How The Best of Intentions Destroyed Liquidity

By Jared Dillian

I just got done grading the final exams for my class (took me 12 hours). It’s 100 short answer questions and two essays. One of the essay questions is about the Volcker Rule. “Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve chairman, as part of the rulemaking process for Dodd-Frank, included a provision prohibiting proprietary trading by banks, known as the Volcker Rule. Do you agree or not agree with the Volcker Rule? Explain.”

The funny thing about asking someone what they think of a law is, if you leave the question open ended and you don’t really describe what the law does, the response is generally favorable. Out of a class of 20 students, only two or three opposed the Volcker Rule. Most of them were in favor of it, as they were in favor of Glass-Steagall when I asked them to write a paper on that.

Seems pretty straightforward. If you have these banks that you call “systemically important,” such that they could go out of business and get rescued by taxpayers, then you don’t really want them taking risks with their own capital, right?

I mean, look how this worked out in the past.

Milton Friedman once said that laws should be judged by their results rather than their intentions. Liquidity has disappeared, and it is directly attributable to the Volcker Rule. If you hear someone try to make an argument that it’s not, that person is probably a journalist or a professor with no first hand knowledge of the situation.

I remember when the Volcker Rule first passed, years ago, someone senior in the equity derivatives market asked me, “Do you really think they will have regulators going through your trades, one by one, line by line, asking you if it was your intent to make money?”

“That seems very unlikely,” I told him.....But that is what we got.

In addition to confiscating cell phones and monitoring phone conversations, chats, and emails, the vast army of compliance officers at investment banks really will go through a trader’s blotter line by line and determine if each trade was a bona fide hedging transaction or if he was trading for his own account. In single stocks, this is pretty straightforward—either you were buying GE for a client or you were buying it for yourself. But in derivatives, it’s not. If you get hit on the GE Jan 30 calls, you’re not going to be able to turn around and sell them—you have to sell something else.

For example, if you’re long too much vega, you may want to sell some short-dated stuff against it, putting on a term structure trade. Is that a hedge, or prop trading? It’s impossible to make that distinction. But the compliance guys try. The interpretation varies. In equity derivatives, traders generally get the benefit of the doubt. In credit, they don’t. You can’t sell bond B to hedge bond A. You literally have to sit there and try to sell bond A. This is why the bond market is such a mess, which we have talked about in this space before.

Of course, none of this gets us any closer to preventing an investment bank from blowing up, because the guy trading 500 call options on GE was never going to blow up the bank in the first place. On the other hand, the Volcker Rule never would have prevented Jon Corzine from blowing up MF Global with European sovereign bonds. If a CEO really wants to do something like that, is some compliance dork really going to stop him? To say that this regulation is a catastrophic failure would be an understatement. Liquidity has disappeared, with no discernible benefit. I’m a middlebrow market commentator, and I’m not supposed to say things like “This is dumb,” but this is really dumb. It doesn’t take an Austrian economist to figure out the unintended consequences.

In the old days (10 years ago), banks were the big liquidity providers. Let’s look at this a different way: do we want banks to continue to be liquidity providers, yes/no? Banks were not always liquidity providers. In the ‘90s, in equity options, it was the physical trading floors where all the risk was handled. Stocks, too. But the bond market has always been an upstairs phenomenon.

If banks aren’t going to be liquidity providers, then we need non bank entities to provide liquidity, and we need to encourage it. Some large hedge funds and some second tier (i.e., not systemically important) broker dealers are starting to do this. But it’s not enough.

The goal was to take a bank and turn it from a risk taking institution to a toll taking institution, where everything is traded on an agency basis, with a commission applied. The FX markets, which were once all risk, are starting to look like this. In equities, traders don’t do much aside from maintain relationships and plunk orders into auto trader, where they are preyed upon by the algorithms.

This is unsustainable, because how can you hire all these smart people from fancy schools and pay them all this money just to push a button—while all their communications are monitored? Nobody is happy with the current state of affairs. 10 years ago, you could sell 250,000 shares on the wire. Or $25 million of bonds.

I have two radical solutions. Here they are:

1. Repeal the Volcker Rule
2. End decimalization

When I came into the business, stocks still traded in fractions. On the options floor, I had to learn to add and subtract fractions in my head. Seriously—I ran drills on this, testing myself for speed. When I got to Lehman, to the program trading desk, I noticed something remarkable—we could send our orders to “wholesalers” like Spear, Leeds & Kellogg or Knight Trading. They would auto execute the orders up to 2,000 shares on the bid or the offer—for free.

Then decimalization happened. The preferential treatment lasted about another month, then they started charging us a penny a share. Market making went from being a profitable business to an unprofitable one.
Guess what—if market making is profitable, a lot of people will want to do it, and you will have a lot of liquidity. If market making sucks, nobody will want to do it, and you will have no liquidity.

Did the retail investor benefit? Maybe. Now he could go into his E-Trade account and execute something for a penny instead of 1/16. But if he was a shareholder in a mutual fund, the mutual fund portfolio manager now had to drop 250,000 shares into auto trader, getting preyed upon by the aforementioned algorithms, instead of getting it done for 1/8.

Then SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt led the charge for decimalization. More unintended consequences.
It’s not likely we’ll go back. Levitt was having conniptions about the length of time it was taking for the options market to decimalize, even though the computing power didn’t even exist.

