Hedge Fund Stars Have to Learn to Take ‘No’ for an Answer
Chief risk officers were unable to prevent investment banks from going bang a decade ago. Let’s hope their hedge fund counterparts have learned the lesson.
Staying alive.
Photographer: Patrick Riviere/Getty Images
With the coronavirus pandemic triggering wild price swings, hedge funds have got their dancing shoes on as they seek to make the most of volatile values and atone for their underperformance in recent years. While the temptation is for traders to load up on risk to boost profits and bonuses, strutting their stuff like drunken uncles at a particularly raucous wedding, a couple of recent blowups suggest that the risk managers charged with curbing those enthusiasms need to stand firm in setting and abiding by risk limits.
At Graham Capital Management, which oversees about $15 billion and specializes in global macro, a portfolio manager called Jeremy Wien lost a ton of money speculating on equity volatility, a measure of how much share prices move that in March quadrupled in the space of a few short weeks. The scale of the loss — $500 million gone from a $4 billion absolute return fund, according to my colleagues at Bloomberg News — suggests the U.S. firm didn’t step in quickly enough to stanch the bloodletting once the cracks in the position started to appear.