Nevada only pays $13 Million to run its $35 Billion pension fund!

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal is getting some attention - as it reports that Nevada only pays $13 million to run its $35 billion Pension Fund.  To put this in perspective; North Carolina pays 12 times as much, even after you take account of the size differences in the plan.

So how does Nevada keep costs so low?   The answer is simple: the plan is indexed.

Not only are the costs super low, the performance is pretty good.   Ron Elmer runs the numbers and finds that over 10 years, Nevada's plan earned 6.2% while NC earned 5.5%.   A difference of 0.7%.

Together with a few others (Ron Elmer, Andy Silton and SEANC), I've been advocating indexing for the NC Pension Fund for quite a while now and we've struggled to see any meaningful change.  But now we're now in a position to elect a new state Treasurer.

Recently - WRAL's "On the record" interviewed both candidates - you can see the video here.
http://www.wral.com/candidates-for-state-treasurer-go-on-the-record-/16005623/
(start at the 18 minute point).

Of the two candidates, I think that Dale Follwell understands the problems and has a realistic approach, so I'll be voting for him.

Just as a point of clarification (this came up in the video) - there is a huge difference between the funding of the plan and the performance of the plan.

• A plan's funding level is based on how much money is put into the plan - basically - has the state honored its obligation to fund the plan?
• A plan's performance is based on the investment choices that the plan makes.   Poor investment choices (and high fees) result in lower performance and can negative impact the funding level.  These choices are largely controlled by the Treasurer.

You can't consistently beat the market. Just ask Harvard.

Harvard University has been lamenting a substantial loss in the value of their endowment.  Apparently about $2 Billion.   See:http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-a-2-Billion-Loss-Really/237965

Harvard has chased all sorts of exotic strategies, including private equity and hedge funds and yet - to quote the above article:

"...if Harvard had passively invested in a standard mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds, it would have gotten a higher rate of return — 8.9 percent over the past five years, versus 5.9 percent with its active in-house management, according to The Boston Globe."

What's worse, is that Harvard was paying its money managers millions to come up with these strategies.   While Harvard is clearly one of the premier academic institutions in the world, this status does not give it the ability to beat the market.  Other institutions (I'm looking at you NC Pension Fund) would do well to learn from this.

Money Monster - a review

I just watched "Money Monster".   It's a thriller staring George Clooney and Julia Roberts that's basically a mashup of Jim Cramer meets the flash crash meets (fill in your evil corporation here).

The movie is OK, if you don't know much about finance.   However, if you do happen to know a little bit about how markets actually work, you'll be cringing all the way through.

The basic plot:  Clooney is a TV star (a la Cramer) who runs a stock picking show.  Roberts is his producer.  At some point Clooney had recommended a stock (in an evil corporation called IBIS) and said it was as safe as a savings account (sound familiar?).  Some guy looses his savings in this stock and comes to the studio and takes Clooney hostage.   Drama ensues until there is a showdown with the evil corp CEO who admits defrauding the stockholders.   The hapless investor gets shot by the the police, and Clooney suffers a bad bout of Stockholm Syndrome.

Here's what drove me crazy.

Apparently the evil CEO had manipulated his stock price (no explanation of how) so that it crashed and lost $800 million of investors money.   He then took this money and bribed a South African union to strike at a mine in South Africa.  With the strike underway, he ploughed his $800 million into this mining stock.  His brilliant plan was to call off the strike and cash in when the stock went up in price.

What is so stupid about this, is how on earth the CEO was able to extract the $800 million due to the decline of IBIS corp's stock?  All I can think of was that he must have shorted the stock and then announced some very bad news.  But such an action would have been such a blatant case of insider trading that the Feds would have been all over it.  And anyway, there was no mention of the CEO saying anything.  In the movie the price crash is a mystery to the media and to folks at IBIS.

In reality, the writers of the movie clearly don't understand what happens when a stock price falls.  They seem to think that the reduction in value must have wound up in someone's pocket.  And of course, who else but an evil CEO.  To make a movie about finance and not understand the basic premise of the stock market really boggles the mind.

What's even more confusing was that IBIS corp apparently hires its own "quants" to run HFT trading strategies on its own stock.   Why?   Are they buying on IBIS corp's account?   Is this some sort of repurchase program?   I just don't get it.   But the kicker is that the HFT guys hardly trade at all on the day of the IBIS corp stock crash.   To quote the movie: "it has someones fingers all over it".