Ask any portfolio manager today: Liquidity is the number one concern. That’s bullcrap. It’s like buying a house and having plumbing be your number one concern. It should just take care of itself.

Jared Dillian

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The article The 10th Man: How The Best of Intentions Destroyed Liquidity was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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EFPs and The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action

By Jared Dillian

Pretend you are a corn trader. As such, you have two choices: have a position in corn futures or own physical corn. It may seem silly to even consider owning physical corn, because corn futures are easy to trade—just click a button on your screen. But assume you have a grain elevator, and whether you own futures or physical corn is all the same to you. How do you decide which you prefer?

If one is mispriced relative to the other.

If you consider owning physical corn, you have to take into account the cost of storage and any transportation costs you may incur getting the corn to the delivery point. You also have to think of the cost of carrying that physical corn position, or the opportunity loss you incur by not investing the money in the risk-free alternative.

The thing is, there’s nothing keeping the spot and futures markets on parallel tracks, aside from the basis traders who spend their time watching when the futures get out of whack from the physical. That basis exists in just about every futures market, even in financial futures that are cash settled. In fact, that was pretty much my life when I was doing index arbitrage—trading S&P 500 futures against the underlying stocks. I was basically a fancy version of the basis trader in corn.

With stock index futures (like the S&P 500, or the NDX, or the Dow), the basis is slightly more complicated. Not only do you have to calculate the cost of carry—which is usually determined by risk free interest rates and the stock loan market for the underlying securities—but you also have to take into account the dividends that the underlying stocks pay out. Remember, futures don’t pay dividends, but stocks do. At Lehman Brothers, we had a guy whose sole job was to construct and maintain a dividend prediction model for the S&P 500.

So far, so good. However, one of the first things I learned about on the index arbitrage desk was EFP, which stands for Exchange for Physical—a corner of the market almost nobody knows about.

Basically, we could take a futures position and exchange it for a stock position at an agreed-upon basis with another bank or broker. Interdealer brokers helped arrange these EFP trades. The reason so few people know about them is probably because, historically, the EFP market has been very sleepy. The most it would usually move in a day was 15 or 20 cents in the index, or in interest rate terms, a few basis points.

Now it is moving several dollars at a time.

A Basis Gone Berserk

Back when I was doing this about ten-plus years ago, we had a balance sheet of about $8 billion, which is to say that we carried a hedged position of stocks versus S&P 500 futures (also Russell 2000 futures, NASDAQ futures, etc.).

We did this for a few reasons. One, it was profitable to do so—the basis often traded rich so that by selling futures and buying stock and holding the position until expiration, we would make money. Also, by carrying this long stock inventory, we were able to offset short positions elsewhere in the firm and reduce the firm’s cost of funds. At Lehman and most other Wall Street firms, index arbitrage was a joint venture with equity finance.

During the tech bubble in 1999, the basis got very, very rich because money was plowing into mutual funds and managers were being forced to hold futures for a period of time until they were able to pick individual stocks.

During the bear market in 2008, the basis traded very cheap, up until very recently, because inflows into equity mutual funds were weak, and index arbitrage desks were willing to accept less profit on their balance sheet positions.

But now, the basis has gone nuts.

It always goes a little nuts toward year-end because banks try to take down positions to improve the optics of their accounting ratios. If you have fewer assets, your return on assets looks better. So when banks try to get rid of stock inventory into year-end, they buy futures and sell stock, pushing up the basis.

But now it has skyrocketed, and the cause seems to be the effects of regulation.

We’ve talked about this before, in reference to corporate bonds. Banks aren’t keeping a lot of inventory anymore, because there’s no money in it. The culprits here are a combination of Dodd-Frank and Basel III. There are all kinds of unintended consequences, and the EFP market going nuts is probably the least of it.

But even that is a big one. Basically, it has introduced significant costs (about 1.5% annually) to the holder of a long futures position, which includes everyone from indexers all the way down to retail investors. These are the sorts of things that don’t get talked about in congressional hearings. Did XYZ law work? Sure it worked. But now it costs you 1.5% a year to hold S&P 500 futures and roll them, and you can’t get a bid for more than $2 million in a liquid corporate bond issue.

It’s All About Liquidity

The liquidity issue is the biggest one, and the one I harp on all the time. Pre Dodd-Frank, the major investment banks were giant pools of liquidity. You wanted to do a block trade of 20 million shares? No problem. You wanted to trade $250 million of double-old tens? It could be done.

Not anymore. Liquidity has diminished in just about every asset class, from FX to equities to rates to corporates, because compliance costs have gone up and it’s expensive to hold more capital against these positions. Someday, someone might take up the slack, like second-tier brokers or even hedge funds.
But here’s the biggest consequence of the equity finance market blowing up: High-frequency trading (HFT) firms that aren’t self-clearing now find it difficult to trade profitably and stay in business. With fewer of them around, we will finally get an answer to the question whether they add to liquidity or not.

So if you talk to an index arbitrage trader about what is going on with the EFP market, he can tell you precisely why it is screwed up. It’s an open secret on Wall Street. Introduce a regulation over here, an unintended consequence pops up over there. Then there are more regulations to deal with the unintended consequences. Regulations have added 100 times the volatility to one of the most liquid and ordinary derivatives in the world—the plain vanilla EFP.

Less liquidity, more volatility—welcome to 2015.

Jared Dillian

The article The 10th Man: EFPs and The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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