Brokers and hedge funds
In their prime
Jun 1st 2006
From The Economist print edition
Brokers, feeling squeezed, are scrambling to serve hedge funds
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LIFE has been unusually hectic in the past few weeks for brokers rushing to fill buy and sell orders as financial markets toss and turn. Oh, that it were always so. It may seem hard to believe amid the recent rise in market volatility, but for some time brokers have been lamenting a whole range of pressures on their traditional businesses—not just the lack of action. With commissions for each trade having been whittled down to a fraction of what they once were and regulators increasing their focus on what clients actually pay for, broking has begun to look like a business in decline.
That is why many big investment banks are now seeking to forge closer relations with hedge funds, one of the few successes in their brokerage operations. Hedge funds can be extremely volatile—at least $1 trillion is sloshing around—and have played a big part in the ups and downs of recent days. Yet it is hedge funds' trading style—complex, multi-asset strategies often driven by insomniac computer-trading models—that has made the investment banks so excited. Eager to serve such customers, most big banks have established “prime-brokerage” arms that offer hedge funds a range of services, including securities lending, leveraged-trade executions, cash management and even computer systems if they need it.
In a recent report Morgan Stanley reckoned that revenues from prime brokerage at big investment banks surged by 29% last year, to $5.2 billion. That is still small compared with overall revenues, but they are expected to jump another 25% this year. Using a broader definition, TABB Group, a consultancy, puts total spending on prime brokerage in America at $10 billion (see chart). It is a lucrative business: historically, banks have recouped returns on equity from their prime-brokerage units of more than 40%. “The dirty secret about prime brokerage is it's all about the lending margins,” says one investment banker.
Given the ties between hedge funds and banks, questions have arisen about how each has fared in the recent market sell-off. Although hedge funds can make money from volatility, some are thought to have lost in May half of the year's gains. Emerging-market and commodity funds have been hit hard. But many funds invested in stocks had a “net-long” bias—meaning they thought markets would go up: the pain has been widespread.
Analysts say some smaller hedge funds may go bust, particularly those exposed to emerging markets. But these may not be big enough to matter. Industry experts reckon 7-12% of hedge funds have anyway shut up shop each year over the past decade, so this year's crop of failures may simply have been harvested early.
What does all this mean for the prime brokers? In the past, regulators have been worried about the systemic risk of brokers' loans to hedge funds. However, the brokers themselves sound confident. The big banks say lending is fully backed by collateral and they are monitoring their risk by marking their outstanding exposures to market on at least a daily basis.
Thanks in part to past industry scandals, prime brokers say they have tightened their risk management. The ghost of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that went spectacularly bust in the late 1990s, still hovers over the industry. More recently, the minds of brokers, hedge funds and investors have been focused by scandals ranging from Bayou Management (a hedge fund caught in a web of alleged fraud) to Refco (where the prime-broking arm collapsed after an alleged fraud in a sister company).
One result of the collapse of Refco has been a “flight to quality” among hedge funds seeking the best investment banks. Those who can afford to are being choosy about who provides them credit, says Philippe Bonnefoy of Cedar Partners, a London investment firm.
Nonetheless, regulators and central banks are watching, alert to the risk of a big failure with potential ripple effects. Hedge funds are growing fast, but remain lightly regulated and often shift strategies, sell stock short and hold illiquid assets. Their growing use of derivatives quietly traded away from exchanges is also testing the appetite of prime brokers to lend, because they find it hard to price the business.
As some hedge funds have grown in size and sophistication, they have begun to ask more of prime brokers, says Huw van Steenis of Morgan Stanley. Big clients have the power to demand thinner margins. More professional fund managers know how to play banks off against each other. And when funds get big, they need more than one prime broker, so each broker gets only a share of the business. Today some big fund managers use six or more prime brokers, in the spirit of divide and rule.
Meanwhile forecasts suggest that the amount of assets managed by hedge funds will rise further, as institutional investors pour money into the funds. Although there is more business to go round, the battle among the brokers has also picked up.
In time, prime brokerages could face the sort of squeeze that has hurt broking in other markets. The old guard tells sorry stories of how the balance of power has tilted from intermediaries to their customers, as more financial products have become commodities and more information has been at investors' fingertips.
Caught between
Increasingly, middlemen throughout the financial sector have been asked to prove their worth to their customers—or to find other ways of making money for themselves, by proprietary trading or making more use of their balance sheets.
A recent study by IBM Business Consulting Services argues that the vocabulary describing financial markets today—buy side, sell side, hedge funds—could be redundant within a decade. It suggests that, in future, firms will be classed according to whether they add value through “risk assumption” or “risk mitigation”.
Although brokers in many assets are under pressure, equity brokers have been among the hardest hit, especially at “sell-side” firms. Twenty years ago, investors paid brokers six to ten cents per share for trading wrapped up with equity research; today they may pay only a cent or two. Brokers' costs have dropped too—but not as far as commissions have. In a sign of the times, America's Securities and Exchange Commission last month announced big fee cuts on securities transactions and registrations. Fees on securities trades will fall by half in the next fiscal year.
Life is harder in share trading, as elsewhere, because of regulators and technology (which provides direct access to the market, without the intermediation of brokers). One big change came years ago with the end of fixed commissions on trades. More recently, regulators in America and Britain have focused on how to manage and disclose commissions. The “unbundling” of broking services—separating the cost of research from the cost of trading—has come about in fits and starts. Fidelity, a big fund manager, has said that it will pay “hard dollars” for research from Lehman Brothers, separately from any trading commissions it pays the investment bank.
The pace of change could step up soon in Britain, where from this month the Financial Services Authority will require fund managers to report the costs of research and trading separately. This will free buy-side firms to trade with whomever they choose, without having to buy research. Commission-sharing arrangements are becoming more common.
“Everyone is rather nervous,” says Mr van Steenis. “Will it be a shock or a squeeze? Unbundling is making us wonder, ‘What will the future look like?'” Amid the uncertainty, he predicts financial firms will seek further growth in prime brokerage and proprietary trading as they try to replace lost revenues in more promising lines of business. And so they will continue to root for the hedge funds.