More on the Credit Crunch

Hopefully, all of you have read my last blog post -- Credit Derivatives Meltdown & Book Review of 'Traders, Guns & Money' (Aug. 16, 2007). In that blog post (among other things), I outline a major factor in the credit crisis and market fall that is being ignored (or misunderstood) by most commentators -- credit derivatives.

I found several articles in the most recent New York Times that relate to the current crisis in the credit and real estate markets (and their knock-on effects to the financial markets in general). I don't think they get to the heart of the matter (credit derivatives), but they do talk about issues that are nonetheless important to any attempted explanation of what is going on now.

Drop Foreseen in Median Price of U.S. Homes by David Leonhardt and Vikas Bajaj (Aug. 26, 2007) : In the last few years, almost every real estate 'expert' dismissed the idea of a nationwide decline in housing prices across the U.S. Guess what? ... It's happening!

Inside the Countrywide Lending Spree by Gretchen Morgenson (Aug. 26, 2007): With many mortgage banks/lenders at deaths door (either closing down or dramatically reducing their mortgage lending operations), Countrywide's recent bailout from other banks ($11.5 billion credit line had to be drawn down 2 weeks ago and Bank of America recently took a 16% stake in Countrywide for $2 billion) is emblematic of the recent crisis in the credit and real estate markets.

A Psychology Lesson From the Markets by Robert J. Shiller (Aug. 26, 2007): Yale financial economist and author of Irrational Exuberance comments on what is happening in the most recent market crisis.

Will the Credit Crisis End the Activists’ Run? by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Aug. 26, 2007): Speculates that credit crisis will reduce the ammunition needed by activist hedge funds to ply their trade.

Just How Contagious Is That Hedge Fund? by Mark Hulbert (Aug. 26, 2007): Hulbert cites research by 3 financial economists (the most prominent being Rene Stulz of Ohio State University) arguing that hedge fund strategies may be correlated with each other. This is flies in the face of hedge funds' advertised goals of using strategies that are unique and distinct from one another. What this means is that if the strategies of a few hedge funds fail, then there is a good chance that others will fail as well. To some extent, we are seeing some of this with the credit derivatives bets made by some hedge funds.

Timber! Money Can Grow on Trees

A few years ago, I came across an alternative asset class that institutional investors -- especially university endowments -- that struck me as being really out-of-the-box: timberland. At the time, I asked myself, "Why are sophisticated investors investing in trees and forests?"

A recent New York Times article, For Some Investors, Money Grows on Trees (May 27, 2007), answered many of the questions I had about this alternative investment. In a nutshell, investors are counting on revenues from sales of timberland products to lumber, paper, and other companies, along with potential gains from the underlying real estate. Rather than investing in individual lots (which would make little sense for large institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments), investors invest through TIMOs (timber investment management organizations) and timber REITs (real estate investment trusts).

Historically, investing in timber has done well. An index of returns on timberland investments since 1986 (when the index was created) to the first quarter of this year rose at an annualized rate of 15.09%. In the last three years, the return was 14.63%, which is higher than the returns on the S&P 500 over that period (12.25%).

The most appealing aspect of this asset class is that it has had low correlation with the performance of stocks and bonds. 'Low correlation' is important to risk management under conventional financial economics portfolio theory. I should note that that I am usually highly skeptical and suspicious of claims of 'low correlation' between asset classes and markets since 'correlations' are (a) dynamic, and (b) there might be less obvious links between investments that simple measures of correlation don't pick up. However, in this case, this idea does seem to pan out at this point in time.

Note: The best books I'm aware of dealing with the role that alternative assets can play in managing an investment portfolio are the two books written (thus far) by David Swensen. I'm not sure if Yale's endowment invests in timberland, but I would be shocked if they didn't. I am aware of other university endowments that do invest in timberland, e.g., Caltech.

The Foresight Saga Revisited (or How Much Money Can You Make If You Had Perfect Foresight?)

So what is the 'Foresight Saga'? The Foresight Saga was a gedanken (i.e., thought experiment) conducted by The Economist magazine in its fin de siecle (1999) Christmas issue. The Economist magazine created an imaginary character named 'Felicity Foresight' who was able to perfectly predict the performance of financial markets -- across different asset classes and across borders -- for each and every upcoming year from January 1st 1900 onwards.

Starting with an initial investment of $1 in January 1st 1900 (and by reinvesting any dividends and/or interest income in the coming years), Felicity Foresight would decide at the beginning of each year which investment would bring the highest return (capital gain plus income) for that year and put all her wealth into that single asset. She would repeat this process year after year, shifting her funds to match her new forecast for each and every year starting from the year 1900.

