What is the magic that allows us to have intraday liquidity through an ETF on a market that itself trades more or less by appointment? Case in point: the high yield bond market. Or emerging markets. Or just about any bond market short of sovereigns and maybe agencies.
Suppose there is a sudden rush for the exits in the high yield bond market. Those in the cash bonds know the drill. They will put in orders with the bank/dealer market makers. For a while those high yield bond trading desks will buy the bonds and hold them in inventory. But it won't take long for the trading desks to reach their capacity. After that point, they won't be buyers. They will act as agent -- also knows as riskless principal -- and look for someone on the other side of the trade. In the meantime the seller has to bide its time. The point is that on the cash bond side, it is not an intraday sort of a transaction. It can take days to find the other side for the trade. And anyone who is active in the high yield bond market knows that, so they structure their leverage and liquidity accordingly.
However, those in the ETFs by and large have no inkling that this is the way the market for high yield bonds works. As far as they can tell, the ETFs trade like an S&P 500 stock. You put in an order to sell, and you are done in minutes.
The reason there is typically high liquidity in the ETFs is that there is typically good two-way flow. And beyond the buyers and sellers are what are called authorized participants. The authorized participants keep the ETFs linked to the underlying cash bonds. They can create ETFs by buying up and bundling the underlying bonds, and they can take in the ETFs and unbundle them and sell the underlying bonds. In a functioning, two-way market, this all works the like a cash-futures arbitrage for equities indexes. If the ETFs are at too high a price relative to the cash bonds, they grab the cash bonds to create and sell ETFs. If the ETFs are at too low a price relative to the cash bonds, they buy the ETFs and take the bonds to sell in the bank/dealer market.
It sounds simple, but it can't really be foolproof. You know there must be something that can go wrong when you have an instrument -- the high yield bond ETF -- that is as liquid as water even though the bonds it contains are almost the definition of an illiquid security. There is something akin to trying to cheat the law of conservation of momentum. And we all know the anytime something depends on a some notion of arbitrage, things can go off the rails. I was in the middle of portfolio insurance problems in 1987. I knew all about option theory, but when the market was in free fall and the bid-offer spread for the S&P 500 futures was over a dollar, no one was in the mood to try to keep prices in line by doing delta hedging. Options traded in their own world. Implied volatilities were 80% and higher. The option market went into rotation -- trading one stock at a time throughout the day.
For the ETFs, things can go off the rails if the authorized participants can't do their job. If there is not a two-way market, and if the authorized participants' inventory is filled up with ETFs, and if they see that it will take days to get the bonds off of their hands, at the very time that prices are going crazy, they will be stepping away. At that point there is nothing tethering the ETFs to the cash market. The ETF market and the high yield bond market will each trade as their own thing, based on who needs to sell and who is there to buy. At that point it might as well be one market for Martian gravel and another for Enceladian ice cones.
Sure, that is taking it a little too far. There will be some real money investors who will finally step in and keep things from moving into a totally imaginary world. But for the time being the ETF market will, for all practical purposes, shut down. And, getting to the next chapter in this story, it is the "for all practical purposes" that matters. A clear-thinking, experienced investor in, say, an ETF on an equity market index or gold or currency will not be bothered much by the failure of the high yield bond ETFs. They will get the point that the high yield ETF was creating a fiction of liquidity when there wasn't any, whereas in these equity and currency and commodity markets the underlying markets trade with pretty much the same liquidity as the ETF.
But for many investors, all they will hear is that ETFs are in trouble. In the face of the major market dislocation in which the high yield bond problems are likely to be embroiled, people are already going to be in risk-off mode, and if they smell some sort of structural risk with these "newfangled ETFs" they will sell them, period. And there will be plenty of sources out there ready to spread the view that something is amiss.
And, getting to Soros's theory of reflexivity, the changing expectations that comes from people in the market buying into this view means that the clear-thinking experienced investors will get out of these more liquid ETFs themselves. And if the authorized participants are still up for doing their job in those markets, that selling will feed back to drop the underlying markets in equities, currencies, and commodities.
Can We have an ETF Meltdown?
