Can hedge fund be managing by 2 people?

Can hedge fund be managing by 2 people? We will find out it. Today's evening i serfed hedge fund's websites. I found that a lot of great hedge fund's are using quantitive strategies the most. A lot of their employes are Ph.D. in mathematics, physics and they are even not competent in finance, economics. They are working with retrieval of data and even dont know from what assets data are. The bright example is Jim Simon's Renaissance fund. We have a strong trend in markets - they becoming more and more mathematical. We can found less and less psyhology their. Program trading prospers. Methods that were used in daytrading are not actual now coz market became hybrid. Now reading ribbon is not actual, prints a random, we cant find how NYSE specialist works. So less psyhology, more numbers. A lot of people will go out from trading in some years coz they cannot competite with programs. In hedge funds we can found so many analysts, mathematics, statisticans. They can work with so much data, to find large more ideas, to test more.. Ofcoz its costs big money to have this quality staff.. So to have this, hedge fund have to big really big sized. But is it possible to beat this groups of the smartest people with 2 people? I trust that we can. Having not so big capital we can concentrate all on few best ideas which can give us even better returns. Trust in God, trust in us :-) . Be with love ! :-)

Thoughts adding on standart deviation

Mistake here. Look to this
In last post i wrote that our portfolio standart deviation is 30% versus market 64%. In real - our standart deviation in large more lower. So our risks are minimal. As we have long/short strategy with full balance long/short side standart deviation from long compensates standart deviation on shorts and vice versa. Other factor that make our risks lower - stocks correllation with index. Our diversification efficient , as avarage correllation on our portfolio 47%.

Evaluation portfolio's investments ideas

Our portfolio is in small positive zone now, but we are rather confidence about its future nice perfomance. Saying that investment ideas on what portfolio is build now are working. We saw that our portfolio feeling much better on good trendive days where we can saw big changes in S&P. Until today we saw only 3-5 those days on June.
I want to acknowledge that we did some mistake with thin stock. This mistake are in risk managment area. We have some think stocks like DW, TECUA, VOXX. If we would have news on it which will push stock much , we will have big problems to cover our more than 1000 shares stakes if we will need it coz avarage trading volume on this stocks are somelike 100k , etc.

Interesting situation. Stock - WCG

I want to acknowledge that i am not experience stock daytrader. So this situation looks pretty interesting for me. Need to know what behavior to chose when we see something like this. Market in stong down trend, WCG too. I was looking to this stock as its in our portfolio with short position. Nothing special beofre 18-00 Kyiv time. After big down move volume sharply increased and we saw 25c up move. Hm..Sell? Not sure but lets suppose that we sold this for example @17.63. We know that this stock is weak fundamental, so why it will be attractive even intraday on this strong down trend? But if we were enetered @17.63 we should have stop loss , coz up move didnt stop. Ok. Lets look for some bearish candle and volume fading. At price 17.85 we saw something like this. Short again! But again we have stop loss on new uup move and big volume! Heh. What it was? Just fund's buying large stake? Or maybe some speculation? When i am writing this post price comeback down to 17.7$.

Bearish propaganda

This week opening with huge down move on US Markets. S&P broke 900 points level.
Was interesting to see news background today. It is looking like propaganda. In one time all powerfull financials began to say the same about economy. Trichet said about potentional new wave of unstability, said that we are still in down trend in economy. World Bank said that the recession will be deeper than they forecast in March. Interesting change after 3 month stong bull rally and good earnings. Also we saw a strong sell from insiders. S&P losing 2,5% on Monday's evening. The largest from June 2007. This is interesting that this all news brought down on market on one day. FED on wednesday can keep bearish move going. Oil finishing 2nd day in strong down trend. Think if we will see self powered trend by all catalysts above we will see oil comeback to much lower levels.. Hard to say.. For now maybe 55-60$ area. Commodity can fall hard coz current prices represents not real demand but hopes of economy recovery and inflation expactations.

Knowing yourself weaknesses you become stronger

Many writers/philosofers tried to build a model of really successfull people. They researched bios of great humans and than tried to found same in character traits, type of thought. For me, I think its critical to know own weak sides. When you know your weak sides you can concentrate on what dont using your weak sides. You can find a best areas for you character, skills. One of managment classics, Peter Druker, were saying that we need to improve our strong sides and its really more important and will give us better results. For example i am not ashamed to be acknowledged that i havent enaough discipline to work intraday now. Maybe its just because i havent chances to concentrate only on this. I understand it fully that at least i will not concentrate only on daytrading i will lose money on it. So i will not even try to put in one daytrading and portfolio running. If i will do so my productivity will be less. I dont like to work with details and work with numbers. So i will prefer to work with philophy, ideas, macro stuff - all ares where i could fully use my type of thought to get bigger pleasure and better results. So guys, concentrate on your strong sides and work on areas where you can use it fully! Be true with youself about your weak sides! Go for better results!