One more stupid thing:
They send a producer to the SEC to find out what is going on.   He comes back with a piece of paper that says that the volume was down 80% on the crash day.   Umm, you don't need to go to the SEC to find that stuff out.   Try yahoo finance instead.

So unless you really like Clooney and Roberts, give this one a miss.   Watch "the big short" instead.

NC SPIN talks about Pension Fund Fees.

On a recent episode of NC SPIN, the topic was pension fund fees.   I was quoted at the start of the segment.  The video is here:  The bit about the pension fund starts at 17:37.

While the discussion was pretty good and I am glad to see that the fees are getting more and more attention, there were a few comments that I think need addressing.

1. John Hood talks about the idea that if everyone indexed, markets wouldn't be efficiently priced anymore.   While in theory, this is correct as no one would trade on actual information, in reality it would never happen, simply because, as prices got out of whack, investors would have the incentive to pile back in to active investing.  But Hood does emphasize that we need to reduce costs.

2. I think that this focus on getting higher returns is a fool's errand.   This notion that there are good returns out there and that all we need to do is find them is pretty silly.   This might seem counter-intuitive, but in reality an $85 Billion pension fund is going to be broadly invested across stock and bond markets.  Because of this, the fund is really just a price taker - it will earn whatever these broad market segments earn.  The two key decisions that the fund has to make are 1) what is the mix of stocks and bonds and 2) how do we get this mix and at the same time pay as little in fees as possible.

3. Cash Michaels says that "a lot of other states are not experiencing the same kind of luck" when talking about the returns of the fund.  The facts don't support this statement.   NC is lagging other states in performance.   Ron Elmer estimated the returns of NC vs other states and tweeted the results.  Here's the graph:

4.  Mr Michaels also talks about investing in infrastructure projects as a way to boost returns.   I think that this would be a terrible idea - risky and expensive.   Stick to stocks and bonds.

5.  There was some discussion of broadening the control of the fund to a board structure.   I support this idea, providing that we have good people on the board!   

6. The idea of defined contribution plans was also raised.  While a DC plan gets the state out from its pension obligations, it is not a solution to high fees.   So I think that this is red herring.

Bottom line, I appreciate that the panel of NC SPIN took the time to discuss this issue and keep it in the attention of the electorate.  I hope both candidates for Treasurer put fees at the forefront of their campaigns and more importantly, the candidate who is ultimately elected enacts meaningful change.

Pension Fund Fees keep on growing.

Last Friday, Cullen Browder reported on the level of fees now being paid by the NC Pension Fund.   In the process, he interviewed yours truly.   The video is here:

http://www.wral.com/fees-grow-faster-than-nest-egg-in-nc-employees-pension-fund/15963461/

A big thank you goes to Ron Elmer who blogged about the fees on his investorcookbooks blog.

Ron compared the fund today vs. what it would have looked like had the asset allocation in 2000 been maintained using Vanguard index funds.  His analysis is here.

The results are shocking.   Fees as a percentage of the assets have increased by a factor 7 from 0.1% to 0.7% and the fund has gone from being overfunded to underfunded.

But it's not just fees - Ron also takes a look at the lost performance of the fund.   Again, the results are shocking.  The fund has underperformed by 1.8% per year over the past 10 years.

But it gets worse.  If you look at the annual report for 2014 - 2015 - here: https://www.nctreasurer.com/inside-the-department/Reports/NCDST_Annual_Report_FY2014-2015.pdf  you can start to add up all the fees that are being paid (for fiscal 2015).

Page 32:  Total Fees: $538 Million.
Page 33:  Fund of Funds Management Fees:  $38 Million
Page 33:  Fund of Funds Incentive Fees: $36 Million.
and in the Government Ops Report for June 2015, there are additional costs of $53 Million (presumably mostly attorney and consultant fees).  (Again thanks go to Ron for spotting this).

Add all these together and you've got a total cost of $665 Million which on an $85 Billion fund is about 0.78%.   So amazingly the total fees are approaching 0.8%!   And given that this data is from last year, I'd fully expect the total to be higher now.

So what's going on?

Well - it's really hard to say, but a look at page 31 of the annual report can shed a little light.

Let's look at Global Equity - the second row.   Global equity is benchmarked against the MSCI All World Index (AWI) Long Only - pretty reasonable, but also in the benchmark is a beta adjusted version to reflect hedged portfolios.  My guess is that some of the Global Equities allocation is in long-short hedge funds - a very expensive strategy.

