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

Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, examines the personalities, academic experts, and professional relationships at LTCM and uncovers the layers of numbers behind its roller-coaster ride with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.

LTCM began trading in 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping $1.25 billion. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned $1.6 billion, profits that exceeded 40 percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996, it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.

The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan). Lowenstein's smooth, conversational but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum

Product Description
John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best--and the brainiest--bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then, in 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of his traders, Meriwether abruptly resigned. For two years, his fiercely loyal team--convinced that the chief had been unfairly victimized--plotted their boss's return. Then, in 1993, Meriwether made a historic offer. He gathered together his former disciples and a handful of supereconomists from academia and proposed that they become partners in a new hedge fund different from any Wall Street had ever seen. And so Long-Term Capital Management was born.
        In a decade that had seen the longest and most rewarding bull market in history, hedge funds were the ne plus ultra of investments: discreet, private clubs limited to those rich enough to pony up millions. They promised that the investors' money would be placed in a variety of trades simultaneously--a "hedging" strategy designed to minimize the possibility of loss. At Long-Term, Meriwether & Co. truly believed that their finely tuned computer models had tamed the genie of risk, and would allow them to bet on the future with near mathematical certainty. And thanks to their cast--which included a pair of future Nobel Prize winners--investors believed them.
        From the moment Long-Term opened their offices in posh Greenwich, Connecticut, miles from the pandemonium of Wall Street, it was clear that this would be a hedge fund apart from all others. Though they viewed the big Wall Street investment banks with disdain, so great was Long-Term's aura that these very banks lined up to provide the firm with financing, and on the very sweetest of terms. So self-certain were Long-Term's traders that they borrowed with little concern about the leverage. At first, Long-Term's models stayed on script, and this new gold standard in hedge funds boasted such incredible returns that private investors and even central banks clamored to invest more money. It seemed the geniuses in Greenwich couldn't lose.
        Four years later, when a default in Russia set off a global storm that Long-Term's models hadn't anticipated, its supposedly safe portfolios imploded. In five weeks, the professors went from mega-rich geniuses to discredited failures. With the firm about to go under, its staggering $100 billion balance sheet threatened to drag down markets around the world. At the eleventh hour, fearing that the financial system of the world was in peril, the Federal Reserve Bank hastily summoned Wall Street's leading banks to underwrite a bailout.
        Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author of Buffett, captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-nineties culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.
        When Genius Failed is the cautionary financial tale of our time, the gripping saga of what happened when an elite group of investors believed they could actually deconstruct risk and use virtually limitless leverage to create limitless wealth. In Roger Lowenstein's hands, it is a brilliant tale peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama.

The tale of the rise and fall of Long-Term capital was coming to its end as I was putting to press my own book on option-based trading strategies and their effects on market volatility (Capital Ideas and Market Realities). The whole adventure constituted a perfect capstone to my story, which goes back to the crash of 1929, showing how strategies that purport to eliminate the risk of investing can end up exploding in the face of their followers and investors generally.

Now Roger Lowenstein, formerly a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and author of a biography on Warren Buffett, has devoted a whole book to LTC. Drawing largely on contemporaneous reporting and on his own personal interviews with many of the principal and supporting players (although not, alas, Meriwether himself), Lowenstein manages to create a real page-turner out of the unfolding events, even for readers who already know the ultimate outcome.

Part of the tension, it seems to this reader, stems from the unresolved (and probably unresolvable) ambiguity about the real nature of the story. On the one hand, it seems to play out as a classic tragedy: Its larger-than-life protagonists hubristically pit themselves against the gods of the marketplace and fall hard. Certainly, for many of the players involved, it was a tragedy. Meriwether not only lost his money but his reputation. Nobel laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes found their lives' works on modern finance theory rocked to the core. Many of those instrumental in engineering LTC's rescue (including Goldman Sachs' Jon Corzine) ended up subsequently losing their own jobs. LTC's employees, who had been encouraged to invest their bonuses from the firm's fat years back into the firm itself, lost it all when the firm collapsed; nor did they get the $500,000 bonuses secured by the LTC partners as part of the bailout package.

On the other hand, one can also view the whole affair as great comedy (especially if one is on the outside looking in). After all, a scene with 140 lawyers in one room is worthy of the Marx brothers. Then you have the Fed descending, at the eleventh hour, like some deus ex machina, to restore order and stability; not to mention Wall Street's viciously competitive masters of the universe gathered on folding metal chairs around the New York Fed's boardroom table, trying to rescue the world from themselves. Even LTC's partners bounce back. Meriwether (J.M. to friends, and throughout the book) starts a new hedge fund, bringing in several old LTC colleagues. Merton and Scholes are still teaching and consulting. A week after LTC was bailed out, many of the principals gather at the Pierre Hotel in New York to celebrate Scholes' remarriage; a wedding, of course, is the classic comedic emblem of reconciliation and renewal.

