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When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

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A somewhat didactic narrative history of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Nicholas Dunbar covers the same subject in his book "Inventing Money." Both books present a blizzard of details about who did what and when. Too much detail. The general reader would better served by a medium sized article. Nevertheless if you're a finance buff interested in the nitty-gritty then read both books. Dunbar has a physics background and his book is more technical, while Lowenstein comes from journalism and his narrative flows better.

LCTM began operating in 1994, set up by John Meriwether formally head of the bond-arbitrage group at Solomon Brothers. He put together a star-studded cast that included three (1997) Nobel prize winners in economics. Their basic strategy was something called convergence arbitrage. In essence this strategy says buy two bonds that you think will track one another. Go long on the cheap one and short on the other; you make money if the spread narrows. In theory you are protected from changing prices as long as the two vary in the same way. To make the big bucks LCTM was after they took a gigantic number of highly leveraged arbitrage positions all over the world. To get high leverage you borrow for the position, like buying a stock on margin. LCTM got really high leverage by avoiding something called the "haircut," which is an extra margin of collateral banks usually demand, but forgave LCTM. Why would banks they do such a thing? Because they were blinded by the glitter of the cast, and in some cases the banks themselves were investors in LCTM. By 1997 convergence arbitrage opportunities in bonds began to dry up, everyone was doing it. So LCTM applied their strategy to stocks. Find two stocks that will track on another and go long and short with borrowed money. This is not easy. Stocks are less amenable to mathematical analysis than bonds, and after all these were the bond guys from Solomon, they were out of their depth. You might ask how can you borrow most of your stock position when the Federal Reserve requires 50% margin (Regulation T). Answer: don't really buy the stocks, instead buy derivative contracts that simulate stocks, an end run around Regulation T. Even with all this leverage LCTM would claim that the fund was no more risky than the stock market, meaning a stock index. In 1998 the markets went against LCTM, with the "flight to quality" (US government bonds) as investors panicked. The fund suffered from what reliability engineers call "common mode error." Spreads got wider not narrower across the board, and LCTM's capital base began to shrink as their positions lost money. At a certain point they would have to start liquidating positions, and the market impact of such large scale selling would cascade across their portfolio. The fund would "blow up."

The above gives a flavor of the material Lowenstein provides, only in much greater detail. If that's what you want, buy the book. Is this a tale of human folly or just plain bad luck? Answering that question is not easy, one needs to grasp a large amount of technical finance theory, and understand what happened in the particular case of LCTM. This book will help.

A couple of years ago I read Nick Dunbar's account of the LTCM collapse "Inventing Money", and a friend recently lent me this book. They make an interesting comparison.

Dunbar - a physicist by trade - is more interested in the theoretical economics that went into the risk arbitrage fund in the first place and how this came unstuck. He gives a long description of the Black-Scholes model, what it says, and how it was used to pull off the risk "free" trades which made Long Term so much money for three or four years.

Lowenstein, by contrast, barely mentions either the Black-Scholes model (he barely touches on option pricing at all, as a matter of fact) or the Italian convergence trades which eventually blew the gaffe on the fund, but instead tells the human story, exposes the inevitable egos, and indulges in more than a little smuggery (this book is long on wisdom after the fact) in dissecting the naivety of the LTCM hedging and trading strategy and the people who ran it.

As long as he sticks to the egos and the posturing, When Genius Failed is a dandy read: the negotiations amongst the Wall Street top brass as the fund is going under rate with anything served up in Barbarians at the Gate, and as this is a large part of the book, it rips along quite nicely.

But the schadenfreude grates: One of the lessons of the whole fiasco was that the smart money is with the guy who can predict the future: any old mug can be a genius with hindsight. Lowenstein spends a lot of his time wisely pointing out what the traders should have done.

Additionally, Lowenstein employs some metaphors which indicate he might not have much of a grip on his subject: for one, he states "a bit of liquidity greases the wheels of markets; what Greenspan overlooked is that with too much liquidity, the market is apt to skid off the tracks." It's a poor metaphor, because it isn't excess liquidity which causes markets to skid, rather, it's the sudden disappearance of it. As this is the fundamental lesson of the Long Term story, it's a bad mistake to make for the sake of a smart-alec aphorism.

