Global CIO - A macro view

Finally the day has come that your Ivy League (please note that the spell checker capitalized that, not me) education and hard work are paying off: Congratulations, you were just appointed Global CIO.  You are now responsible for investing all of the world’s financial assets and, given your history as a highly educated CIO, steeped in finance and highly experienced managing other pools of capital your goal is to create a diversified portfolio with uncorrelated assets.

On the first day of work you decided to use a three step process in setting up the portfolio 1) see what you have, 2) determine what you want to have and 3) make changes to create the desired portfolio.

The first thing you do is send your star analyst to give you a rundown of what is in the portfolio you inherited. S/he starts out with collating and aggregating the portfolio which consists of stocks, bonds, and a number of derivatives such as futures, options and credit default swaps as well as a number of hedge fund investments.  After burning the midnight oil s/he comes to your office with a shocking discovery - all the long and short derivative positions are offsetting and net to zero, the short equity and bond positions in hedge fund portfolios are offset by levered longs held by other funds and therefore also net out to zero and all you have in net exposure is a portfolio of stocks and bonds.

You may want to re-read the above paragraphs a few times to make a small dent in you denial that on the most extreme macro level of financial instruments all there are is stocks and bonds.

Once you start to get your head around this observation is becomes easier to understand that there only are three return streams available to a financial investor and they are dividends, interest payments and capital appreciation/depreciation on equities. Three you say - what happened to capital appreciation on bonds, which have done so well?

 

Let's assume you buy a 6%  US10 year treasury note when it is issued at par. Soon after you bought it rates go down to 5% and, as the Wall Street Journal so tirelessly points out, the price of bonds moves inversely with yields, and the bond price goes up to 107. You just made 7% in just a few short months courtesy of the Fed/ financial markets/ your investment genius! However, as you are the Global CIO and own all financial assets you have nobody to sell it to. So you hold it to maturity and which point the bond gets redeemed at, you guessed it, par. Total capital appreciation over the life of the bond: zero. You did however collect 10 years worth of interest.

 

Even the capital appreciation on equities is a paper-only exercise. You can’t “realize” the gain because you can’t sell. On a macro level this is exactly what happens in the real world; collectively market participants cannot sell their positions and that is what sets assets up for large price swings which can’t be explained by fundamentals. The notion that a certain asset is over or under owned is nonsensical – somebody always owns the asset – you can’t sell without somebody else buying it from you. Markets then function primarily as a wealth redistribution mechanism and a valuation tool secondly although when it matters that function does not seem to work.

 

As Global CIO all you can do is sit there, lean back and collect interest, dividends and watch the value of your stocks and bonds fluctuate with the level of economic activity and whatever financial models you choose to use to value them and the psychology of market participants. On occasion you buy new stock and bond offerings and write off assets which went to zero. Your investment genius or lack thereof has no effect on the cash flows, stock and bond valuations or the value of the portfolio overall. Brokers won’t take you golfing or for steak dinners either because they no longer have any secondary trading activity nor the fees that come along with that.

(So perhaps you don’t want to be the Global CIO but engage in something useful like teach finance and share what you learned with them or learn how to make an omelet.)

On the second day on the job it has become obvious that collectively your active strategies add no value so you redeem in kind from all your active managers and collapse all offsetting positions. And that, surprise, surprise will cause your performance to better than the performance in the world where there are lots of separate pools of capital especially when actively managed. Actually, you’re shocked by how much better the collective performance is than the sum of the individual performances. The amount of money paid in transaction costs, management fees and incentive fees and financing charges is absolutely staggering. The concept of negative carry no longer exists and bid/offer, slippage and netting risk also are removed from your financial vocabulary. In fact, the only words your financial vocabulary contains at this point are issue price, coupon, dividend, credit and business risk.

Clearly this financial model would have issues, mainly lack of discipline on the side of the issuers of financial instruments because the Global CIO is a forced buyer and therefore a price taker, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment. And although derivatives like futures net out to zero the risk transfer function of them can add value to the real economy by redistributing risk……