Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund founded in 1994 by John Meriwether that utilized quantitative models and leverage to profit from convergence trades. While initially successful, LTCM lost billions in 1998 during the Russian financial crisis as markets became volatile and liquidity dried up. To prevent systemic risk, the Federal Reserve orchestrated an emergency bailout. The crisis showed that highly leveraged positions are vulnerable to shifts in market liquidity and correlations between assets. Key lessons include incorporating liquidity as a risk factor, stress testing models, and relying more on judgment than purely quantitative analysis.

1. Long Term Capital Management

2. Summary of Events
• In 1994, John Meriwether, the famed Salomon
Brothers bond trader, founded a hedge fund
called Long-Term Capital Management.

3. • Meriwether assembled an all-star team of
traders and academics in an attempt to create
a fund that would profit from the combination
of the academics' quantitative models and the
traders' market judgement and execution
capabilities.

4. • Sophisticated investors, including many large
investment banks, flocked to the fund,
investing $1.3 billion at inception.

5. • But four years later, at the end of September
1998, the fund had lost substantial amounts
of the investors' equity capital and was
teetering on the brink of default.

6. • To avoid the threat of a systemic crisis in the
world financial system, the Federal Reserve
orchestrated a $3.5 billion rescue package
from leading U.S. investment and commercial
banks.
• In exchange the participants received 90% of
LTCM's equity.

7. What was LTCM’s Strategy
• The basic principle of LTCM’s strategy was that
in the long term, the price of a security would
converge to its fair market value even though
there may be mispricing in the short term.

8. • LTCM utilized computer models to find
arbitrage opportunities between markets.
LTCM's central strategy was convergence
trades where securities were incorrectly
priced relative to one another. LTCM would
take long positions on the under priced
security and short positions on the overpriced
security.

9. • The strategy depended on exploiting deviations in
market value from fair value. And it depended on
"patient capital" -- shareholders and lenders who
believed that what mattered was fair value and
not market value. That is, because the fair values
were hedged, it didn't matter what happened to
market values in the short run — they would
converge to fair value over time. That was the
reason for the "Long Term" part of LTCM's name.

10. • A convergence trading strategy in the stock
markets, is a trade idea based on the principle
that when the price of a stock (or stock
portfolio) significantly deviates from its long-
term trend, it will sooner or later converge
(move back) back to its original trend. For
example, a trading strategy that generates a
buy signal at every dip of the stock price in a
general up trend is a convergence trading
strategy.

11. Convergence trades
• LTCM's main strategy was to make
convergence trades. These trades involved
finding securities that were mispriced relative
to one another, taking long positions in the
cheap ones and short positions in the rich
ones.

12. There were four main types of trade:
• Convergence among U.S., Japan, and
European sovereign bonds;
• Convergence among European sovereign
bonds;
• Convergence between on-the-run and off-
the-run U.S. government bonds;
• Long positions in emerging markets
sovereigns, hedged back to dollars.

13. • Because these differences in values were tiny,
the fund needed to take large and highly-
leveraged positions in order to make a
significant profit. At the beginning of 1998,
the fund had equity of $5 billion and had
borrowed over $125 billion — a leverage
factor of roughly thirty to one.

14. • LTCM's partners believed, on the basis of their
complex computer models, that the long and
short positions were highly correlated and so
the net risk was small.

15. What Does On-The-Run Treasuries
Mean?
• The most recently issued U.S. Treasury bond
or note of a particular maturity. These are the
opposite of "off-the-run treasuries".

16. What Does Sovereign Bond Mean?
• A debt security issued by a national
government within a given country and
denominated in a foreign currency.

17. LTCM ‘s positions
• LTCM had fixed income and equity positions.
The equity positions were a mix of index
spread trades, total return swaps and some
takeover positions.

18. Total return swap
• In a total return swap, the party receiving the total
return will receive any income generated by the asset
as well as benefit if the price of the asset appreciates
over the life of the swap.
• In return, the total return receiver must pay the owner
of the asset the set rate over the life of the swap.
• If the price of the assets falls over the swap's life, the
total return receiver will be required to pay the asset
owner the amount by which the asset has fallen in
price.

19. Example
• For example, two parties may enter into a
one-year total return swap where Party A
receives LIBOR + fixed margin (2%) and Party B
receives the total return of the S&P 500 on a
principal amount of $1 million. If LIBOR is
3.5% and the S&P 500 appreciates by 15%,
Party A will pay Party B 15% and will receive
5.5%. The payment will be netted at the end
of the swap with Party B receiving a payment
of $95,000 ($1 million x 15% - 5.5%).

20. What is a Takeover
• In business, a takeover is the purchase of one
company (the target) by another (the acquirer,
or bidder).

21. The Ultimate Cause of the debacle

22. Flight to Liquidity
• The ultimate cause of the LTCM debacle was
the "flight to liquidity" across the global fixed
income markets.
• As Russia's troubles became deeper and
deeper, fixed-income portfolio managers
began to shift their assets to more liquid
assets.

23. • What LTCM had failed to account for is that a
substantial portion of its balance sheet was
exposed to a general change in the "price" of
liquidity. If liquidity became more valuable (as
it did following the crisis) its short positions
(rich assets) would increase in price relative to
its long positions (cheap assets).
• This was essentially a massive, unhedged
exposure to a single risk factor.

24. • Capital is only as patient as its least patient
provider. The fact is that lenders generally lose
their patience precisely when the funds need
them to keep it — in times of market crisis.
• As the case demonstrates, the lenders are the
first to get nervous when an external shock
hits.

25. • At that point, they begin to ask the fund manager
for market valuations, not models-based fair
valuations.
• This starts the fund along the downward spiral:
illiquid securities are marked-to-market; margin
calls are made; the illiquid securities must be
sold; more margin calls are made, and so on.
• In general, shareholders may provide patient
capital; but debt-holders do not.

26. • The only real source of capital that is patient
enough to take fluctuations in market values,
especially through crises, is equity capital. In
other words, you can take liquidity bets, but
you cannot leverage them much.

27. Lessons

28. The lessons to be learned from this
crisis are
• Market values matter for leveraged
portfolios;
• Liquidity itself is a risk factor;
• Models must be stress-tested and combined
with judgement;

29. • LTCM fell victim to a flight to liquidity. This
phenomenon is common enough in capital
markets crises that it should be built into risk
models, either by introducing a new risk factor
— liquidity — or by including a flight to
liquidity in the stress testing.

30. • Another key lesson to be learnt from the LTCM
debacle is that even (or especially) the most
sophisticated financial models are subject to
model risk and parameter risk, and should
therefore be stress-tested and tempered with
judgement.

31. • According to the complex mathematical
models used by LTCM, the positions were low
risk. Judgement tells us that the key
assumption that the models depended on was
the high correlation between the long and
short positions.

32. • Certainly, recent history suggested that
correlations between corporate bonds of
different credit quality would move together (a
correlation of between 90-95% over a 2-year
horizon).
• During LTCM's crisis, however, this correlation
dropped to 80%.
• Stress-testing against this lower correlation might
have led LTCM to assume less leverage in taking
this bet.

33. The End