Similarly, in the epilogue states, with regard to the putative diversification in the fund "the Long-Term episode proved that eggs in separate baskets *can* break simultaneously". Again, this conclusion is not supported by the text, which observes several times that in a market crash, liquidity drains and the correlation risk of instruments in the market goes to one: that is to say, it turns out all your eggs are in the same basket after all. Diversity wasn't the problem; the problem was you wrongly thought you had it.

For these reasons I prefer Dunbar's more academic work: it may not be such a sizzling read, but nor does it misguidedly kick a fund when it's down.

In 1994, bond arbitrage guru John Meriwether, late of Salomon Brothers, launched a hedge fund. Its partners included two soon-to-be Nobel laureates and an ex-vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. The fund was to exploit highly quantitative techniques to bet on (primarily) bond spreads throughout the world, using large amounts of leverage to magnify small returns from supposedly low-risk positions. By early 1998, each dollar invested in the fund had grown to $4.11. By early fall 1998, that $4.11 was down to 33 cents. The fund's potential bankruptcy so threatened the world economy that the U.S. Federal Reserve had to step in to broker a rescue.

The tale of the rise and fall of Long-Term capital was coming to its end as I was putting to press my own book on option-based trading strategies and their effects on market volatility (Capital Ideas and Market Realities). The whole adventure constituted a perfect capstone to my story, which goes back to the crash of 1929, showing how strategies that purport to eliminate the risk of investing can end up exploding in the face of their followers and investors generally.

Now Roger Lowenstein, formerly a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and author of a biography on Warren Buffett, has devoted a whole book to LTC. Drawing largely on contemporaneous reporting and on his own personal interviews with many of the principal and supporting players (although not, alas, Meriwether himself), Lowenstein manages to create a real page-turner out of the unfolding events, even for readers who already know the ultimate outcome.

Part of the tension, it seems to this reader, stems from the unresolved (and probably unresolvable) ambiguity about the real nature of the story. On the one hand, it seems to play out as a classic tragedy: Its larger-than-life protagonists hubristically pit themselves against the gods of the marketplace and fall hard. Certainly, for many of the players involved, it was a tragedy. Meriwether not only lost his money but his reputation. Nobel laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes found their lives' works on modern finance theory rocked to the core. Many of those instrumental in engineering LTC's rescue (including Goldman Sachs' Jon Corzine) ended up subsequently losing their own jobs. LTC's employees, who had been encouraged to invest their bonuses from the firm's fat years back into the firm itself, lost it all when the firm collapsed; nor did they get the $500,000 bonuses secured by the LTC partners as part of the bailout package.

On the other hand, one can also view the whole affair as great comedy (especially if one is on the outside looking in). After all, a scene with 140 lawyers in one room is worthy of the Marx brothers. Then you have the Fed descending, at the eleventh hour, like some deus ex machina, to restore order and stability; not to mention Wall Street's viciously competitive masters of the universe gathered on folding metal chairs around the New York Fed's boardroom table, trying to rescue the world from themselves. Even LTC's partners bounce back. Meriwether (J.M. to friends, and throughout the book) starts a new hedge fund, bringing in several old LTC colleagues. Merton and Scholes are still teaching and consulting. A week after LTC was bailed out, many of the principals gather at the Pierre Hotel in New York to celebrate Scholes' remarriage; a wedding, of course, is the classic comedic emblem of reconciliation and renewal.

The vibrancy of any play, whether comedy or tragedy, often rests on the quality of its villains. Lowenstein singles out a few individuals for special opprobrium. These include Victor Haghani and Lawrence Hilibrand, who basically ran LTC's trades and pushed the firm into ever larger, more highly leveraged positions, and into areas such as merger arbitrage in which the firm had no demonstrated expertise. Hilibrand comes across in a particularly bad light, especially when he shows up at the bailout negotiations with his own private lawyer and threatens to derail the whole process because "there was nothing in it for him."

The person one might expect to hold the center of the story, J.M. himself, plays a strangely muted role. Lowenstein describes him as "an unlikely star, too bashful for the limelight." Even his contributions in furtherance of LTC's eventual downfall seem to be more sins of omission than sins of commission. That is, he failed to rein in his uber traders, Haghani and Hilibrand, and he failed to heed the warnings of his more temperate (and, as it turned out, more realistic) colleagues. Of course, J.M. did set the tone for the firm-the air of infallibility that was to prove its downfall.

The book emphasizes how LTC's greed, arrogance and even foolhardiness made it susceptible to a market crisis. But was this crisis purely a result of exogenous events, such as the turmoil in Asia and Russia, as Lowenstein suggests? If so, how did these troubles overwhelm markets in fundamentally sound Western economies?

