The Fed Wants To Absorb Excess Reserves -- Quick

The Fed proposed today to sell term deposits, a few weeks after setting up three-party reverse repos. Both are meant to absorb the banks' excess reserves after the largest monetary expansion in U.S. history. That expansion could cause high inflation, which the Fed typically fights by increasing interest rates. But would that work this time?...

Banks hold so much cash that they would still be able to lend to each other at very low rates even if the Fed started to increase its discount rate. To pump so much cash out of the banking system, the Fed seems to realize it has few means, so it began experimenting with the tri-partite reverse repos -- in addition to more traditional tools like the sale of Treasuries, MBS, and now, deposits.

In my view, the Fed acts like admitting their main inflation-fighting weapon (rates increase) would be ineffective if it had to be used today, and that they're running out of time and out of tools to fix that weapon (i.e., to absorb excess reserves).

KB Home and Ryland

The equities of KB Home and Ryland are strongly correlated. Still, market close on Dec 22 was an outlier.



When overlapping the two plots, we see that indeed Ryland suddenly became rich relative to its comp KBH. It was an opportunity to short RYL and go long KBH, with the hedge ratio given by the slope of the regression line above.

Pershing Square and Hovde Fight Over GGP

Two hedge funds, Pershing Square and Hovde, have been arguing over the value of GGP. Ackman claimed today that the GGP (new ticker GGWPQ) are "undervalued against its peers." Comparing the share price with that of Simon Prosperties and Boston Properties do not support his claim, however.

The Fly Already Retraced

Butterfly on 2-, 5- and 10-Year Swaptions

The 1:2:1 fly on 3-month options on the 2-, 5- and 10-year swaps reached levels not seen in 10 years. Definitely a trade to put on.

Spreads on IG Bonds Remain Elevated Relative to Leverage

Morgan Stanley's "2010 Outlook" report shows that, even if spreads on investment-grade bonds have significantly tightened, they remain elevated given the leverage corporations have taken.

USD-Funded Carry Trade: Return of 27%, YTD

Interesting stats that the FXFB page on Bloomberg offers. A simple buy-and-hold strategy of being long the 3 most-yielding currencies of the developed world, in equal weighting, funded by borrowing U.S. dollars, would have returned more than 27% year-to-date this year, with a Sharpe ratio of 1.37. Of course, this is only for the last 12 months, and we know how the Yen carry trade ended... (The actual return is a tad higher since the tool computes the excess return over the risk-free rate.) The screen shot below shows monthly returns and is thus as of Nov 30.

CRE CDOs: Events of Default Triggered on Senior Notes for Missed Interest Payments

On Dec 8 (sorry for the delay!) Standard & Poor's lowered its ratings on 12 classes from LNR CDO V's series 2007-1 (LNR CDO V), which is a commercial real estate collateralized debt obligation. The downgrades "reflect liquidity interruptions to the transaction" after the outstanding classes did not "receive interest according to the trustee
remittance report dated Nov. 23, 2009." The most senior tranches, Classes A and B, are non-deferrable interest classes and they have each missed interest payments, which "resulted in an event of default (EOD) under the transaction's indenture," so S&P lowered the ratings on these classes to "D."

Ironically, the ratings on the 10 subordinate classes were lowered to a relatively higher grade of CC, because the interest due to the classes may be deferred for many years following the EOD. S&P indicated though that they "believe these classes will likely experience principal losses [..] due to principal losses on the underlying commercial mortgage-backed securities collateral."

Smurfit Stone Bond: The Impact of Mutual Funds

We know HY bonds have had a nice run since March this year, mostly due to retail mutual funds. The Smurfit Stone bond pulled up in Bloomberg below is no exception. It is a favorite of credit hedge funds, but its major holders have been U.S. mutual funds ("MF-USA") and insurance companies ("Sch-D")



Looking at historical holdings confirms MFs have been adding to their position on this bond. One fund increased its holding 10x in Q2!

Exxon's Acquisition of XTO...

... simply brought XTO's price in line with its peers. For example, we had noticed on Oct 20 the dislocation w.r.t. Anadarko and suggested a long/short stat arb trade. The long position on XTO pays off about $3/share, and the short position on Anadarko pays about $6/share.

Safeway and Kroger

Safeway and Kroger dropped like a rock after their downgrade by UBS. But Kroger fell more, relatively, than Safeway, resulting in a data point really far from their linear historical relationship (R2 = 72% over past 12 months).

Hedging Corporate Bonds With Other Issuers

Today's post is about hedging corporate bonds with the bonds or CDS of issuers in the same industry, taking paper companies as an example. First up: Smurfit-Stone and International Paper. The two bonds below have slightly different maturities and slightly different coupons, but their prices follow a nicely linear relationship:



The actual relationship may in fact be slightly convex, or simply the bottom left data points, which date back to late 08/early 09, are anomalies due to panicking post-Lehman markets. So the IP bond may be a good hedge, but of course shorting a cash bond is not always easy, so buying CDS protection on IP would be easier if the relationship with the Smurfit bond is robust -- and it is:



The relationship is similar with a comparable bond of another paper company, Temple-Inland:



This makes Temple-Inland another good candidate for hedging the Smurfit bond.

Debt Distribution and the Term Structure of CDS Spreads

Realogy has a massive wall of debt to refinance by 2013:



Not surprisingly, the cost of CDS protection on the firm's debt peaks at that horizon. If the company can pass that milestone (i.e., refinance this debt before it matures), the markets consider the firm will then have an increasing chance to survive:



Same thing with First Data: The firm has a huge revolver maturing in 2014. The bonds maturing in 2015 are not small either ($7bn), but half of it is PIK-able, i.e., its interests can be paid with more debt.

That explains the usual term structure of CDS protection on First Data: it’s most expensive over the next 5 years, when the 2014 revolver matures. Markets seem to think that, if the company can survive that, they should survive longer, so the cost of protection decreases.

CDS Protection on Campbell

In a previous post, we noticed that CDS protection on Campbell Soup is abnormally expensive relative to that of HNZ. It is not consistent with the yield on its debt either: the graph below shows that the yield on similar-maturity debt (in white) has tightened to 2.38% even though the CDS (in amber) kept widening out:



I did some casual research and found out that fundamentals on the company seem pretty good. Below, and except from recent Barclays research:

Campbell Soup Beats Consensus on F1Q and Raises FY Guidance. Despite relatively weak top-line performance partly due to difficult y/y comparisons, Campbell Soup beat consensus expectations for F1Q earnings and raised its full-year earnings and revenue guidance. Campbell 's debt balance stood at $2.905bn, up from $2.624bn last quarter and $2.756bn a year ago. However, the company contributed $260mn to its US pension plan during the quarter. LTM leverage now stands at 1.8x, up from 1.7x last quarter.