Or take a look at Opportunistic Fixed Income.   Here 50% of the benchmark is in the HFRX Distressed Securities Index (the HFRX site doesn't seem to have the exact index that is described).  The remaining parts of the benchmark cover stuff like leveraged loans and high yields.   Bottom line, these are, in part, hedge funds buying junk and distressed debt.

So the takeaway is that the Pension Fund asset allocations are highly complex and as we've seen, very expensive.   And yet, as we've seen from Ron's post above, this strategy is not paying off.

But what about risk?   A frequent defense of the heavy use of hedge funds and private equity is that these assets provide risk reduction benefits to the fund.  But the evidence doesn't support these claims.   For example, in a recent Journal of Finance article Francesco Franzoni, Eric Nowak and Ludovic Phalippou find that private equity doesn't earn a positive alpha when you include liquidity risk.  In a 2013 Review of Financial Studies paper, Adam Aiken, Chris Clifford and Jesse Ellis find that hedge fund index returns have a significant bias because only "winning" funds tend to report returns to the index creator.

The real question though, is even if these alternative investments are generating positive alpha (which I strongly doubt), are they generating enough to offset the 1.8% annual performance drag over the past 10 years?

I am pretty sure that they aren't even coming close.

Indexing Pension Funds

This is a bit of a repost - but is relevant as we talk about fees.

Back in February I wrote a white paper that was a back of the envelope analysis of the fees paid buy the pension fund, including some hidden fees such as trading costs.  

You can read the paper here.    It was referenced in this article on Forbes that talks about indexing pension funds.

Are markets efficient?

A must watch discussion between Richard Thaler and Gene Fama - both from the University of Chicago.


http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are-markets-efficient#

Pension Funds using options.

Two states, Hawaii and South Carolina are using Cash Secured Puts to boost the yield of their pension funds.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pensions-play-with-puts-for-protection-1471777202

So what exactly is a cash secured put?  

A put is a bet that the underlying stock will fall in price.

• Buying a put results in a payoff when the stock price falls below the strike.   

• Conversely, selling a put results in a loss when the stock price is below the strike.   

The benefit to writing (selling) a put is that you earn a premium when the stock is trading above the strike.   But when the stock price falls, the writer incurs a loss.  The payoff from this strategy is basically the same as a covered call.

A cash secured put involves keeping cash on hand to cover this loss.   In the case of a pension fund, this cash is probably in the form of Treasuries.   Holding this cash doesn't make the loss go away, it just means that you have the money to cover it.   When the option is exercised, the writer sells the Treasuries to buy the stock, and ends up holding the stock.

If as a portfolio manager, you wanted to move money from Treasuries to, say the S&P 500, but wanted to do so when the price of the index fell below a certain level, then a cash secured put would be one way of doing this.  During the periods when the index was high, you'd keep your money in Treasuries and instead earn the option premium.  It's similar to issuing a limit order.

So is this a risky strategy for a pension fund as implied by the Wall Street Journal?   I don't think so.   The payoffs are pretty clear and the risk is quite quantifiable providing that the strategy is managed
carefully.  That said, essentially what these states are doing is providing market insurance to other market participants.   The insurance business is a great business to be in, except when there is a disaster.   Just ask AIG.

A bigger issue is whether or not the optimal asset allocation of the pension fund is being compromised.  For example, if the pension fund is holding larger allocations to Treasuries instead of stocks, the fund will miss out on stronger performance by stocks in an up market.   The fund will instead be an aggressive buyer of stocks in a declining market which may result in an overweighting of stocks in a bear market.

More poor performance from the NC Pension Fund

Ron Elmer crunches the numbers on the recent performance of the NC Pension Fund and yet again finds that the fund has underperformed a simple basket of Vanguard funds.

This isn't just bad luck.   It is exceptionally bad decision making.   Here's to hoping that the next Treasurer will do a better job.

John Oliver on retirement plans

John Oliver on retirement plans, advisors and fees.

His conclusion:  Index Funds.    Now where have you heard that before?

MSFT buys LinkedIn

I guess I didn't see this one coming.   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/microsoft-to-buy-linkedin-in-deal-valued-at-26-2-billion-ipe079k9

I was looking back at my blog posts from 2011, and I was convinced that LinkedIn was overvalued then.  I think it still is, but you'd have done pretty well if you bought the stock at the IPO.  That's why I'm an indexer and not a stock picker!

R&D expenditures - then and now.

Here's an interesting article comparing R&D expense in 2006 with now.