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October 15, 2017 - NTAsset Selects SS&C for Fund Administration and Middle Office Operational Support
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ABN AMRO Clearing extends its relationship with Fidessa to include screen distribution
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Pushing Crime Around the Corner? Estimating Experimental Impacts of Large-Scale Security Interventions -- by Christopher Blattman, Donald Green, Daniel Ortega, Santiago Tobon
Bogota intensified state presence to make high-crime streets safer. We show that spillovers outweighed direct effects on security. We randomly assigned 1,919 "hot spot" streets to eight months of doubled policing, increased municipal services, both, or neither. Spillovers in dense networks cause "fuzzy clustering," and we show valid hypothesis testing requires randomization inference. State presence improved security on hot spots. But data from all streets suggest that intensive policing pushed property crime around the corner, with ambiguous impacts on violent crime. Municipal services had positive but imprecise spillovers. These results contrast with prior studies concluding policing has positive spillovers.
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Advertising Spending and Media Bias: Evidence from News Coverage of Car Safety Recalls -- by Graham Beattie, Ruben Durante, Brian Knight, Ananya Sen
Do news media bias content in favor of advertisers? We examine the relationship between advertising by auto manufacturers in U.S. newspapers and news coverage of car safety recalls. This context allows us to separate the influence of advertisers, who prefer less coverage, from that of readers, who demand more. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that newspapers provide less coverage of recalls by their advertisers, especially the more severe ones. Competition for readers from other newspapers mitigates bias, while competition for advertising by online platforms exacerbates it. Finally, we present suggestive evidence that lower coverage increases auto fatalities.
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Educational Choice, Rural-urban Migration and Economic Development -- by Pei-Ju Liao, Ping Wang, Yin-Chi Wang, Chong Kee Yip
Observing rapid structural transformation accompanied by a continual process of rural to urban migration in many developing countries, we construct a micro founded dynamic framework to explore how important education-based migration is, as opposed to work-based migration, for economic development, urbanization and city workforce composition. We then calibrate our model to fit the data from China over the period from 1980 to 2007, a developing economy featuring not only large migration flows but major institutional reforms that may affect work and education based migration differently. We find that, although education-based migration only amounts to one-fifth of that of work-based migration, its contribution to the enhancement of per capita output is larger than that of work-based migration. Moreover, the abolishment of the government job assignment for college graduates and the relaxation of the work-based migration have limited effects on economic development and urbanization. Furthermore, the increase in college admission selectivity for rural students plays a crucial but negative role in China's development, lowering per capita output and worsening the high-skilled employment share in urban areas.
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Ranking Firms Using Revealed Preference -- by Isaac Sorkin
This paper estimates workers' preferences for firms by studying the structure of employer-to-employer transitions in U.S. administrative data. The paper uses a tool from numerical linear algebra to measure the central tendency of worker flows, which is closely related to the ranking of firms revealed by workers' choices. There is evidence for compensating differential when workers systematically move to lower-paying firms in a way that cannot be accounted for by layoffs or differences in recruiting intensity. The estimates suggest that compensating differentials account for over half of the firm component of the variance of earnings.
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Dynamic Trade, Endogenous Institutions and the Colonization of Hong Kong: A Staged Development Framework -- by T. Terry Cheung, Theodore Palivos, Ping Wang, Yin-Chi Wang, Chong K. Yip
To explore the interplays between trade and institutions, we construct a staged development framework with multi-period discrete choices to study the colonization of Hong Kong, which served to facilitate the trade of several agricultural and manufactured products, including opium, between Britain and China. Based on the historical data and documents that we collected from limited sources, we design our dynamic trade model to capture several key features of the colonization process and use it to characterize the endogenous transition from the pre-Opium War era, to the post-Opium War era and then to the post-opium trade era, which span the period 1773-1933. We show that while the low opium trading cost and the high warfare cost initially postponed any military action, the high valuation of the total volume of bilateral trade, the rising opium trading cost and the anticipated increase in the demand for opium eventually led the British government to declare the Opium Wars, legalizing opium trade via the colonial Hong Kong. We also show that, in response to a drastic drop in opium demand and a rising opium trading cost, it became optimal for the British government to abandon opium trade soon after the founding of the Republic of China.
