Basis trading is a form of fixed-income arbitrage that seeks to benefit from a change in the spread between a spot bond price and an adjusted futures price.
Click here for reuse options! Our review of hedge fund trading strategies continues with a discussion of yield-curve arbitrage (YCA), a form of fixed income arbitrage. I have previously written about the yield curve, convexity, and duration.
Click here for reuse options! Shorting a stock means selling shares you do not own in the hopes of benefiting from a decline in the price of the shares. The seller borrows shares, usually from a broker, and delivers them to a buyer in return for cash.
Click here for reuse options! We are reviewing the underlying assumptions made by the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Recall from last time the assumption that returns are distributed normally (i.e. a bell-shaped curve) and how this fails to account for skew and fat tails. Today we’ll look at CAPM’s assumption that there is but a single source of priced systematic risk: market beta.
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Prime brokers offer a variety of services to investors, from providing credit to clearing trades. One important service offered is known as Securities Lending. In Part One of this article, we’ll look at the contractual and collateral rules pertaining to Securities Lending.
As an investor or hedge fund, you may wish to borrow shares for a variety of reasons, such as shorting the stock or hedging a long position. An executed Securities Lending Agreement is the documentation required before shares are loaned. Continue reading “Securties Lending, Part One” »
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Our risk/return series continues with a review of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). We’ve already looked at alpha, beta, efficient markets, and returns. Our ultimate goal is to evaluate the role of alpha in hedge fund profitability, how to replicate hedge fund results without needing alpha, and finally how you can start your own cutting-edge hedge fund using beta-only replication techniques.
MPT suggests that a portfolio can be optimized in terms of risk and return by carefully mixing individual investments that have widely differing betas. Recall that beta is return due to correlation with an overall market (known as systematic risk). To take a trivial example, if you hold equal long and short positions in the S&P 500 index, your portfolio would have an overall beta of (.5 * 1 + .5 * -1) = 0. There would be no risk, but in this case, there would be no return either, except for the slow drain of commissions, fees, etc.
Continue reading “Modern Portfolio Theory – Part One” »
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