In my opinion, the book lets LTC off the hook in failing to explain how the very strategies it followed helped to create the perfect storm that ended up swamping the firm. The argument in my book, based on decades of debate with options experts in the industry and in academia, is that LTC provides yet another illustration of the market's susceptibility to certain large-scale trading strategies. These strategies tend to attract a lot of capital because they appear to offer a haven from the vicissitudes of market risk; given leverage and derivatives, they can command hundreds of billions (even trillions) of dollars of assets. Under adverse market conditions, however, the "rules" of these strategies call for dumping all these assets on the market-all at once. We saw this in the crash of 1987, and again in the turbulence of 1989, 1991,1994 and 1997.

All in all, however, When Genius Failed is a classic tale of greed and fear on Wall Street. Lowenstein tells it well, especially in the later chapters, which give readers a blow-by-blow account of the bailout negotiations. What's more, he brings out the story's particular pertinence for today's investors: Even with all the brains and all the computers in the world, investors can't control, let alone predict, human nature.

Bruce I. Jacobs (cimr@jlem.com), Principal, Jacobs Levy Equity Management, and author of Capital Ideas and Market Realities (Blackwell, 1999)

Lowenstein follows in a proud history of Wall Street Journal reporters that have written outstanding books about current events, such as "Den of Thieves" by Stewart and "Barbarians at the Gate" by Burrough and Heylar. Lowenstein walks us through the development of Long Term Capital management at the hands of "Liar's Poker" star John Merriweather. Merriweather and his band of academic, bond-trading proteges raised the mother of all funds in LTCM, dedicated to making massive bets, the majority of which were related to convergence amongst various interest rate spreads.

Merriweather and his gang go on to do quite well (all the while we hear the Jaws-like music playing in the background), in fact they do a little too well. At one point they forcibly return money to investors - it is, of course, after this that things start to go tragically wrong. There are wonderful descriptions and backgrounds of the key characters involved along the way, which adds to the reader's desire to know just how things wind up. The fund continues to lose all of its holdings, and as things start to go bad, they continue to get worse and worse. Now it is no longer just the markets conspiring against LTCM, but also the growing number of bankers who learn of LTCM's positions, and knowing that due to their size LTCM's exit of those positions would ruin markets. Everything that could go wrong does, and eventually we are left with the aftermath, the fund being bailed out through the behind the scenes maneuvering of the New York Fed.

The book does lack a couple of items, (i) there is little to no in depth discussion of the trading techniques used by LTCM, (ii) there isn't really any 'insiders' view of the behind the scenes maneuvering going on at the fund through the fall, and finally (iii) there isn't a real sense of finality at the end of the book.

All in all this is a well written book about an interesting point in the financial history of the US, as there are few other major incidents that don't involve some kind of criminal misdeeds. Rather, what we see here is the sheer error of man's hubris and seeming belief that a resounding knowledge of the past would allow LTCM to be victorious no matter what the future lay before it. I believe that this book will grow more interesting with every revision and addition to the epilogue. I recommend the text, but I do look forward to reading "Inventing Money" by Dunbar, which supposedly is a bit more detailed when reviewing the actual trading techniques that LTCM was was built on.

This book is an excellent account of the LTCM debacle. It is especially good in describing the human side of the players involved. Given the obsession to privacy by most of the central characters of LTCM, this book gives a lucid portrayal on how events evolved, and the persons behind those decisions. One couldn't help but wonder, if we were in the same position as the LTCM partners, having achieved their successes, would we do things differently?

On the other hand, this book does have its limitations. For people who are not familiar with the modern financial derivatives and "risk management" techniques, Lowenstein gave a comprehensible, but rather incomplete explanation. This won't hurt the book's readability, but readers certainly won't understand any better about options and swaps after reading this book, either. The "leverage" used by LTCM, central to both its success and downfall, is mainly due to the use these derivatives than simply saving the "haircut" as described in the book. There are also some incorrect statements, though relatively minor, such as Merton's insistence of "continuous time" model without any sudden price jumps. Just for the record, it was exactly Merton himself who first proposed a "jump" model for pricing financial assets in 1976. You can find this in most derivatives textbooks.

Derivatives regularly get a bad rap for causing financial disasters, and LTCM is just the latest in a string of headline news over the years. This is quite unfortunate. Americans probably don't realize that many, many mutual funds and pensions funds use derivatives to "reduce" their investment risks. Lowenstein's book shows that it's really the human factor lying at the root of these fiascos. If only it could give the public a better understanding of the true nature of these modern financial instruments......