How did Felicity do? By January 1st 2000, she managed to turn $1 into $1.3 quadrillion even after deducting transaction costs and taxes. Compared to the $9,000 she would have earned had the $1 been invested in a broad collection of American stocks, Felicity Foresight's performance is truly staggering! The last time The Economist checked in on Ms. Foresight (January 2, 2003), her investment acumen more than doubled her portfolio (to $2.7 quadrillion). [Note: All figures in this paragraph are the revised figures from the 2003 article, and not from the original 1999 article.]

In addition to Felicity Foresight, the Foresight Saga also included two ancillary characters (and potential suitors) -- Henry Hindsight and Charlie Contrarian -- that added zest to this tale of predictive perfection. Unlike Felicity, neither Henry nor Charlie were able to perfectly foretell the future direction of financial markets.

Henry Hindsight follows the same investment process that Felicity does with one major exception: Henry invests in the previous year's best performing asset. In other words, Henry Hindsight is like most investors, following 'fashions' and 'trends.' Henry's initial $1 invested at the beginning of 1900 would have only grown to $783 -- much less than either Felicity's portfolio or investing in a broad index of American shares.

Charlie Contrarian, on the other hand, invested in the previous year's worst performing asset (apparently believing in a sort of 'mean reversion'). Charlie did somewhat better than Henry -- turning his $1 into $1,730 in a century of investing -- but not as well as either Felicity or a broad index of U.S. equity.

The following chart lists the investment choices that Felicity Foresight made over the last century (you can click on the image to enlarge it).


Needless to say, no one has perfect foresight. So inventing 'Felicity Foresight' may, at first blush, seem a rather pointless exercise. However, I believe that we can learn a great deal from gedankens / empirical studies like the Foresight Saga.

One of the things we can learn from this thought experiment is that financial experts often underestimate the effects of taxes and transaction costs. If Felicity's porfolio had been constructed without those costs, it would have grown to $27.5 quintillion; i.e., 99.99% of potential investment wealth was eliminated by transaction costs and taxes (along with effects of compounding). Many experts tend to think of these kinds of costs to be negligible and readily dismiss them, but this extreme example demonstrates that investment costs can add up -- or, more precisely, compound -- to a sizable amount in the long run.

Another valuable lesson that can be learned from this seemingly fanciful tale is that there has been a fundamental change in the ability to achieve investment performance over the last decade and a half. Until the early 1990s, both Henry Hindsight's and Charlie Contrarian's strategies -- which are the typical strategies used by most investors -- would have led to respectable gains. Since then (or at least until the early 2000s), these strategies would have been less successful and, up until the year 2000 or so, would have led to substantial losses.

What is the nature of this 'fundamental change' over the last decade and a half or so? Could it be a more globalized financial market where poor performance in one part of the globe or in one asset class can reverberate much more readily than prior to the 1990s? Could it be that a more dynamic marketplace has shortened the time frame and/or reduced the opportunities where either of the two traditional investing strategies can profit?

One final lesson that can be learned from the Foresight Saga is that the creator(s) of the story have shown that they -- unlike Felicity, but like the rest of us -- lack perfect foresight. None of the installments of the Foresight Saga (the last one was in January 2003) foresaw with any detail what has happened since then and no one could have profited at the rate that Felicity did by what they could glean from her tale of investment success.

Despite the lack of useful predictions for the future, I do hope that The Economist revives the Foresight Sage in the near future because of the insight that this gedanken gives us about the past's future. What do I mean by the 'past's future'? What I mean by that is that we can use the Foresight Saga -- not as a way to give us perfect foresight (which it doesn't) -- but as a way to put ourselves in the proverbial shoes of those who in the past had been trying to make decisions based on uncertain projections of the future. In other words, we can evaluate the past's predictions about the future ... and see the frustrating nature of such attempts at prediction. For example, anyone who had predicted in 1939 (the eve of World War II) that, by the early 1940s (well into World War II), the French stockmarket would have over a 200% annualized return would have been dismissed as a lunatic ... yet it happened!

The Foresight Saga is more about hindsight than foresight ... gendankens and empirical studies like this one can place us back in time to see how those who came before us (or even ourselves in the distant past, if we are old enought) viewed their future ... and usually got it wrong! The most important lesson to learn from Felicity Foresight's amazing track record as an investor is how all of us, in reality, lack such consistently perfect foresight about our future.

Air Out of the Real Estate Bubble?

With each passing day, there seem to be more and more signs that the air is coming out of the real estate bubble in the U.S. News of layoffs at mortgage lenders and investigations of some mortgage lenders seem to be consistent with the popping of a bubble. Most of the economic data and trends related to real estate are also consistent with a downturn in real estate. The Economist magazine has an article (March 22, 2007) analyzing the rise in foreclosures and the downward direction of the real esate market.