Archegos: Difference between revisions

2,510 bytes added ,  9 August 2021
no edit summary
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 57: Line 57:


===Concerns about Archegos===
===Concerns about Archegos===
*'''Trustworthiness''': Between 2012 and 2014 [[Bill Huang]] and his Tiger Asia fund was convicted of wire fraud, settled charges of [[insider trading]], and was banned from the Hong Kong securities industry for four years. Huang was only able to continue by returning all outside capital to its investors and “rebranding” as a family office exclusively running Huang’s own (and, well, his prime brokers’) money.
What emphasis should you place on a record of misfeasance and bad management? A lot, you would think. [[All other things being equal]], treat more carefully those who have proved themselves cavalier with legal boundaries than those who have not. (Though, ''pace'' [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]]: “he who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.”)<ref>''[[Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder]]''... but only because you ''know'' him to be a potential sinner; she who is entirely without sin ''may'' be a saint, or it may just be she hasn’t sinned — or been caught — ''yet''.</ref>
 
Archegos had plenty of form for misfeasance — outright criminality, in fact — and mismanagement. and guess what: the two were potentially related.
 
==== Misfeasance ====
Between 2012 and 2014 Archegos’ principal was convicted of wire fraud, settled charges of [[insider trading]], and was banned from the Hong Kong securities industry, and was only able to continue to trade by returning all outside capital and “rebranding” as a [[family office]].
{{Quote|''The SEC alleges that Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang, the founder and portfolio manager of Tiger Asia Management and Tiger Asia Partners, committed insider trading by short selling three Chinese bank stocks based on confidential information they received in private placement offerings. Hwang and his advisory firms then covered the short positions with private placement shares purchased at a significant discount to the stocks’ market price. They separately attempted to manipulate the prices of publicly traded Chinese bank stocks in which Hwang’s hedge funds had substantial short positions by placing losing trades in an attempt to lower the price of the stocks and increase the value of the short positions. This enabled Hwang and Tiger Asia Management to illicitly collect higher management fees from investors.''
:—SEC press release, 12 December 1012 <ref>https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2012-2012-264htm</ref>}}
 
==== Mismanagement ====
And nor was Archegos’ performance through time anything to crow about:
{| class="wikitable"
|+Archegos Total NAV through time
!Date
!NAV (Billions)
|-
|2012
|0.5
|-
|2013
|0.95
|-
|2014
|1.9
|-
|2015
|2.0
|-
|2016
|3.7
|-
|2017
|1.2
|-
|2018
|4.7
|-
|2019
|2.65
|-
|February 2020
|3.5
|-
|April 2020
|2.0
|-
|March 2020
|1.5
|-
|December 2020
|6.0
|-
|January 2021
|8.1
|-
|March 8 2021
|16.0
|-
|March 24 2021
|20.00
|}
[[File:Archegos NAV to 2020.png|alt=Archegos NAV 2012-2020|left|thumb|Archegos’ performance between 2012 and 2020 was ''all over the shop''...]]
[[File:Archegos NAV to armageddon.png|left|thumb|... and then it got ''worse''.]]
Insider trading
 
 
Not that any of this stopped the CS Risk team portraying Archegos to its own reputational risk committee as a client with “strong market performance” and “[[best in class]]”  infrastructure and compliance.
*'''Skill''':  Over the 10 years between the insider trading debacle and the final collapse, Archegos suffered multiple massive drawdowns. Extreme volatility which sounds like Huang had no real skill as a money manager, and was rather riding around like a child holding a firehose of leverage.
*'''Skill''':  Over the 10 years between the insider trading debacle and the final collapse, Archegos suffered multiple massive drawdowns. Extreme volatility which sounds like Huang had no real skill as a money manager, and was rather riding around like a child holding a firehose of leverage.
*'''Controls''': As early as 2012 the Credit team had identified Archegos’ [[key man]] risk (in Huang), volatility, mediocre operational management practices, fraud risk, and poor risk management as significant concerns.
*'''Controls''': As early as 2012 the Credit team had identified Archegos’ [[key man]] risk (in Huang), volatility, mediocre operational management practices, fraud risk, and poor risk management as significant concerns.