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Emigration during the French Revolution: Consequences in the Short and Longue Duree -- by Raphael Franck, Stelios Michalopoulos
During the French Revolution, more than 100,000 individuals, predominantly supporters of the Old Regime, fled France. As a result, some areas experienced a significant change in the composition of the local elites whereas in others the pre-revolutionary social structure remained virtually intact. In this study, we trace the consequences of the emigres' flight on economic performance at the local level. We instrument emigration intensity with local temperature shocks during an inflection point of the Revolution, the summer of 1792, marked by the abolition of the constitutional monarchy and bouts of local violence. Our findings suggest that emigres have a non monotonic effect on comparative development. During the 19th century, there is a significant negative impact on income per capita, which becomes positive from the second half of the 20th century onward. This pattern can be partially attributed to the reduction in the share of the landed elites in high-emigration regions. We show that the resulting fragmentation of agricultural holdings reduced labor productivity, depressing overall income levels in the short run; however, it facilitated the rise in human capital investments, eventually leading to a reversal in the pattern of regional comparative development.
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Computerization and Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the United States -- by Gaetano Basso, Giovanni Peri, Ahmed Rahman
The changes in technology that took place in the US during the last three decades, mainly due to the introduction of computerization and automation, have been characterized as "routine-substituting." They have reduced the demand for routine tasks, but have increased the demand for analytical tasks. Indirectly they have also increased the demand for manual tasks and service oriented occupations. Little is known about how these changes have impacted immigration, or task specialization between immigrants and natives. In this paper we show that such technological progress has attracted skilled and unskilled immigrants, with the latter group increasingly specialized in manual-service occupations. We also show that the immigration response has helped to reduce the polarization of employment for natives. We explain these facts with a model of technological progress and endogenous immigration. Simulations show that immigration in the presence of technological change attenuates the drop in routine employment and the increase in service employment for natives.
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Religious Competition and Reallocation: The Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant Reformation -- by Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, Noam Yuchtman
Using novel microdata, we document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation: a massive reallocation of resources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual framework in which the introduction of religious competition shifts political markets where religious authorities provide legitimacy to rulers in exchange for control over resources. Consistent with our framework, religious competition changed the balance of power between secular and religious elites: secular authorities acquired enormous amounts of wealth from monasteries closed during the Reformation, particularly in Protestant regions. This transfer of resources had important consequences. First, it shifted the allocation of upper-tail human capital. Graduates of Protestant universities increasingly took secular, especially administrative, occupations. Protestant university students increasingly studied secular subjects, especially degrees that prepared students for public sector jobs, rather than church sector-specific theology. Second, it affected the sectoral composition of fixed investment. Particularly in Protestant regions, new construction shifted from religious toward secular purposes, especially the building of palaces and administrative buildings, which reflected the increased wealth and power of secular lords. Reallocation was not driven by preexisting economic or cultural differences. Our findings indicate that the Reformation played an important causal role in the secularization of the West.
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Sparse Signals in the Cross-Section of Returns -- by Alexander M. Chinco, Adam D. Clark-Joseph, Mao Ye
This paper applies the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) to make rolling 1-minute-ahead return forecasts using the entire cross section of lagged returns as candidate predictors. The LASSO increases both out-of-sample fit and forecast-implied Sharpe ratios. And, this out-of-sample success comes from identifying predictors that are unexpected, short-lived, and sparse. Although the LASSO uses a statistical rule rather than economic intuition to identify predictors, the predictors it identifies are nevertheless associated with economically meaningful events: the LASSO tends to identify as predictors stocks with news about fundamentals.
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Sequential Design and Spatial Modeling for Portfolio Tail Risk Measurement. (arXiv:1710.05204v1 [q-fin.RM])
We consider calculation of capital requirements when the underlying economic scenarios are determined by simulatable risk factors. In the respective nested simulation framework, the goal is to estimate portfolio tail risk, quantified via VaR or TVaR of a given collection of future economic scenarios representing factor levels at the risk horizon. Traditionally, evaluating portfolio losses of an outer scenario is done by computing a conditional expectation via inner-level Monte Carlo and is computationally expensive. We introduce several inter-related machine learning techniques to speed up this computation, in particular by properly accounting for the simulation noise. Our main workhorse is an advanced Gaussian Process (GP) regression approach which uses nonparametric spatial modeling to efficiently learn the relationship between the stochastic factors defining scenarios and corresponding portfolio value. Leveraging this emulator, we develop sequential algorithms that adaptively allocate inner simulation budgets to target the quantile region. The GP framework also yields better uncertainty quantification for the resulting VaR/TVaR estimators that reduces bias and variance compared to existing methods. We illustrate the proposed strategies with two case-studies in two and six dimensions.
