Date: Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Author: Andrew Waxman, Advanced Trading
The ongoing proliferation of insider trading cases at hedge
funds points to the need for more transparency into investment decisions and
trading processes. One way to stop the pattern is for hedge funds to form
internal control groups that scrutinize the links between investment themes and
material non-public information.
January 29, 2013 Insider trading was once again
center stage in 2012 with the by now usual raft of arrests, guilty pleas and
high profile trials. The trend has only continued in 2013 with the charging
of Matthew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager and the continuing swirl
of speculation and rumor surrounding SAC itself. The aggressive prosecution
of the crime, however, seems insufficient, leading to suggestions that more
could be done by the industry to manage the issue. But what? To paraphrase
Freud, understanding the problem, will go a long way towards solving it.
The infrastructure of insider trading industry is of course, by design,
opaque, since it deals in an illegal substance called inside information.
One can't be overly simplistic about this. Unlike drugs, for example, there
is some level of ambiguity that makes going after its traffickers somewhat
tricky: first, what exactly constitutes "material non-public information" (mnpi);
second, how to determine who is in possession of such information and,
third;how to identify those who are trading on it with the requisite intent
to do so. However, prosecutors have had considerable success in overcoming
these obstacles in recent years as they have adopted more aggressive
methods. Much of this success has been focused on two types of financial
service firms: expert networks, firms who provide consulting advice to
trading firms, and hedge funds.
The middlemen in the insider trading industry are the expert networks who
can (sometimes unknowingly) link the users (traders) to the suppliers
(industry executives, researchers - people with access to inside
information). The operation is financed by the users who are willing to pay
good rates for the information. The industry is global in its scope. Many of
the cases that have been brought have turned on evidence that expert
networks provided mnpi to their clients.
Second, as with the drug industry, the inside information industry would
not exist without the demand of the users. So who are these users? It would
appear, given the number of hedge fund managers charged in recent years,
that some hedge fund managers are very significant dealers and users of
inside information. Cases in the last three or so years have brought down
several major and well-established multi-billion dollar funds, including:
Front Point Partners, Galleon Group, Diamondback Capital Management, and New
Castle Funds. So what is it about hedge funds that have given rise to this
trend?
Hedge funds have grown ever more ubiquitous as more and more traders from
large banks, frustrated with red tape and declining pay have left to set up
their own shops. These are typically aggressive types, quite different from
the portfolio managers of the more traditional and conservative asset
management industry. They tend to build very sleek and streamlined
organizations with very little infrastructure. It is not so unusual for a
young fund to have a billion dollars or more under management with
relatively few staff members in operations and a fairly junior "chief
financial officer" (cfo) or controller. In some cases hedge funds may take
on an experienced CFO to help set up the infrastructure and systems, only to
replace him or her with a more junior, and lower paid person once that goal
has been achieved. In addition, compliance may be outsourced and there is
likely no independent risk management function or investment committee to
speak of.
The weakness of the leadership structure on the control side of the house would
be fine of course if all hedge fund managers had the talents and ethics of a
Warren Buffet. With this many hedge fund managers, however, not everyone is
going to be and sometimes those who fall short may be tempted to enhance
performance by cheating. Weak control functions make them all the more likely to
succeed in doing so. Raising the bar in this area would, it is true, raise the
cost of entry into the industry. However, while that might penalize a little,
the great and the good, it would also more importantly serve to filter out the
bad and the ugly.
So how can the bar be raised? The push seems most likely to come from
investors. For a start, one area of focus should be on ensuring greater
transparency into funds' investment decision and trading processes. How about,
for instance, requiring discussion and then registration of any potentially
“material non-public information” (mnpi) with a control group internal to the
fund and independent of the trading team? Such a group of course already occurs
at investment banks to a sophisticated level and at some of the more firmly
established hedge funds. Investments and trades can then be cross-checked
against the “mnpi registry”. Additionally, information upon which an investment
thesis has been based could be reviewed by control and compliance functions. If
the thesis is found to be based, in part, on “mnpi”, then the proposed
investments or transactions would be pulled.
Additionally, like at investment banks, an independent compliance function
should be surveilling market events and cross-checking in an automated fashion
(after the fact) for any trades ahead of those events. This type of control is
absolutely standard in investment banks and it should be so also at hedge funds
and other asset managers. The experience of a friend of mine illustrates the
potential value of such an approach, difficult as it would be to implement
effectively. He is the CFO of hedge funds, one of the most experienced on the
Street but found himself on the receiving end twice of portfolio managers who
did not provide sufficient transparency into the investment process. The first
time, as CFO of a credit fund, he did not have full transparency into the extent
of sub-prime investments in the portfolio. The second time, as CFO of an
equities fund, he was not provided with information regarding the nature of the
data upon which investments and trades were being made, some of which was later
alleged (with ultimately a guilty conviction for several of the portfolio team)
by federal prosecutors to be based on “inside information”. The CFO was
blind-sided in both cases in part because he was, in effect, treated not as an
investment partner but as back-office. Had he been fully brought into the
investment process, with much greater transparency, he may have been able to
help avert the crises that overtook the funds in both cases. In other words,
portfolio managers require supervision but very rarely do they get it or accept
it.
[Re-Thinking Operational Risk
on Wall Street]
The foregoing examples illustrates that there is a heavy unseen cost to
insider trading which is borne, when firms close, by hard working and innocent
folks in support functions. Ultimately, it will become harder to attract and
retain talent into infrastructure roles in hedge funds if the risks are seen as
being too great. The problem of insider trading then needs to be addressed
head-on by the hedge fund community. It appears that the low-cost infrastructure
and structural inadequacies of hedge funds is the most pressing to address.
However, we will also look, in a follow-up column, at what the middlemen and
suppliers in the chain can do to strengthen their controls and culture against
the issue.