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-29/amazon-and-facebook-are-big-spenders-on-r-d


Top R&D today:
Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Intel and Apple.

Top R&D in 2006:
Ford, Pfizer, GM, J&J, Microsoft, IBM, Intel.

Radiohead - it's all about taxes.

Radiohead the band has an incredibly complex corporate structure, comprising of numerous individual companies.  As a colleague of mine has been known to say: "I bet there's a tax story in there somewhere".

Read about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/29/radiohead-corporate-structure-firms

Yahoo's black hole

How can you be worth -$8 Billion?

Ask Yahoo.  http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-yahoo/

Should students use laptops in the classroom?

Step into any classroom and you'll see rows of students with laptops open tapping away at their keyboards.  Some of these students are taking notes, some are checking facebook or instagram.

Aside from distractions, I've wondered whether laptop usage is a good thing or not.  Turns out, the evidence is pretty clear.   We shouldn't use laptops for note taking.

Here are a few articles...

Scientific American reports that deeper understanding comes from handwritten notes:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

See also:
http://lifehacker.com/the-benefits-of-writing-by-hand-versus-typing-1778758792

Laptops are a distraction to not just the owner, but also other students: http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2013/08/20/new-study-shows-computers-in-class-distract-both-users-and-non-users/

And one Prof even writes about being a Luddite:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/28/confessions-of-a-luddite-professor/

I think that we should seriously consider imposing laptop bans in classrooms, but also encourage online students to be low-tech and keep notes using pen and pencil.

John Oliver on Puerto Rico's debt woes

Turns out that there is more to their problems than meets the eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-mpuR_QHQ

Gawker on Pension Fund Fees.

Gawker media on pension fund fees (and NC in particular).

http://gawker.com/retirees-are-handing-wall-street-billions-for-no-good-r-1767496764

Bogle on the Buffet Hedge Fund bet

Jack Bogle opines on why Buffet is winning the hedge fund vs index fund challenge.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-bogle--here-s-why-buffett-will-win-his--1-million-bet-against-a-hedge-fund-manager-200012224.html

A Plan to Stop the Pension Plan Rip-Off

Via Huff Po.

A Plan to Stop the Pension Plan Rip-Off


Quote:

There's big money to be made from "advising" these plans. A study from The Maryland Public Policy Institute looked at data from 33 state pension funds. In last fiscal year they examined, researchers found these pension funds paid collective fees of $6 billion!The Wall Street firms that collected these fees touted their ability to pick stocks and bonds that would "outperform a given section of the stock or bond market." They were handsomely rewarded for this alleged prowess. Unfortunately, it was a myth.The study found an inverse relationship between high fees and returns. The median five-year return for the pension funds in the study was 12.83 percent. If plans had fired their high-priced Wall Street investment bankers and instead invested in low-management-fee index funds, the annualized five-year return would have increased to 14.45 percent.The study found no evidence that alternative investments, such as hedge funds and private equity, beat the market.

Why I am supporting Ron Elmer for Treasurer

Ron Elmer is running for the democratic nomination for the NC Treasurer.   Ron Elmer is highly qualified for the job.  Here's why:

• He has extensive investment management experience managing institutional mutual funds and index funds.  He's even managed index funds for the State Pension Fund.
• He's very well qualified.  An NYU MBA, a CFA and a CPA.   
• He's not a career politician - he doesn't want to use the Treasurer's office to climb the political ladder.
• He's a really nice guy.

Ron's basic platform is to save the state millions of dollars by bringing the management of the pension fund in house and basically firing all the external managers.   Once in house, he plans to index the entire $90 billion portfolio.    I think that this is a brilliantly simple way that the state can save probably between $500 - $900 Million per year.

Let me state that again:   Ron's plan can save the State at least half a billion dollars per year and potentially close to a billion dollars per year.

This sounds like crazy money, but Wall Street investment firms have been enjoying this payola from North Carolina (and many other states) for years.   It's time to put a stop to this madness.

I've put together a short paper that details my back of the envelope computations which show that these savings are reasonable and there should be no loss in performance of the fund as a result.  In fact, I would expect that the fund will perform better.

Click here for a copy of my report.   

Click here for a copy of a presentation that I did for the State Employees Association a couple of years ago.

And don't forget to vote for Ron and spread the word.

Thanks

The short termism myth

Nice summary of why US financial markets are probably not myopic.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/the-short-termism-myth

HT: Newmark's Door.