasons why this is so:

1.  Indexing is like cruise control.  You know you’re going to get more or less the return on the index against which a given index fund/ETF is benchmarked.  So you only have two variables to consider:  how closely the fund/ETF is able to track the benchmark, and what its expense ratio is.  There’s no fretting about an active manager’s style and strategy, or whether he/she is still running the portfolio whose historical record you’re examining

2. Fidelity doesn’t necessarily want mutual fund customers.  I’ve had a Fidelity brokerage account for decades.  Fidelity has never approached me, ever, to buy a mutual fund product of any type.  I presume it’s because the company makes more money from having me trade individual stocks.

3.  Picking active managers takes some effort.  It requires having some understanding of the stock market and an ability to deduce strategy from the lists of holdings that managers report each quarter to the SEC.  

True, there is Morningstar, a service which has been providing its famous “star” rankings of mutual funds for about a quarter century.  Although Morningstar, disingenuously, warns buyers of its star information not to use it as the reason for picking a given mutual fund, people do pay for the rankings.  So they must have a reason.  Investment management companies take out full-page adds to tout their high star-ness.  Inflows seek high-star funds and shun low-star ones.

Over at least the past several years, however, Vanguard points out that following Morningstar rankings hasn’t been a good idea.  The index fund giant is publicizing a study it did of Morningstar fund rankings from 2011 – 2013.  Over the three years, Vanguard says there was a strong correlation between Morningstar star ranking and fund performance, but it was the opposite of what the rankings suggested.  One-star funds performed the best vs. their peers, two-star funds the next best   …and so on, in order, with five-star funds performing the worst.  Whoops!

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Morningstar’s use of short-term volatility as a measure of the riskiness of a portfolio.  My guess is that the relative stability of a fund’s NAV ends up being the most important factor in getting a high star rating.  So that rating has little to do with future return potential.  But I have no real idea how Morningstar could have gone as badly astray as Vanguard says.

Anyway, to sum up, if there’s any news in the FT article, it’s the (understandable) extent to which individual investors are embracing psssive investing, not the fact that they’re doing so.

 

 

 

exit fees for junk bond funds?

June 17, 2014 By in bond market, ETFs Vs. Mutual Funds, Industry Analysis, Investment firms, junk bonds, pik bonds, securities markets Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

contingency planning

The SEC is doing contingency planning for the time when the Fed will declare the current five-year+ economic emergency over and begin to raise interest rates back to normal.  What “normal” is in today’s world is itself a subject of debate .  The official Fed view is that overnight money should carry an annual interest charge of 4% vs. the current zero.  Even if the right number is actually 3%, that’s still a huge jump (more on this topic in a couple of days).

According to the Financial Times, the SEC is worried about what will happen to junk bond funds/ETFs when rates begin to rise.

the problem

The issue is this:

–investors wary of the stock market but searching for yield have put $1 trillion into corporate bond funds since the financial crisis.  Such funds now have about $10 trillion in assets under management.

–the charm of mutual funds is that the holder is entitled to cash in any/all of his shares at any time before the market close on a given day, and cash out at that day’s net asset value.

–junk bonds are relatively sensitive to changes in interest rates and go down when rates go up, and

–many junk bonds trade “by appointment only,” meaning they’re very illiquid and basically don’t trade.

So, the question arises, what happens if/when holders see their net asset value eroding and decide to all withdraw at once?  Arguably buyers will disappear when they see an avalanche of selling coming toward them.  The initial selling itself will tend to put downward pressure on bond prices.  A falling NAV can conceivably generate even more, panicky, selling.

If a big no-load junk bond fund is hit with redemptions equal to, say, 25% of its assets over a period of several months, will it be able to sell enough of its portfolio to meet shareholders demands for their cash back?  Maybe   …maybe not.

operates like a bank…

Put a different way, a junk bond fund is a lot like a bank.  It takes in money from depositors and lends to corporations.  In the pre=-junk bond days, a bank would lend at, say, 10%, pay depositors 2% and keep the rest for itself.  That opened the door to junk bond funds, which reverse the revenue split, keeping a little for themselves and paying the lion’s share of the interest income to shareholders.

…but no FDIC or Fed

If there’s a run on a bank, the government steps in and stands behind deposits.  If there’s a run on a mutual fund, there’s only the fund management company.

a real problem?

How likely is any of this to happen?  I have no idea.  Neither does the SEC   …but it’s apparently thinking it doesn’t want to find out.

Allowing/requiring junk bonds to charge exit fees would do two things:  it would decrease the flow of new money into the funds from the instant the fees were announced–and maybe trigger redemptions in advance of the imposition date; and it would make holders think twice before taking their money out.

footnote-ish stuff

Historically, there’s a sharp difference between the behavior of holder of load and no-load funds.  In experience, load funds that I’ve run have experienced redemptions of maybe 5% of assets in bad times.  Similar no-load funds might lose a third of their assets.

Mutual funds typically have tools they can use to deal with high redemptions.  They can usually buy derivatives that will hedge their portfolio exposure; they have credit lines they can use to get cash for redemptions immediately; in dire circumstances, they can suspend redemptions or meet redemptions in kind (meaning you get a junk bond instead of your money ( ugh!)).

Junk bond ETFs are a tiny portion of the whole.  They’re a special type of mutual fund.   Holders of ETF shares don’t deal directly with the management company.  They buy and sell through designated market makers, who have no obligation to transact at or near NAV.  Therefore, they can staunch selling simply by swinging the market down far enough.  At the bottom of the stock market in March 2009, for example, I can recall specialized stock ETFs trading at over 10% below NAV!

This issue is part of a larger government debate about whether large investment management companies are systematically important to the financial system and, as such, should be more highly regulated.