The story of LTCM's rise and fall is a compelling one not only for people interested in finance, but for anyone fascinated by the spectacle of very smart people losing enormous sums of money. Lowenstein's book makes this story accessible by glossing over some of the technical details, a tradeoff of readability for depth, but still provides insight into the causes of LTCM's collapse. I recommend reading both this book and Nicholas Dunbar's excellent _Inventing Money_: Dunbar provides more technical explanations, while Lowenstein has a richer story to tell about the people involved.

By now Long-Term Capital Management's tale is well known. A group of hot bond arbitrage traders joined forces with a pair of future Nobel Prize winning academics to form a hedge fund that promised it had conquered the ogre of risk. As profits grew, greedy bankers and brokers stood in line to provide financing on the finest of terms. Yet, like other speculators before them, they failed.

The markets, as G. K. Chesterton wrote, lay "a trap for logicians . . .. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

While the hedge fund's history is familiar, Lowenstein's conclusions are worthy of examination by both historians and investors.

1. Long-Term Capital Management's (LTCM) profits look less impressive in light of the losses that followed. The "profits" used by bankers and brokers to justify their loans and investments in the fund were not "earned", merely borrowed against the day the tide turned.

2. LTCM saw the cycle was turning, yet refused to limit its exposure. As spreads markets withered, the partners opted to increase their leverage to maintain returns.

3. The fund had faith in diversification. Its history serves as ample notification that eggs in different baskets can and do all break at the same time.

4. One can be big - read illiquid; one can be leveraged, but to be both is begging for trouble. No one can be right every trading day.

5. Traders are not computer chips. They are motivated by emotions; they run in herds, they retreat in hordes. Uncertainty will never conform itself to a numeric straitjacket despite the risk defining desires of the academic community.

This book tells a timeless tale. Markets are cunning animals, there to exploit investors' mistakes and hubris.

This book reads like a horror story: we know John Merriwether and his arbitrageurs shouldn't ratchet up their leverage again and again but we can't tear our eyes away when they do it. Already knowing what ultimately happens to the Fund does nothing to alleviate the suspense and trepidation as a wave of panics begins to richocet from seemingly unrelated financial markets to trigger a worldwide financial crisis with LTCM square in the middle. Lowenstein's detailed description of the daily losses the Fund experienced will take your breath away.

All in all, this book provides a vivid portrait of how sensible, seemingly "safe" investment strategies can go terribly wrong when greed overcomes prudence and positions are pushed to the limit. Yet LTCM is not the only one who comes off bad here: Goldman Sachs is portrayed as shameless front-runners, Alan Greenspan looks like he is more out of touch than Ronald Reagan and Wall Street brokers and bankers appear as rational as rabbits in heat as they fall over themselves to extend credit to LTCM without charging hardly any margin whatsoever. This "easy credit" is what let LTCM leverage their assets up to an incredible 100X by the time of their downfall.

I promise you this: "When Genius Failed" will become "The Barbarians At The Gate" for the 1990s. And it will rightfully go down as one of the best books of business history of the last 25 years.

Hubris and leverage create a volatile combination. These fund managers may have been the brightest in the business, yet they began to think they could call the direction of the market based on historical data.

William Poundstone's book "Fortune's Formula" gives additional background on Richard Merton, and other geniuses who exploited probabilities and market anomalies to make money. Ed Thorpe's exploitation of convertible arbitrage is particularly interesting. The Kelly formula and Merton's early forays into finance are also mentioned. While the geniuses in Poundstone's book start out with discipline, they often succumb to speculation and greed. The thrill of the easy money game seems irresistible even to geniuses. For financiers, Tavakoli gives background in "Credit Derivatives and Synthetic Structures 2nd Edition.". She talks about hedge funds leveraging returns using total return swaps and how they refused to disclose the volume of these off-balance sheet transactions even to the banks doing business with them. For finance professionals it is good background to how banks got in over their head by supplying implied loans to LTCM without asking for sufficient collateral.

This is a good read even without that background, and I highly recommend "When Genius Failed" even to people without a background in finance as an insight into how human intelligence can be compromised by pride.

