When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

by Roger Lowenstein

The source of the trouble seemed so small, so laughably remote, as to be insignificant. But isn’t it always that way? A load of tea is dumped into a harbor, an archduke is shot, and suddenly a tinderbox is lit, a crisis erupts, and the world is different.

For four years, Long-Term had been the envy of Wall Street. The fund had racked up returns of more than 40 percent a year, with no losing stretches, no volatility, seemingly no risk at all.

The fund had entered into thousands of derivative contracts, which had endlessly intertwined it with every bank on Wall Street. These contracts, essentially side bets on market prices, covered an astronomical sum—more than $1 trillion worth of exposure.

Officials had wondered what would happen if one big link in the chain should fail. McDonough feared that the markets would stop working; that trading would cease; that the system itself would come crashing down.

Eckstein had made this bet many times, typically with success. As he made more money, he gradually raised his stake.

Gradually, governments around the globe were forced to drop their restrictions on interest rates and on currencies. The world of fixed relationships was dead.

Meriwether, who joined Salomon on the financing desk, known as the Repo Department, got there just as the bond world was turning topsy-turvy. Once predictable and relatively low risk, the bond world was pulsating with change and opportunity, especially for younger, sharp-eyed analysts.

The other factor is the risk of default. In most cases, that is not strictly quantifiable, nor is it very great. Still, it exists. General Electric is a good risk, but not as good as Uncle Sam. Hewlett-Packard is somewhat riskier than GE; Amazon.com, riskier still. Therefore, bond investors demand a higher interest rate when they lend to Amazon as compared with GE, or to Bolivia as compared with France. Deciding how much higher is the heart of bond trading, but the point is that bonds trade on a mathematical spread. The riskier the bond, the wider the spread—that is, the greater the difference between the yield on it and the yield on (virtually risk free) Treasurys.

As in the Eckstein trade, he often bet that a spread—say, between a futures contract and the underlying bond, or between two bonds—would converge. He could also bet on spreads to widen, but convergence was his dominant theme.

Eventually, spreads always came in; that was the lesson he had learned from the Eckstein affair, and it was a lesson he would count on, years later, at Long-Term Capital. But there was a different lesson, equally valuable, that Meriwether might have drawn from the Eckstein business, had his success not come so fast: while a losing trade may well turn around eventually (assuming, of course, that it was properly conceived to begin with), the turn could arrive too late to do the trader any good—meaning, of course, that he might go broke in the interim.

He wore the same blank half-tense expression when he won as he did when he lost. He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders—fear and greed—and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.4

Such reticence was a perfect attribute for a trader, but it was not enough. What Meriwether lacked, he must have sensed, was an edge—some special forte like the one he had developed on the links in high school, something that would distinguish Salomon from every other bond trader. His solution was deceptively simple: Why not hire traders who were smarter?

Most Wall Street executives were mystified by the academic world, but Meriwether, a math teacher with an M.B.A. from Chicago, was comfortable with it. That would be his edge.

The eggheads immediately took to Wall Street. They downloaded into their computers all of the past bond prices they could get their hands on. They distilled the bonds’ historical relationships, and they modeled how these prices should behave in the future. And then, when a market price somewhere, somehow got out of line, the computer models told them.

This is how they talked, and this is how they thought. Every price was a “statement”; if two statements were in conflict, there might be an opportunity for arbitrage.

The professors spoke of opportunities as inefficiencies; in a perfectly efficient market, in which all prices were correct, no one would have anything to trade. Since the markets they traded in were still evolving, though, prices were often incorrect and there were opportunities aplenty. Moreover, the professors brought to the job an abiding credo, learned from academia, that over time, all markets tend to get more efficient. In particular, they believed, spreads between riskier and less risky bonds would tend to narrow. This followed logically because spreads reflect, in part, the uncertainty that is attached to chancier assets. Over time, if markets did become more efficient, such riskier bonds would be less volatile and therefore more certain-seeming, and so the premium demanded by investors would tend to shrink.

All of Wall Street did this trade, including the Salomon government desk, run by the increasingly wary Coats. The difference was that Meriwether’s Arbitrage Group did it in very big dollars. If a trade went against them, the arbitrageurs, especially the ever-confident Hilibrand, merely redoubled the bet. Backed by their models, they felt more certain than others did—almost invincible. Given enough time, given enough capital, the young geniuses from academe felt they could do no wrong, and Meriwether, who regularly journeyed to academic conferences to recruit such talent, began to believe that the geniuses were right.