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Dynamic Portfolio Optimization with Looping Contagion Risk. (arXiv:1710.05168v1 [q-fin.MF])
In this paper we consider a utility maximization problem with defaultable stocks and looping contagion risk. We assume that the default intensity of one company depends on the stock prices of itself and another company, and the default of the company induces an immediate drop in the stock price of the surviving company. We prove the value function is the unique continuous viscosity solution of the HJB equation. We also compare and analyse the statistical distributions of terminal wealth of log utility based on two optimal strategies, one using the full information of intensity process, the other a proxy constant intensity process. These two strategies may be considered respectively the active and passive optimal portfolio investment. Our simulation results show that, statistically, active portfolio investment is more volatile and performs either much better or much worse than the passive portfolio investment in extreme scenarios.
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Mean Field Game Approach to Production and Exploration of Exhaustible Commodities. (arXiv:1710.05131v1 [q-fin.EC])
In a game theoretic framework, we study energy markets with a continuum of homogenous producers who produce energy from an exhaustible resource such as oil. Each producer simultaneously optimizes production rate that drives her revenues, as well as exploration effort to replenish her reserves. This exploration activity is modeled through a controlled point process that leads to stochastic increments to reserves level. The producers interact with each other through the market price that depends on the aggregate production. We employ a mean field game approach to solve for a Markov Nash equilibrium and develop numerical schemes to solve the resulting system of non-local HJB and transport equations with non-local coupling. A time-stationary formulation is also explored, as well as the fluid limit where exploration becomes deterministic.
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Arbitrage-Free Regularization. (arXiv:1710.05114v1 [q-fin.MF])
We introduce a path-dependent geometric framework which generalizes the HJM modeling approach to a wide variety of other asset classes. A machine learning regularization framework is developed with the objective of removing arbitrage opportunities from models within this general framework. The regularization method relies on minimal deformations of a model subject to a path-dependent penalty that detects arbitrage opportunities. We prove that the solution of this regularization problem is independent of the arbitrage-penalty chosen, subject to a fixed information loss functional. In addition to the general properties of the minimal deformation, we also consider several explicit examples. This paper is focused on placing machine learning methods in finance on a sound theoretical basis and the techniques developed to achieve this objective may be of interest in other areas of application.
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“Bank” Some of Your Gains
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Loss Leader or Value Creator? Deconstructing Amazon Prime
I am an Amazon Prime member and have been one for a long time, and I am completely hooked. Not only do I (and my family) use Amazon Prime for items ranging from tissue paper to big screen televisions, but it has become my go-to for every possession that I need in my working and personal life. In fact, I know (and am completely at peace with the fact) that it has subtly affected my buying, as I substitute slightly more expensive Prime items for non-Prime equivalents, even when I shop on Amazon. It is not just the absence of shipping costs that draws me to Prime, but the reliability of delivery and the ease of return. In short, it makes shopping painless. As I tally how much we save each year because of Prime and weigh it against the $99 that we pay for it, I am convinced that we are getting far more value from it than what we pay, and that leads to an interesting follow up. If many of the 85 million other Prime members in October 2017 are getting the same bargain that we are, is this not an indication that Amazon has not just under priced Prime, but is perhaps selling it below cost? As someone who has wrestled with valuing Amazon over the last 20 years, I have learned never to under estimate the company. In this post, I would like to take the process I used to value a user at Uber and apply it to value not just a Prime member to Amazon but the collective value of Amazon Prime to the company.
The Growth of Amazon Prime
Amazon introduced Prime in 2005 and the service was slow to take off. At the end of 2011, only about 4% of Amazon customers were Prime members. In the years since, though, the service has seen explosive growth:
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Introduction and Keynote Remarks: Commissioner Quintenz before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Fourth Annual Conference on CCP Risk Management
Introduction and Keynote Remarks: Commissioner Quintenz before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicagoâs Fourth Annual Conference on CCP Risk Management
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CFTC’s LabCFTC Releases Primer on Virtual Currencies
The Commodity Futures Trading Commissionâs LabCFTC today released, âA CFTC Primer on Virtual Currencies.â
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