Economic reforms - new stakes in portfolio

Now we have so many stakes that i even cant post full screen shot of portfolio :-). In future we will concentrate only on best ideas and we will have less stakes. Just need to keep normal level of diversification. But on other we need to remember that diversification mean from ignorance as Warren Buffet saying :-) .
Before we had an idea to long canadian banks due to its strong fundamentals and financial health. Today we realesed this idea by hedging with short big american banks. We looked to our database and found that STI, JPM, KEY have to be the weakest in near future. Also with shorting this banks we hedged it with our old idea to long CSCO from technology. Large growth of broadbend in Asia will support solid CSCO fundamentals.
Also we now have a hedged stakes in healthcare. Due to Obama healthcare reform plan we shorted health insurance companies and longed pharmaceuticals companies which making generic drugs. So we shorted WCG, UNH and longed JNJ, PFE.
Thanks Victor from Belarus, he will program for us portfolio tool which we need so. It will calculate all numbers we need.

Random thoughts

Our portfolio feeling better last time. Now we have drodown -0,23%. This drodown coz of falling gold prices but we are rather confidence of it. We see good resistance @900$. Our fundamental view on it wasnt changed. We are happy, coz our portfolio strategy we think is working, especially that we made real investment portfolio for 1st time in life. Other our picks filling good.
Last time i have a lot of global thought/professional dreams. At first was inspired by golden boy of 80x - Mikel Milken. He made in whole word sense junk bonds market in America. I read far time ago book about Wall Street in 80x and this really fun, interesting, scarry, sometimes inspired, emotional.. Book author James Stuart, name of book - "Gang of thieves from Wall Street". We can read a story of Mikel Milken, Ivan Boeski and others. 80x - was time of avidity on Wall Street. Do you think something was changed? ))). A dream - to MAKE MARKET in Ukraine. Now RTS conquers bigger and bigger market share of exchange operations in Ukraine. Regulation fund of RTS UKraine is only 12mln UAH. But i think it will hard to get a part of RTS, coz its a lot of market, market policy power, etc. So even with money its a question. It would be really cool to make liquidity in Ukranian market, derevatives, etc.
Other professional interest is on options. Need to work a lot with numbers, graps trading options, i dont like this much but anyway i feel this is good area for making money, huge less efficient than stock market. There are must be huge more "free lunches" here. For russian language readers can give a really nice blog of rus guy - Option trader .
Eric Nayman from UkrSocBank - here his blog made calculations of Herst index with target to find trending on financial markets. With this calculations he refutes Effective Market Hypothesis, EMH. Question of EMH was always worrieng me. Sometimes i think market Efficient/not efficient depending on how we thinking about it. Somelike thought become real :-). I trust that this phenomen we have in life, so why we cant have it even in scientific researches :-) especially on researchs of social proccess. EMH investigation from classical economic theory where buyer and seller are rational. But on banal philosophy we can to refute EMH easy. Why economists acknowledge trends in economy but not acknowledge trend in stock markets? This to process are influence one on other, so if one is trendive , other have to be trendive too? This sounds crazy and very simple? Maybe i just have small skill in economy? Other look have Victor Niedernhoffer. He is statistican and calculated that there is no trends on markets, but he dont trust in EMH. He dont trusts in trends but trust in conformities to law of motion of price.
Other old professional dream is to build dynamic model in which we could see a line of how economy sectors will grow/fall, in what sequences, how they will influence one on other, etc. I found deep scientific works on it. For example - Klein-Goldberg Model, Warton economic model. But to work on this theme need solid economy, econometic background.
We didnt find a good portfolio tool on free. Dont understand why. Is it hard to programm nice portfolio tool, which will calculate coefficints automaticaly?) Bullshit. In future we will program it by ourselves and it will be on our site ))).