Meriwether had the particular genius to bring this group to Wall Street—a move that Salomon’s competitors would later imitate. “He took a bunch of guys who in the corporate world were considered freaks,” noted Jay Higgins, then an investment banker at Salomon. “Those guys would be playing with their slide rules at Bell Labs if it wasn’t for John, and they knew it.”9 The professors were brilliant at reducing a trade to pluses and minuses; they could strip a ham sandwich to its component risks; but they could barely carry on a normal conversation. Meriwether created a safe, self-contained place for them to develop their skills; he adoringly made Arbitrage into a world apart. Because of Meriwether, the traders fraternized with one another, and they didn’t feel the need to fraternize with anyone else.

Typical of Meriwether, he made gambling an intimate part of the group’s shared life. The arbitrageurs devised elaborate betting pools over golf weekends; they bet on horses; they took day trips to Atlantic City together. They bet on elections. They bet on anything that aroused their passion for odds. When they talked sports, it wasn’t about the game; it was about the point spread. Meriwether loved for his traders to play liar’s poker, a game that involves making poker hands from the serial numbers on dollar bills. He liked to test his traders; he thought the game honed their instincts, and he would get churlish and threaten to quit when they played poorly. It started as fun, but then it got serious; the traders would play for hours, occasionally for stakes in the tens of thousands of dollars. Rosenfeld kept an envelope stuffed with hundreds of single bills in his desk. Then, when it seemed that certain bills were cropping up too often, they did away with bills and got a computer to generate random lists of numbers. The Arbitrage boys seemed addicted to gambling: “You could never go out to dinner with J.M.’s guys without playing liar’s poker to see who would pick up the check,” Gerald Rosenfeld, Salomon’s chief financial officer, recalled.

The Arbitrage Group, about twelve in all, became incredibly close. They sat in a double row of desks in the middle of Salomon’s raucous trading floor, which was the model for the investment bank in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Randy Hiller, a mortgage trader in Arbitrage, found its cliquish aspect overbearing and left. Another defector was treated like a traitor; Meriwether vengefully ordered the crew not to even golf with him. But very few traders left, and those who remained all but worshiped Meriwether. They spoke of him in hushed tones, as of a Moses who had brought their tribe to Palestine. Meriwether didn’t exactly return the praise, but he gave them something more worthwhile. His interest and curiosity stimulated the professors; it challenged them and made them better. And he rewarded them with heartfelt loyalty. He never screamed, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. To the traders, the two initials “J.M.”—for that was his unfailing sobriquet—were as powerful as any two letters could be.

Though he had a private office upstairs, Meriwether usually sat on the trading floor, at a tiny desk squeezed in with the others. He would chain-smoke while doing Eurodollar trades, and supervise the professors by asking probing questions. Somehow, he sheathed great ambition in an affecting modesty. He liked to say that he never hired anyone who wasn’t smarter than he was. He didn’t talk about himself, but no one noticed because he was genuinely interested in what the others were doing. He didn’t build the models, but he grasped what the models were saying. And he trusted the models because his guys had built them. One time, a trader named Andy who was losing money on a mortgage trade asked for permission to double up, and J.M. gave it rather offhandedly. “Don’t you want to know more about this trade?” Andy asked. Meriwether’s trusting reply deeply affected the trader. J.M. said, “My trade was when I hired you.”

Ever an outsider, he molded his group into a tribe of outsiders as cohesive, loyal, and protective as the world he had left in Rosemoor. His cohorts were known by schoolboy nicknames such as Vic, the Sheik, E.R., and Hawk. Although J.M. knew his markets, his reputation as a trader was overwrought. His real skill was in shaping people, which he did in singularly understated style. He was awkward when speaking to a group; his words came out in uneven bunches, leaving others to piece together their meaning.10 But his confidence in his troops was written on his face, and it worked on their spirits like a tonic. Combined with the traders’ uncommon self-confidence, Meriwether’s faith in them was a potent but potentially combustible mix.

Driven by fanatical loyalty to Meriwether, the Arbitrage Group nurtured an us-against-them clannishness that would leave the future Long-Term dangerously remote from the rest of Wall Street. Hilibrand became so obsessed with his privacy that he even refused to let Salomon Brothers take his picture.

The deeper truth was that Hilibrand and his mates in Arbitrage had little respect for their mostly older Salomon colleagues who worked in other areas of the firm. “It was like they were a capsule inside a spaceship,” Higgins said of J.M.’s underlings. “They didn’t breathe the air that everybody else did.”

