Felix Salmon

On Tuesday I moderated a panel at the New York Forum which featured, inter alia, Duncan Niederauer, the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and Richard Robb, the CEO of Christofferson Robb, a money management firm which does its fair share of speculation.

My question at the beginning of this clip, for Niederauer, didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Amar Bhidé had previously talked about the casino aspect of markets, and Andrew Ross Sorkin had talked about the distinction between speculation and investment. But Niederauer was not happy when I pushed him on these concepts. Wall Street is increasingly a game of speculation rather than investment, I said, and asked how a casino operator pushing people to make bets over the course of a millisecond was not part of the problem. Rather than engaging with the question, he simply shut me down: “I thought my job description was quite different than what you just described,” he said. “So you must be talking to someone else.”

Niederauer then used all his media training to pivot and give a mini-speech instead about how self-regulation was better than Dodd-Frank. But Richard Robb, to his credit, engaged, even if what he said doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. “I don’t know what the difference between investing and speculation looks like,” he said, throwing up a straw man of everybody working at peoples’ tractor collectives. Robb’s prescription was essentially to do nothing but ban a few of his competitors: stop big banks from doing what he does, leave him alone to do anything he wants, and “let innovation find its own way, and if it’s parasitic and unproductive, it will not be rewarded by the capitalist system.”

That’s clearly false, of course: we can all think of parasitic and unproductive Wall Street innovations which have made millions of dollars for bankers and traders and money managers. Richard Robb himself gave a good example earlier on in the panel: structured investment vehicles.

And so Sorkin jumped in, making the good and obvious point that “it’s actually very easy to see what speculation is and what investing is.” Here’s one simple distinction: speculation is where you buy something in the expectation that it will rise in price, where investment is where you put money into something so that over the long term you can make a profit from the resulting cashflows, be they coupon payments or dividends. And as Sorkin said, if you make an investment for two seconds, that’s clearly speculation.

Robb’s response to Sorkin I think was one of the most telling points of the panel. “How about two days?” he asked. “Two weeks? Two months? Where would you draw the line?”

I could barely believe what I was hearing — was Robb really suggesting that holding a position for two days might be considered investment rather than speculation? Or even two months? All of them are speculation — and the fact that the likes of Niederauer and Robb can’t see that is I think a big part of the problem.

The subject of the panel was financial innovation, and Robb genuinely believes that he’s something of a centrist on the issue: he makes great play of agreeing with his friend Bhidé, for instance. But the fact is that if you’re talking to alumni of Goldman Sachs (Niederauer) or the University of Chicago (Robb), or someone who used to run the derivatives desk at a too-big-to-fail bank (Robb, again), then their idea of what’s good for the world is always going to be pretty skewed. They’ve made millions of dollars in the Wall Street casino, and they’re precisely the people being put on panels to ask whether the casino is a good thing. It’s reasonably easy to predict what they’re going to say — and to discount it heavily.

Joe Weisenthal says I’m wrong about the Ira Sohn conference. But that doesn’t mean he thinks that David Gaffen is right. Gaffen reckons that people go to these events so that they can trade in and out of stocks in the space of 10 minutes. Weisenthal, by contrast, sees value somewhere else entirely:

It’s not often that you get to hear the thought process and reasoning employed these financial professionals. Within the broader scope of financial media, you hear a lot of managers and pundits making their arguments in broad strokes, with lines like “We’re bullish on US banks because of low rates, yada yada yada…“And that kind of stuff really is useless. But these are professionals who usually have portfolios of just a handful of stocks, who have done a tremendous amount of research on each one before pulling the trigger, and frequently they do have original insights.

So you shouldn’t go out and by MBIA just because a manager likes it. But if you’re looking for original thinking on stock selection, the speeches, presentations, and letters of big hedge fund managers is frequently some of the best stuff around.

This is a good point. The best way to extract value from Ira Sohn presentations is to concentrate not on the stocks that the hedge fund managers are talking about, but rather on their methodology. At the very least, you’re likely to learn a few ways of looking at a company that you hadn’t thought of before. These fund managers, then, can improve the way that investors do their own research on companies, even if they’re not going to be delivering up great investment ideas on a plate. Use their methodology on a stock which none of them are looking at, and you might just be able to find a hidden gem.

There’s another way to look at the fund managers’ investment techniques, and that’s as a way to evaluate the managers. The idea here is that the managers who have the smartest techniques are likely to be the best managers to invest in. On this front, I’m far from convinced: as I told Gaffen, the analyses presented to the Ira Sohn conference are really sales pitches more than they are transparent views into how hedge fund managers think and invest in the real world. For all their joined-up thinking at Ira Sohn, most successful fund managers in reality use techniques which they would hesitate to admit to in public.

But in any case, you’ll never get the important nuance about how these fund managers think from reading news reports about the conference. So I still don’t see the point in sending a bunch of reporters to cover it.

It’s the Ira Sohn conference tomorrow, with well over a thousand people paying four-digit sums, and sometimes more, for the privilege of listening to boldface fund managers talk about their investment ideas. The conference gets a lot of press, not least from Reuters, but these presentations are not the kind of thing that individual investors — or even financial journalists — are really qualified to judge.

Hedge funds — and venture capitalist funds, and private-equity funds — have a certain mystique which rubs onto their managers, especially when those managers have posted impressive investment returns over the past few years. The Ira Sohn conference has even more mystique, since with many of these fund managers it’s the only time they speak in public, and as a result the audience is primed to expect something very special.

But as with any investment, it’s important not to get caught up in hype. Precisely because the Ira Sohn conference has so much hype and mystique, everything coming out of it should be treated with extreme prejudice. If you find a great investment idea in an improbable and unexpected place, that’s likely to be a much better bet than if you think you’ve found a great investment idea coming from a professional fund salesman in a highly-artificial context.

Investing in hedge funds is hard enough; investing in individual hedgies’ ideas is pretty much impossible. The only people who should even try are other hedgies, or possibly endowment managers who see a lot of idea flow and have significant experience of getting caught up in a story and then seeing how it plays out. Sometimes the highest-conviction ideas are also the worst ideas. Unless and until you’ve lived through those kind of experiences, you’re probably best off simply ignoring everything coming out of the Ira Sohn conference.

Most of this video is reasonably serious: I genuinely do think that Christine Lagarde is going to be the next managing director of the IMF. And it probably won’t take long before she gets the job, either.

At the end, I throw out a very left-field name which almost nobody outside the world of sovereign-debt geeks has ever heard of. But there’s a serious point there: the single biggest job of the IMF managing director is going to be navigating and architecting a round of pretty much unprecedented sovereign-debt restructuring deals. Can Lagarde do that? I don’t know that she can. But there’s one man who undoubtedly can.

Via Paul comes this montage of highlights from the people who brought you the Everything is OK series. What makes it especially fabulous for me is the fact that a  large chunk of it takes place right outside Reuters HQ in Canary Wharf. Obviously, you shouldn’t watch it. Do your job instead. Or go shopping. One or the other.