When variation margin attacks

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BLACKADDER: Look, there’s no need to panic. Someone in the crew will know how to steer this thing.
CAPTAIN RUM: The crew, milord? What crew?
BLACKADDER: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.
CAPTAIN RUM: Opinion is divided on the subject.
BLACKADDER: Oh, really?
RUM: Yes. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn’t.

—Blackadder, Series 2: Potato

Any of the standard reference works will tell you that variation margin is a good thing, apt for ridding the world of the kinds of systemic risk that have the habit of building up in the financial system.

Since, like Captain Redbeard Rum, your loyal contrarian is going to run against what all the other captains will tell, you, let me set the scene with a story.

Once upon a time in America

Shares of ViacomCBS closed down 9% Tuesday, a day after the company said it would raise $3 billion from stock offerings. The stock offerings come just a few weeks after the company launched its Paramount+ streaming service, and the offerings will help the company bulk up its content. ViacomCBS said it would use the funds to power “investments in streaming,” among other general corporate purposes.

—CNBC, March 23, 2021

In the months leading up to March 2021, Archegos Capital Management took synthetic positions on margin on a handful of comparatively illiquid stocks — ViacomCBS, Tencent Music, Baidu and Vipshop — in sizes that, across multiple prime brokers, were big enough to move the market sharply up. As the stocks appreciated, so did Archegos’ profit, and thus the net equity it held with its prime brokers. Archegos used that net equity to double down, buying the same stocks, pushing them up yet further. The higher they went, the thinner their trading volume, and the more of the market Archegos represented.

Now, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but really there was only one way this was ever going to turn out.

On 22 March, Archegos’ position in Viacom had a gross market value of US$5.1bn. In a cruel irony, Viacom interpreted this to mean market sentiment was so strong that it should take the opportunity to raise capital. Alas, no one was buying. Not even Archegos, since it was tapped out of equity with its prime brokers.

Viacom’s capital raising therefore failed, and all hell broke loose.

Now here is an interesting thing. Because Archegos gained their market exposure using swaps, by regulation, their brokers were obliged to pay the value of their net equity to them, every day, in the form of variation margin. To be sure, the broker usually pays VM into an account it runs for its client. There are withdrawal thresholds that apply to that account that takes into account required initial margin — oh, that’s another story altogether — but over those thresholds all the variation margin is the client’s money, available to be withdrawn on request.

This is completely normal in the world of latter-day derivatives: mandatory two-way exchange of variation margin was implemented by regulation in pretty much every major market in the name of reducing systemic risk — but all the same, it is utterly weird. It is like forced lending against asset appreciation. Imagine if your bank, by law, had to pay you the cash value of any increase in your home’s value over the life of your mortgage.

This is very different from cash margin lending. Had Archegos put the equivalent physical positions on, using margin loans, its brokers would not have had to advance it the cash value of its net equity. They may well have willingly done so, of course – that is how prime brokers make their money after all, but being able to lend money, and being obliged to lend money are quite different propositions on that special day when it seems the world is going to hell.

A dissonance

So there is this dissonance, between physical prime brokerage, where advancing cash against net equity is at the broker’s discretion — oh, sure, you have withdraw your equity at any time, but you have to take it in kind — and synthetic prime brokerage, where cash payment is required by regulation. It is inevitable for clients and their advisors to ask, “well, if I can withdraw my equity value in cash under a swap, why can’t I have it in cash for my physical portfolio under a margin loan?”

On its face, this is a fair question, to which the answer is either: “Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I suppose you are right” — call this the all other captains argument; or: “Well that just goes to show what a misconceived idea compulsory two-way variation margin is” — call this the Captain Redbeard Rum argument.

“Come on, JC: I know you are a cranky old bugger. But do you really mean to say you are going to swim against the tide of all that consensus?”

WHY NOT, my friends, WHY NOT?

Now, if someone would kindly hold my beer:

Banking, in the good old days

In the good old days — in the time of the Children of the Forest, before the First Men — the overall vibe of the financial system was circumspect, self-imposed prudence: institutions staffed by Captain Mainwaring-types providing stodgy, unflamboyant facilities and services to clients who were grateful to be offered them, and who would produce whatever sureties their banks required to advance their resources.

The idea here is to set up an idea of a financial services industry with two types of participant: intermediaries and customers. We have waxed elsewhere about the countless ways enterprising individuals can contrive to interpose themselves into a process that oughtn’t to need that much intermediating, but let us, for today’s outing, take it as we find it.

Intermediaries

There are various types of intermediary in the market: the market infrastructure: stock exchanges, clearing systems, securities depositories and so on; then those agents who earn only a commission from their involvement, and take no principal risk at all: cash brokers, investment managers, clearers, market-makers and intermediate brokers; and then there are those who do take principal risk, but only by lending to customers, and again don’t participate in the upside or downside of the investments they are financing: banks. In all cases the thing they have in common is that their financial return is not linked the performance of the instruments in which they are dealing.

