Hedge funds just had a miserable week in which they were beaten by retail traders on Reddit in the $43 trillion U.S. stock market.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Melvin Capital, the largest institutional short-seller shorting GameStop (GME), lost a whopping 53% in January, and after receiving a $2.75 billion infusion of aid money from Citadel and Point72, its assets were down to about $8 billion at the end of January The report also noted that this means that the company’s assets have shrunk significantly from $12.5 billion at the beginning of the year.
The report also pointed out that this means that in less than a month, Melvin has a huge loss of $ 7 billion, asset size cut.
In addition to Melvin, hedge fund D1 Capital Partners has lost about 20% and POINT72 has lost 10-15% in less than a month to start the year.
In the process of this huge loss, institutional investors have been forced to cut their market exposure at the fastest pace since March last year. Foreign media analysis says this is related to their risk models.
As the influx of retail money sent stocks like GameStop and AMC soaring, the trading signals that guide the “smart money” approach to investing began to sound red alarms.
This rough but widely used indicator is called “value at risk” (Value at Risk), which measures the maximum possible loss of a financial asset or portfolio of securities under historical price fluctuations, pioneered by JPMorgan Chase in the 1990s.
The volatility of the 50 companies in the Russell 3000 doubled last week as retail investors battled Wall Street. At the same Time, the stocks most shorted by hedge funds rose so strongly that they outperformed those long by hedge funds, and the gap between the two was unprecedented.
With institutional clients worried, Wall Street professionals were left to cut their positions across the board, while retail investors, who are not subject to such restrictions, continued to fire away. Benn Dunn, president of Alpha Theory Advisors, which helps fund managers monitor risk, said.
“When risk models become helpless, you can only reduce leverage. Whatever hedge funds are long, they have to dump them to reduce their exposure and keep the risk under control.”
Hedge fund exposures fell by a record amount last Wednesday, according to Morgan Stanley prime brokerage data. Data going back to 2010 show that this rate of leverage reduction was the fastest since the outbreak last March, deviating as much as 11 standard deviations from the mean. Hedge funds serving institutional clients, such as pensions, are often constrained by trading plans that curb extreme excessive losses.
Last week, the challenge for “smart money” was the collapse of a reliable trading model. Assuming a stock picker chooses to short GameStop and go long Peloton Interactive, for the most part they act as a hedge against each other as they move in the same direction. However, when the former soars and the latter plunges, it creates a negative and loss-making co-move, says Melissa Brown, global head of applied research at Qontigo.
“If you short one stock and then go long another, it can actually increase your risk when the correlation drops.”
Last Wednesday, an exchange-traded fund that tracks hedge fund “darlings” (GVIP) deviated seven standard deviations from the mean relative to the most heavily shorted stocks in the Goldman Sachs Russell 3000 basket. Based on 250 days of data, this is outside the statistical norm.
Of course, this is based on what happens when the data is normally distributed, and it is well known that this distribution does not hold, especially in complex modern markets. However, it simply illustrates how retail investors have led to unprecedented volatility in the institutional community.
The multiple drivers that drove hedge funds to reduce leverage are inextricably linked, and the storm has yet to die down as an army of retail investors launches an assault on newly shorted stocks. Increased volatility has forced hedge funds to trim positions, and client redemptions and margin calls have added to the pressure.
But digging deeper, last week’s frenzy also suggests a worrying phenomenon has emerged in financial markets: volatility, which used to have the lowest statistical probability of occurring, is now occurring more frequently, a risk known as “fat tails” (fatter tails).
“I’m seeing sell-offs everywhere, and there’s an irrationality in the market.”
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