There's an old saying to the effect that every army prepares to fight the last war, rather than the next one. In financial circles, the equivalent is to create models that optimize decisions in light of the history of financial markets. That is great, as long as the future is like the past. As soon as the future becomes different, this 'rear-view mirror' vision of the future can create terrible crashes. That's what happened with Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The cost was almost a meltdown in the financial markets around the world. This cautionary tale should stand as a warning to regulators, investors, academicians, and traders about avoiding the same mistakes in the future. One particular reason to be so concerned is that John Meriwether and his crew of geniuses were back in business as of 1999, as reported by the book (apparently with some of the same investors as in LTCM).

You may recall that Mr. Meriwether appeared in the book, Liar's Poker, by challenging John Gutfreund, CEO of Salomon Brothers, to one hand of liar's poker for ten million dollars. Mr. Gutfreund correctly declined, but lost face. Mr. Meriwether later had to leave Salomon Brothers after the firm was found to have failed to notify the Federal Reserve promptly after discovering that it had been violating rules on bidding for government securities.

In this book, you will learn more about Mr. Meriwether and his love of brilliant people, betting on everything in sight, and taking outside bets when the odds seemed to be in his favor. This approach can work well when the odds can be known, but that is not the case in the financial markets. Mr. Meriwether did not make himself available to the author.

Roger Lowenstein is our most talented financial writer (you may remember him from his days at The Wall Street Journal and for his wonderful biography on Warren Buffett), and he has produced an outstanding work that will be a cautionary tale for future generations about the financial myopia of the 1990s.

Long Term Capital Management was built around consensus in the financial markets. The firm attracted the thinkers in the financial markets with the greatest reputations (including future Nobel Prize laureates, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes -- of Black-Scholes option pricing fame, and the top talent from the arbitrage area at Salomon Brothers), a top regulator (the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board), famous investors from the top investment banks and consulting firms, and lines of credit from every major financial institution in these markets.

The firm planned to invest by finding small mispricings of one security versus another (such as the interest rate on one bond maturity versus another compared to history, an option versus the underlying stock for the time remaining on the option, a bond yield in a foreign currency versus the currency futures, and the price of a stock versus a hostile takeover bid price for the company). Here, it hoped to proverbally make lots of nickels by borrowing lots of money to make these trades.

Although other firms took similar risks (and many also took enormous losses in 1998), LTCM stood out for two things: It had no independent evaluation of its risk to control what it was doing (the traders monitored themselves -- a little like letting the fox guard the hen house) and it took on vastly more debt than others did compared to its equity base. At the firm's peak, it had borrowed over $100 billion against a base of $4 billion in equity and had derivative (option) positions for an exposure of another $1 trillion. This enormous finanical leverage magnified the size of any gains or losses it took. Part of what had been deceptive is that the firm had been regularly and spectacularly profitably for most of its initial four years.

What the firm had neglected was to consider what might happen to historical price differentials in a market crisis (particularly a 'stress-loss liquidation'). In 1998, an unprecedented financial crisis occurred following the Asian meltdown and Russia's refusal to pay its debt. In the panic that followed, there were many sellers and few buyers. Tens of billions evaporated quickly in these abritrage trades. LTCM moved slowly to unwind the trades, believing that things would come back to normal. Soon, it was too late, and the New York Federal Reserve supported a shotgun wedding of the firms that would lose the most if LTCM died to put another $4 billion in the firm until it could be wound down. The aftermath was not much fun for anyone.

Mr. Lowenstein does an excellent job of describing what occurred at the level of a college-level course in finance. If you have a higher level of knowledge than that about trading, you can skip most the explanation of what happened and why.

The crash exposed several major weaknesses in the financial system. One, the lenders were too lax. Two, the risk review of the firm was essentially nonexistent, although it reported risk levels monthly (apparently based on incorrect assumptions). Three, the Federal Reserve doesn't know what goes on with hedge funds, until they are about to blow up the financial markets. Four, Wall Street goes along with reputations more than due diligence. Five, excess risk compared to current market conditions creates excess losses. Six, modeling historical trends is a dangerous way to make money unless you use small amounts of leverage to hedge against the risk of unexpected market volatility.

After reading this interesting book, I hope you will also ask yourself if you know what the risk level is with your financial investments for the current market. If you don't know, I hope you will quickly find out. And have your testing done against the potential risk of something extreme happening, not just with history. Certainly, the 80-90 percent losses that many Internet stocks have suffered in the last year or so should be an indication of how much risk can occur even in a successful industry.

Good luck with avoiding large losses in pursuing financial gains!