Our potentional stakes

Our potentional stakes
Canadian bank
Canadian financial institutions mostly avoided the worst of the fallout from the credit crisis due to tougher regulation and a more conservative culture that kept them away from risky credit derivatives that hurt so many of their competitors in Europe and on Wall Street.
The problem is that retail banking – one of the main engines of the sector – is deteriorating, with earnings collectively down 10% from the second quarter of 2008.
For expample we are looking for buying TD stake.
Energy/commodities stocks
We are bullish on comodities mostly not by that we see potentional demand increasing but mostly by inflation expectations. We are not sure that real economy demand on commodities will increase huge. We assume “W” vivid structure of economy recovery. With second down wave on august/september 2009.
We have big inflations expectations and doubtful market growth. If no risks will be converted in to reality we will see continue of market growth and gold growth too. Market will growth by better fundamentals, gold will growth by inflation expectations - if economy is began to recover - inflation wiil begin growing quick. If we dont see real economic recovering now, we will see second wave of recesion. It will mean more money to print again, bigger inflation in future, so market in this scenario will go down again, but gold after some down move, will grow even more quickly. For our fund we wanna to acumulate positions in gold, silver, stocks which are producers of commodities. The focus of our fund will be on silver. We have to be happy buy silver companies but silver companies is very expensive on fundamentals. Better way just to buy silver as metal.
On oil OPEK will not increase supply until oil prices will rich 100$. For most OPEK countries 75$ - comfortable price. Other positive on oil was Goldman upgrades to 85$. Before last rally they said about oil growth and then we saw 150$ price .
So we dont saying that this type of stocks will growth, we just saying that they will be strenghter than market.
Technology
Even now we see a nice up in buisness activity of technology stocks. They have a good balance sheets with large cash positions and ready to invest in new buisnesses, innovations. We already have a large stake in technology but we see opportunities even to increase it. Candidats are DELL, CSCO, ORCL

Portfolio. Stakes overview

BCS (current result +9,58%) - we see what we wanted to see. BCS was really attractive and now we have $13.5bn deal to sell its Barclays Global Investors unit to BlackRock.
DW, USG, TECUA - nothing special we had on this stocks, sector.
VOXX - before this stock show its weakness but yesterday we had good report on retail sales. This catalyst pushed stock huge higher, but then we saw pullback. So nothing special now. Just holding short.
MSFT - having some talks about their search engine Bing which they started on 1st of June. Microsoft invested nearly 100mln in this project. Also have talks about their products. They will not sell their own fin program, will make own antivirus program. So with good balance sheet and strong fundametals this stock is on the move now.
IBM - feeling good. They improve their buisness activity now. Looking for oportunities deals. They opened a new center in China to drive the development of high tech railroads, builds networked security system in Chicago, takes social networking to its channel partners, etc.
SOHU - no changes. Exelent fundamentals.
ABFS, CNW, VMED, MHK - no changes.
ABX, NEM, HMY - we see a range this week in gold between 965$ and 945$. We assume gold prices falling in short term period. Our middle and long view is the same.
FWRD - we saw huge up on this due analyst upgraded by KeyBanc Capital Mkts. Bullshit :-) .
SPWRA - up move in oil prices helped this stock to go higher. But now we see nice resistance in oil. We shouldnt expect large up move in oil in short term as we think this growth explaining not by increasing demand on oil as commoditie but just as safe active, inflation hedge, etc.

Our portfolio. Beta calculation

Monday. Portfolio

Coefficient which we will calculate for our portfolio
Alpha. To see how effectively we running fund.
Beta. To see fund volatility.
Long's relative strenght (comparing with S&P including long's beta). Do we really bought strong stocks?
Short's relative strenght (comparing with S&P including short's beta). Do we really sold weak stocks?
Drawing a chart of fund valuation every day.
Other coefficient that figured in portfolio theory is not usefull for us know. 1st because we havent history of our fund. 2nd - its developed for more long term investing.

Portfolio. Weekend overview.

Portfolio structure by sector
Total invested money - 480852$
Long - 287164$
Technology - 136104$
Financials - 54480$
Gold - 97030$
Short - 193238

Short - 193238$
Services - Trucking - 83480$
Electronics wholesale - 6920$
Media - 16980$
Overall services - 107380$
Industrial goods - General building materials - 46850$
Textile industrial - 19345$
General contractors- 20293$
Overall industrial goods - 86488$

Biggest drodown we have in "gold" part of our portfolio. Its not strange, we had big gold drop on friday. Nothing change fundamentaly. Our look to gold the same as before. So we will not change gold stakes in short\middle time.
Another drodown - SPWRA - SunPower Corporation. Solar-energy companies's sector known for its volatility and speculative interests. Usually this sectors going up when oil prices increasing. Before companies from this sector reported about better earnings then expected. We dont expect strenght of this sector until we will see stong trend up in economy and large increasing of oil prices. We expect slow growth\range of oil prices.
VMED - we should be more carrefull next time about shorting of Richard Branson company :-). Richard - adherent of theory of chaos have motto - "To the devil all, undertake and do" :-) . Not far ago he bought Hefner's Playboy. On 3rd of June Virgin Media closed 1$ billion bond offering. We are carrefull about it, but dont see power for growth on it now.
BCS - we are in 2.59% plus on it know. We wont to see institutional support on it.
VOXX - we are now pretty right of VOXX shorting. Nothing special now. Just looking for 5$ price now.