Structured Credit
topic on 1 show · 11 statements across 2 episodes
11 statements about Structured Credit, every show
Lippmann: Stale credit agency ratings have provided 30 years of profitable trades
“One of the things I've made money on for 30 years is that the rating's Are very, very stale. And sometimes they're stale too good. Sometimes they're stale too bad.”
Lippmann: Running structured credit properly is impossible under $500M AUM
“We spend millions of dollars a year on data, and on a team to sort of process that data, and then on each of the sector heads where they're reading the documents, and they're parsing the structure and understanding this, so it's really difficult to do what we …”
Lippmann: Third-party valuation software errors create alpha in structured credit
“Back when I started, each bank had their own internal software that valued these bonds. Now there are companies that sell those, and the good news about it is that everybody is looking at the same thing, and occasionally our guys are able to identify that ther…”
Lippmann: Bank regulations create forced, non-economic debt selling
“There's lots of situations where people are doing things for non-economic reasons. They're saying, hey, if I don't sell this aged inventory, I'm going to get a huge penalty. So it's cheaper for me to sell it cheap today than to get this huge internal penalty, …”
Lippmann: Structured credit remains resistant to quantitative investing
“One thing that is really attractive about the space is the esoteric nature of it. It remains somewhat resistant to sort of the quantification of most of investing. Some of that relates to each deal is different. So it's a little bit harder to do that because w…”
Lippmann: Structured credit derivatives are a shadow of their pre-crisis size
“The derivative market is a shadow of what it was back then.”
Lippmann: Structured credit price moves are more correlated with broader markets today
“And so I think that our market has become more integrated in other markets, and therefore the price moves are somewhat more connected and correlated than they were back then.”
Lippmann: Illiquid and Complex Structured Credit Trades Yielded High Margins
“Because the trades were complicated, because they were illiquid, because not that many people did it, our margins were really big.”
Jefferson: Strong option protections let distressed credit survive zero-price drops
“And one of the interesting things about if you have a deal and the value of the option is very, very strong, you can have assets that trade down to zero, trade back up. As long as that option can't be exercised, then you're okay.”
Jefferson: Structured credit requires a bazaar mindset instead of a mall mindset
“If you're dealing in equities, you're dealing in high yield bonds where you can just go and buy a bond. I call it like shopping at the mall. You go to the mall, you know what you're going to buy. What we do is like going to the Turkish Bazaar and you show up w…”