In return for such freedom, hedge funds must limit access to a select few investors; indeed, they operate like private clubs. By law, funds can sign up no more than ninety-nine investors, people, or institutions each worth at least $1 million, or up to five hundred investors, assuming that each has a portfolio of at least $5 million. The implicit logic is that if a fund is open to only a small group of millionaires and institutions, agencies such as the SEC need not trouble to monitor it. Presumably, millionaires know what they are doing; if not, their losses are nobody’s business but their own.

People at barbecues talked of nothing but their mutual funds, but a mutual fund was so—common! For people of means, for people who summered in the Hamptons and decorated their homes with Warhols, for patrons of the arts and charity dinners, investing in a hedge fund denoted a certain status, an inclusion among Wall Street’s smartest and savviest.

But there was one significant difference: Meriwether planned from the very start that Long-Term would leverage its capital twenty to thirty times or even more.

J.M.’s design was staggeringly ambitious. He wanted nothing less than to replicate the Arbitrage Group, with its global reach and ability to take huge positions, but without the backing of Salomon’s billions in capital, credit lines, information network, and seven thousand employees. Having done so much for Salomon, he was bitter about having been forced into exile under a cloud and eager to be vindicated, perhaps by creating something better. And Meriwether wanted to raise a colossal sum, $2.5 billion. (The typical fund starts with perhaps 1 percent as much.) Indeed, everything about Long-Term was ambitious. Its fees would be considerably higher than average. J.M. and his partners would rake in 25 percent of the profits, in addition to a yearly 2 percent charge on assets. (Most funds took only 20 percent of profits and 1 percent on assets.) Such fees, J.M. felt, were needed to sustain a global operation—but this only pointed to the far-reaching nature of his aspirations.

Though overlooked, Gutfreund had played a pivotal role in the Arbitrage Group’s success: he had been the brake on the traders’ occasional tendencies to overreach. But it was not to be. At Long-Term, J.M. would have to restrain his own disciples.

In any case, J.M. wanted more cachet than Gutfreund or even his talented but unheralded young arbitrageurs could deliver. He needed an edge—something to justify his bold plans with investors. He had to recast his group, to showcase them as not just a bunch of bond traders but as a grander experiment in finance. This time, it would not do to recruit an unknown assistant professor—not if he wanted to raise $2.5 billion. This time, Meriwether went to the very top of academia. Harvard’s Robert C. Merton was the leading scholar in finance, considered a genius by many in his field. He had trained several generations of Wall Street traders, including Eric Rosenfeld. In the 1980s, Rosenfeld had persuaded Merton to become a consultant to Salomon, so Merton was already friendly with the Arbitrage Group. More important, Merton’s was a name that would instantly open doors, not only in America but also in Europe and Asia.

Unfortunately, Merton was of little use in selling the fund. He was too serious-minded, and he was busy with classes at Harvard. But in the summer of 1993, J.M. recruited a second academic star: Myron Scholes. Though regarded as less of a heavyweight by other academics, Scholes was better known on Wall Street, thanks to the Black-Scholes formula. Scholes had also worked at Salomon, so he, too, was close to the Meriwether group. And with two of the most brilliant minds in finance, each said to be on the shortlist of Nobel candidates, Long-Term had the equivalent of Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali on the same team. “This was mystique taken to a very high extreme,” said a money manager who ultimately invested in the fund.

coast of southwestern Ireland, known as Waterville. Early in 1994, J.M. bagged the most astonishing name of all: David W. Mullins, vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and second in the Fed’s hierarchy to Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

As a central banker, he gave Long-Term incomparable access to international banks.

Private investors were similarly awed by a fund boasting the best minds in finance and a resident central banker, who plausibly would be a step ahead in the obsessive Wall Street game of trying to outguess Greenspan.

Long-Term’s fund-raising blitz had netted $1.25 billion—well short of J.M.’s goal but still the largest start-up ever.

THE GODS SMILED on Long-Term. Having raised capital during the best of times, it put its money to work just as clouds began to gather over Wall Street. Investors long for steady waters, but paradoxically, the opportunities are richest when markets turn turbulent.

Suddenly markets were more closely linked—a development with pivotal significance for Long-Term. It meant that a trend in one market could spread to the next. An isolated slump could become a generalized rout.

With traders scrambling to pay back debts, Neal Soss, an economist at Credit Suisse First Boston, explained to the Journal, “You don’t sell what you should. You sell what you can.” By leveraging one security, investors had potentially given up control of all of their others.

And when armies of financial soldiers were involved in the same securities, borders shrank. The very concept of safety through diversification—the basis of Long-Term’s own security—would merit rethinking.

