Hedge-Fund Growth and Tax Arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

Hedge-Fund Growth and Tax Arbitrage

bloomberg.com

94 pointschollida119 comments

Matt Levine's first point here is very interesting as a lens for understanding why so many large hedge funds seem to have difficulty beating the market, while the ones that do tend to be either smaller operations or more independent groups within the giants.

If you look at the best firms in the world, like RenTec or TGS, you see a trend where they typically stop taking in outside capital and effectively convert to family offices (at least for the most profitable strategies). Levine's point here is particularly applicable to RenTec; it has famously incredible returns via Medallion, but not so much the other funds. Unsurprisingly, the Medallion fund is entirely employee and owner capital.

As extremely profitable strategies scale up to their capacity constraints, fund managers naturally decide to pool greater amounts of their own capital into the firm. Therefore, "skin in the game" is not only effective as an intuitive heuristic for skill ("this manager believes in the fund enough to put most of their personal net worth into it"), but it's also practically effective for showing how likely the firm is to perform based on how much you're able to participate.

As the percentage of "skin in the game" increases, the likelihood of outside investors being able to participate decreases, because the fund managers know they no longer need to share risk, and don't want to waste allocations on the way to capacity constraints. If a firm is soliciting capital, it's highly suspect, and managers who go on to become the next Jim Simons or Seth Klarman will mostly be "on the market" for relatively short periods of time.

Based on my personal experience trading and back testing quantitative systems, the more money you have the harder is to find alpha in the markets, for example I have one system good for up to 1 - 2M which generates me double digits yearly returns, but above that my next system for up to 10M will do only a single, up to lover double digit return (trading the stock market only, because I don't have the data to test Forex or Futures). It's all about the volume and slippage... Just can't imagine how to trade with billions without ending up owning some company by mistake :-)

What books do you recommend to get started with automated trading? :)

Interesting! Probably the most consistent top performer of the large hedge funds is the quant fund Renaissance and it's 100% I think employee/owner-funded at this point.

I hope fans will forgive me for saying this, but Matt Levine's newsletter is kind of incoherent and not relevant to the HN audience. It never has much of a focus, and it's only rarely about tech. If you like this kind of newsletter, just subscribe to it: http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s....

Kindly avoid posting it to HN every day. Post the articles Levine links to instead, if you must.

What do you mean by incoherent?

I expect to read technology articles here, not the unfocused thoughts of a finance columnist on 5+ different topics.

It's not much different than reading 5 separate non-tech posts on HN.

That individually would never have made it to the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I think it's the unfocused thoughts on a range of different topics that's the problem.

I don't mind reading about non tech things. Rambling musings on the other hand don't really do it for me.

Then please adjust your expectation.

It's not in line with the officially stated purpose of this site, nor with the regulars' expectations.

Not the original commenter, but I was also thrown a bit by the structure of the blog post. Most items posted on HN are on a single topic, and I didn't realize going into this item that I was dropping into a multi-topic finance newsletter.

Based on the title, I was expecting a single, unitary article that was about hedge fund size and tax arbitrage. It took a while for me to realize this was not the case.

I'm surprised by your assessment of Matt Levine. He has great insight into the world of finance and has shed light on many complicated issues (for example this great article about Dell going private: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-01/michael-d... ). And HN isn't just about tech - finance has been a topic of many discussions here.

I loved that article, but the difference in quality/relevance between it and the newsletter is night and day.

What exactly was the quality difference?

> it's only rarely about tech

That's not really relevant. If it's interesting and a good discussion results, then it's appropriate for this audience. We discuss archaeology here. I'm sure tax discussion and items about the the financial industry aren't too far afield.

> Kindly avoid posting it to HN every day.

It will be voted up if people think it's worth it, and not voted up or flagged if people think it isn't. We have an accepted mechanism for figuring out what deserves the attention of HN readers. When the site admins think it isn't working to the degree they like for a submission, they make spot adjustments to that submission.

Calling out Levine as not being a good source is fine though, as long as you back it up.

incoherent? it's several vignettes broken up by heading - it's not trying to be coherent (each vignette is definitely coherent internally though (

Only a small fraction of Levine's posts make it to the front page, and a fraction of those have any staying power. Levine posts are a rare case where the HN system mostly works as intended. People should keep posting them when they like them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com