Travel and nuclear physics replace investment models

David Kovacs

New York (Reuters) – Put away the machines and bring  back the humans. Wall Street is setting aside its algorithms and  complex models and turning to experts for clues on how to make  money in an uncertain world, turned upside down by Japan’s  disaster and Middle East uprisings.

For at least one fund manager, that meant hiring a pair of  nuclear physicists.

David Kovacs

Turner Investment Partners, which oversees $16 billion in  assets, enlisted the two scientists to help fill the information  void when reports came out of radiation leaking from Japan’s  nuclear power plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

“We have them so as to ascertain the severity of the leakage  and the risks to other places like Hong Kong, which is 2,000  miles away,” said David Kovacs, Turner’s chief investment officer  who manages money for hedge funds and other investments.

For Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of PIMCO, the world’s  largest bond fund with $1.1 trillion under management, making  sense of the fast-changing geopolitical environment meant  traveling personally to the Gulf to learn first hand how people  see the situation and what it implies for the global economy and  markets.

Both fund managers were grasping for insight, trying to stay  half step ahead of a parade of seemingly contradictory headlines  and gain an edge that can pay off handsomely in today’s  lightning-paced markets.

Usually asset managers and hedge funds can use risk models to  help them navigate. But last week they were glued to the news  screens watching headlines and scrambling for reliable  information after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami of March 11  turned into a nuclear crisis.

Models didn’t work any more. The result was severe market and  investor stress. Volatility, a measure of fear and uncertainty,  leaped last week. The yen rose an eye-popping 8 percent in three  days before central banks intervened. Japan’s Nikkei index ended  the week down 10 percent and oil and global stocks see-sawed.

For many big money managers it meant placing very short-term  trades, for fear the world would change again on a dime.

George Soros, the legendary hedge fund manager, once said he  would rely on “animal instincts” — and a pain in his back — not  models, to tell him when something was wrong with his portfolio.

“The backache didn’t tell me what was wrong – you know, lower  back for short positions, left shoulder for currencies – but it  did prompt me to look for something amiss when I might not have  done so otherwise,” he said in his 1995 autobiography, “Soros on  Soros.”

“UNKNOWN UNKNOWN”

A wave of shocks the past decade has left Wall Street at times  rudderless — the Sept. 11. 20011, attacks, a credit crisis that  morphed into a banking crisis and sovereign debt crisis. In the  two and a half years since Lehman Bros collapsed, money managers  and hedge funds have sought a way to deal with such shocks.

For Kovacs, it was a question of developing models that take  into account what he calls the “unknown unknown.”

“We did not stop using the methodology of our investment  process, but we’ve changed the risk control concept such that it  reduces the negative impact associated with the unforeseen,” said  Kovacs.

In practice, says Kovacs, that means he has relied more on  derivatives to hedge over the last year and a half. “You have to  have some shock absorbers,” he said.

Peter Lee, chief technical strategist at UBS in New York,  describes a herd mentality where short-term hedge funds and high  frequency traders driven by technical targets gravitate towards  widely watched market levels, trying to catch a bounce.  “The news flow is all over the map,” said Lee.

“What normally happens off a geopolitical news sell-off is  you get down to an oversold condition and then you have these  short term, very-first-money traders or momentum traders coming  in trying to scalp this market.”

Investors shorten their time horizon after an unexpected  event because information loses context and it’s difficult to  measure the implications. Analyst revisions of earnings estimates  are sketchy at best and economic data is outdated.

“People lose their faith in these valuation measures because  they don’t know how valid they are anymore, and that’s when they  start to trade on more recent types of information,” said Ed  Peters, a partner at hedge fund FirstQuadrant in Pasadena,  California, where he helps oversee about $18 billion in assets  under management.

Reverting to outside experts like physicists is one way to  try to fill the information void.

Turner took the route of shorting stocks of uranium-related  companies including Cameco <CCO.TO>, which fell nearly 24 percent  to a six-month low during the week.

“We did not short the Nikkei, the yen or Japanese equities  because it just would be immoral,” Kovacs added.