Long-Term was doubly fortunate: spreads widened before it invested much of its capital, and once opportunities did arise, Long-Term was one of a very few firms in a position to exploit the general distress. And its trades were good trades. They weren’t risk-free; they weren’t so good that the fund could leverage indiscriminately. But by and large, they were intelligent and opportunistic. Long-Term started to make money on them almost immediately.

Now, when interest rates rise, people aren’t even going to think about refinancing. But when rates fall, they run to the mortgage broker. That means that IOs rise and fall in sync with interest rates—so betting on IOs is like betting on interest rates.

Put differently, in any given strategy, Long-Term typically wanted exposure to one or two risk factors—but no more.

For all its attention to risk, Long-Term’s management had a serious flaw. Unlike at banks, where independent risk managers watch over traders, Long-Term’s partners monitored themselves.

If J.M. had a cardinal weakness, it was his failure to insert himself into the debates. And there was no one else who could have played the role of nanny, as there had been at Salomon—no Gutfreund. The traders were their own watchdogs.

Other Wall Street firms had also found their way to MIT, and most of the big banks were employing similar models—and, what’s more, were applying them to the same couple of dozen spreads in bond markets. Long-Term’s edge wasn’t in its models but, first, in its experience in reading the models. The partners had been doing such trades for years. Second, the firm had better financing.

How could investors be so certain that markets would always be liquid?, Klarman wondered. He feared that investors were turning “a blind eye to the consequences of ‘outlier’ events,” such as the sudden disturbances and occasional crashes that, historically, have always upset the best-laid plans of investors. In general, Klarman warned, “Successful investors have positioned them-selves to avoid the 100-year flood. Increasingly, that way of thinking has become passé.” Turning to the former Salomon traders’ fund—that is, to Long-Term—Klarman noted that, given its projected leverage, even a single serious mistake would put a “major dent” in the fund’s capital. “Two major errors at the same time, of course, would be catastrophic.”

LONG-TERM EARNED 28 percent in 1994, its first year of operation. After fees to the partners, its investors’ accounts rose by 20 percent. In a year in which the average investor in bonds had lost money, this was nothing short of phenomenal. In October, when it was clear that the fund would finish with impressive numbers, Meriwether warned his investors not to count on a repeat. Long-Term would very likely have years in which it lost money, J.M. stressed: “It is clear that significant losses can occur even over a one-year horizon.” All good money managers write such letters. If they understand their business, they know they can have bad years. If they are honest, they let their investors know it or at least try to temper their expectations.

Notice that there is a key difference between a share of IBM (or an infectious disease) and a pair of dice. With dice, there is risk—you could, after all, roll snake eyes—but there is no uncertainty, because you know (for certain) the chances of getting a 7 and every other result. Investing confronts us with both risk and uncertainty. There is a risk that the price of a share of IBM will fall, and there is uncertainty about how likely it is to do so. So many variables—political, economic, managerial, competitive factors—can affect the result that the uncertainty all but overwhelms us. Seen in these terms, Long-Term’s letter represented a dramatic leap. While it heartily acknowledged risk, it banished uncertainty by putting numerical odds on its likelihood of loss. To J.M. and his traders, money management was less an “art” requiring a series of judgments than it was a “science” that could be precisely quantified.

Some of Long-Term’s investors had learned this credo practically in the crib. Terence Sullivan, who kept notes on his meetings with Long-Term, believed it would take a rare, “calamitous” event—maybe a once-in-a-hundred-year flood—for Long-Term to go seriously wrong. There would be times, Sullivan knew, when prices would deviate from the norm and when markets would move against Long-Term, costing it money. But for the markets in all of their trades to consistently depart from the norm would be a statistical freak, like rolling seven consecutive snake eyes or being hit by lightning twice. Sullivan had learned this long before, in business school at the University of Pittsburgh—which, like all such schools, was steeped in the teachings of Merton and Scholes.

But Black-Scholes makes a very key assumption: that the volatility of a security is constant. To say that the value of an option to buy IBM depends on its volatility is meaningless unless you can agree on what its volatility is. Therefore, the professors treated the volatility of a security like an inherent, unchanging trait. You have blue eyes; IBM has a volatility of X. You or I might assume that the market fluctuations of so many yesterdays are so much noise—arbitrary, not necessarily likely to recur, and best forgotten. But to Black, Scholes, and Merton—and to Long-Term—these fluctuations were invested with deep predictive significance. Each tick of the market up or down was latent with an unerring forecast of future risk. This implied that markets were efficient and rational at every step.