Customer contracts with intermediaries were a one-way affair: since intermediaries were providing services and resources — lending money, handling brokerage orders and so on — legal covenants went one way only.

Inter-dealer relationships

Of course, intermediaries must interact with each other, providing each other liquidity, market access, custody, foreign exchange, hedging and short term funding. These interbank relationships tend to be wide and many-faceted and the terms documenting them tended to be short to non-existent, and bilateral.

Customers

Customers are those who do have skin in the game: they take all the benefits — less the fees, commissions and financing costs of their intermediaries — and absorb all the losses of their investments. They may be institutional (pension funds, investment funds, multinationals) or retail (private investors) and while the range of investment products they can invest in will depend on their sophistication and financial resources, they are not subject to any kind of prudential regulation. They can, and do, blow up. More speculative investment vehicles may be highly geared and quite likely to blow up.

Up until the early 1980s, this was all quite well settled, but innovations in the market, technology and regulation began to change things.

The times they are a-changing

The multi-coloured swap shop

The history of swaps is interesting and fairly well-documented. It all started in earnest in 1981, with a bright idea Salomon Brothers had to match up IBM, who needed U.S. dollars but had a load of Swiss francs and Deutschmarks, with the World Bank, which had all the dollars anyone could need but needed to meet obligations in CHF and DEM which it wasn’t able to borrow. The two institutions “swapped” their debts, exchanging dollars for the European currencies and paying coupons on them, with an agreement to return the the same values of the respective currencies at maturity.

Everyone else recognised this to be a cool idea, and before you know it, swaps trading was a trillion dollar industry. Okay; this took a bit of time, but in the geological history of finance from the time of Hammurabi, it was the blink of an eye. But anyway, note a few things:

Unlike traditional banking activity, swaps were bilateral. In one sense, both parties were lending to each other — hence they were not just parties, but “counterparties”. In another sense, neither was: as long as you could offset the swapped loans at inception a swap trade was market neutral.

But a swap trade does not stay market neutral. Its mark-to-market value will change, and can swing around. Depending on how the cross-rates move, either party can be owed money. Hence the concept of “moneyness”: either party could be in-the-money or out-of-the-money.

This was quite a different thing, and it really challenged the regulatory philosophy of financial services regulation. Until now, there had always been an intermediary and a customer, and you always knew who was who: the intermediary was authorised, regulated to provide its services and appropriately capitalised to protect the customer; the customer didn’t need to be regulated as it the intermediary could obviously look after itself.

The evolution of swaps challenged that: now either party could be creditor or debtor. It was hard to know who to regulate. Who needed protecting from whom? Did they both have to be regulated? Or neither? For the first couple of decades, the regulatory answer was basically “neither”.

Intermediaries, redux

So, the clarity about who was an intermediary broke down a little. Swaps were a financial product in which there did not necessarily need to be an intermediary at all: the very first swap, between IBM and the World Bank, was effectively a transaction between two customers, in that each took principal risk to the transaction. And there is an entire realm of swap trades between intermediaries, where neither side is a “customer” as such.

But the huge preponderance of swap volume is between an intermediary — a “swap dealer” — and a customer — indelicately described as an “end-user”. So are swap dealers intermediaries in the traditional sense, having no “skin in the game”? In one sense, no: being a principal to the swap contract, the dealer takes the other side of the trade to its customer, and is fully exposed to the underlier’s performance. But in another sense, it is an intermediary: swap dealers generally delta-hedge their risk. In many cases are prohibited by regulation from taking proprietary positions. In the classic case of equity swaps, the dealer executes a physical trade in the cash market, holds or finances that position, and prices its swap at exactly that price. It has no net exposure to the trade at all. Economically, it is no different from a broker lending on margin.

Deregulation and electronic trading

At about the same time computer-based trading began to revolutionising the financial markets and the madcap spirit of 1980s free-love laissez-faire delivered their radical deregulation. It is not unreasonable to suppose these conditions contributed to an explosion in the market for OTC swaps during the 1980s.

Risk management under the ISDA

It did not take long for folks to realise that these new swap things presented a whole new class of risks.

Swaps provide “unfunded” financial exposure to assets: you don’t own the assets, much less pay for them: you don’t have to put any money down up front at all. This is, economically, the same as betting. Given the size of individual swap transactions — typically in the millions of dollars — your total notional exposure can quickly blow out of all proportion. The market hit upon two neat tricks to manage these risks: netting and credit support.

Netting

We are not really concerned with netting here — the JC has plenty to say on that topic elsewhere — so let’s quickly deal with it: just as you could offset the present value of the opposing legs of each swap to calculate a positive or negative mark-to-market value for that swap, so too could you offset positive and negative mark-to-market values for different swaps to arrive at a single net exposure for your whole ISDA Master Agreement. This idea — close-out netting — was a stroke of genius, and the brave commandos of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ encoded this “single agreement” concept into the 1987 ISDA and its successors.

Credit support

But even with netting, the highly levered nature of swap transactions meant that one’s overall net exposure could swing around wildly.

A solution arrived a decade or so after swap trading started in earnest. In 1994 ISDA released a “credit support annex” to the ISDA Master Agreement under which the parties could exchange “credit support” to each other to offset their prevailing exposures to each other. This is all rather complicated and fiddly but the gist of it was that you could calculate your net exposure to your counterparty on any day and, if it was over an agreed threshold, you could require your counterparty “post” cash, bonds or liquid securities to you as collateral for that exposure. If the exposure swung back, the counterparty could require you to return those assets tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.

Like the ISDA Master Agreement, the CSA is a bilateral document: it assumes the parties are equal, arm’s-length counterparties and that each can post to the other. In the early days, swap dealers often adjusted their CSAs so that only the customer posted credit support. Over this period, the Basel Accords published increasingly stringent and detailed rules about how much capital banks should hold against their trading exposures to their customers. If at first customers were less bothered about the creditworthiness of their swap dealers, this all changed, fast, during the 2008 financial crisis in which every major dealer had at least a near-death experience, if not an actual one.

Suddenly the dealers, themselves, were a source of systemic risk. The regulatory reform machine moved into overdrive; the era of unregulated derivatives was over. Regulators the world over began requiring all swap counterparties to collect variation margin on all common forms of swap contract: bilateral, daily, and in cash.

Remember the good old days

Now remember that old distinction between intermediary and customer. Intermediaries are meant to be well-capitalised; they don’t have a dog in the fight: their interest is just in collecting their commission. Their customers take the market risks.

Swap dealers look like they are taking market risks, but they are not. Post Volcker, they are not allowed to. Swap dealers are passing on the return of their hedging activity to their customers, and collecting commissions and interest on financing.

You can, and physical prime brokerage customers do, achieve exactly the same effect with a margin loan: the customer buys shares on margin; the prime broker holds the shares as collateral for the loan. If the shares decline in value, the broker may call for more margin. If the shares rise in value, the customer generates increased equity with the broker, but is not automatically entitled to the cash value of that equity. There is no variation margin, as such.

The prime broker may agree to lend more against that equity — that is the business it is in, after all — but it is not obliged to. The customer cannot force the broker to lend against the equity. As long as it leaves enough equity in the account the customer may withdraw excess equity, but only by taking the shares it owns. Withdrawing shares from a prime brokerage account doesn’t fundamentally change ones debtor/creditor relationship. Withdrawing cash against shares assuredly does.

Now: because a synthetic swap position looks like a bilateral derivative — okay, okay: is a bilateral derivative — it is regulated as such, and is in scope for mandatory variation margin. Both sides are obliged to post VM, every day, where they are out-of-the-money. Whenever a customer makes any positive return on an equity swap, its swap dealer is, technically, out-of-the-money, and must therefore post variation margin to the value of that positive return.

This is the equivalent of forcing the swap dealer to lend against equity on a margin loan. It is nuts. To see why it is nuts, let’s return to our old friends at Archegos.

When variation margin attacks

Swap trading involves market risk and credit risk.

Market risk is the risk that an asset in which you have invested goes up when you want it to go down, or down when you want it to go up. Credit risk is the risk that the person who has promised to pay you a return cannot, because that person is broke. Paying variation margin is meant to neutralise both: by squaring up every day, you reduce the market exposure to nil. If neither party owes anything on the trade, there is no credit risk.

The purple, blue, light blue and red lines are the key parts of Archegos’ portfolio between March 2020 and August 2021. The big drop is 21 March 2021.

But markets, like sharks, never stop moving. The assessment that “neither party owes anything on the trade” is good for the instant it is made. Things can change quickly. Generally the further something goes up, the quicker it comes down. Let’s have another look at that lovely Archegos chart: over 6 months from September these stocks rallied on average 54%. That is a lot of variation margin to be paying out the door. But in four days, between 22-26 March 2021, these stocks fell on average by 24%.

You generally have one risk or the other at any time: it is not much good having made a killing on the roulette table if the casino is bankrupt, because it cannot give you any money for your chips. If, on the other hand, you have already lost everything at the card table, it does not matter much if the casino is broke, because it didn’t owe you anything anyway.

Under a swap at any time, the out-of-the-money counterparty has market risk, because it is losing on the trade, and the in-the-money one has credit exposure, because it stands to lose if the other guy can’t pay out its profit. Variation margin addresses that credit exposure by requiring the out-of-the-money counterparty pays out variation margin equal to its moneyness, in full, every day even though the game is still going. If things get worse, you have to give some of the variation margin back. If you start losing, you have to pay variation margin to the house.

See also

• Variation margin

• Archegos
• Swap history