The vibrancy of any play, whether comedy or tragedy, often rests on the quality of its villains. Lowenstein singles out a few individuals for special opprobrium. These include Victor Haghani and Lawrence Hilibrand, who basically ran LTC's trades and pushed the firm into ever larger, more highly leveraged positions, and into areas such as merger arbitrage in which the firm had no demonstrated expertise. Hilibrand comes across in a particularly bad light, especially when he shows up at the bailout negotiations with his own private lawyer and threatens to derail the whole process because "there was nothing in it for him."

The person one might expect to hold the center of the story, J.M. himself, plays a strangely muted role. Lowenstein describes him as "an unlikely star, too bashful for the limelight." Even his contributions in furtherance of LTC's eventual downfall seem to be more sins of omission than sins of commission. That is, he failed to rein in his uber traders, Haghani and Hilibrand, and he failed to heed the warnings of his more temperate (and, as it turned out, more realistic) colleagues. Of course, J.M. did set the tone for the firm-the air of infallibility that was to prove its downfall.

The book emphasizes how LTC's greed, arrogance and even foolhardiness made it susceptible to a market crisis. But was this crisis purely a result of exogenous events, such as the turmoil in Asia and Russia, as Lowenstein suggests? If so, how did these troubles overwhelm markets in fundamentally sound Western economies?

In my opinion, the book lets LTC off the hook in failing to explain how the very strategies it followed helped to create the perfect storm that ended up swamping the firm. The argument in my book, based on decades of debate with options experts in the industry and in academia, is that LTC provides yet another illustration of the market's susceptibility to certain large-scale trading strategies. These strategies tend to attract a lot of capital because they appear to offer a haven from the vicissitudes of market risk; given leverage and derivatives, they can command hundreds of billions (even trillions) of dollars of assets. Under adverse market conditions, however, the "rules" of these strategies call for dumping all these assets on the market-all at once. We saw this in the crash of 1987, and again in the turbulence of 1989, 1991,1994 and 1997.

All in all, however, When Genius Failed is a classic tale of greed and fear on Wall Street. Lowenstein tells it well, especially in the later chapters, which give readers a blow-by-blow account of the bailout negotiations. What's more, he brings out the story's particular pertinence for today's investors: Even with all the brains and all the computers in the world, investors can't control, let alone predict, human nature.

Bruce I. Jacobs (cimr@jlem.com), Principal, Jacobs Levy Equity Management, and author of Capital Ideas and Market Realities (Blackwell, 1999)


Readable and insightful history of LTCM   September 13, 2000
Jussi Bjorling
24 out of 28 found this review helpful

The story of LTCM's rise and fall is a compelling one not only for people interested in finance, but for anyone fascinated by the spectacle of very smart people losing enormous sums of money. Lowenstein's book makes this story accessible by glossing over some of the technical details, a tradeoff of readability for depth, but still provides insight into the causes of LTCM's collapse. I recommend reading both this book and Nicholas Dunbar's excellent _Inventing Money_: Dunbar provides more technical explanations, while Lowenstein has a richer story to tell about the people involved.


Logicians Snared in their Lair   July 17, 2001
Craig L. Howe (Darien, CT United States)
58 out of 73 found this review helpful

By now Long-Term Capital Management's tale is well known. A group of hot bond arbitrage traders joined forces with a pair of future Nobel Prize winning academics to form a hedge fund that promised it had conquered the ogre of risk. As profits grew, greedy bankers and brokers stood in line to provide financing on the finest of terms. Yet, like other speculators before them, they failed.

The markets, as G. K. Chesterton wrote, lay "a trap for logicians . . .. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

While the hedge fund's history is familiar, Lowenstein's conclusions are worthy of examination by both historians and investors.

1. Long-Term Capital Management's (LTCM) profits look less impressive in light of the losses that followed. The "profits" used by bankers and brokers to justify their loans and investments in the fund were not "earned", merely borrowed against the day the tide turned.

2. LTCM saw the cycle was turning, yet refused to limit its exposure. As spreads markets withered, the partners opted to increase their leverage to maintain returns.

3. The fund had faith in diversification. Its history serves as ample notification that eggs in different baskets can and do all break at the same time.

4. One can be big - read illiquid; one can be leveraged, but to be both is begging for trouble. No one can be right every trading day.

5. Traders are not computer chips. They are motivated by emotions; they run in herds, they retreat in hordes. Uncertainty will never conform itself to a numeric straitjacket despite the risk defining desires of the academic community.

This book tells a timeless tale. Markets are cunning animals, there to exploit investors' mistakes and hubris.


When Genius Gambled and Lost   September 18, 2005
AlphaMale (New York)
25 out of 30 found this review helpful

Hubris and leverage create a volatile combination. These fund managers may have been the brightest in the business, yet they began to think they could call the direction of the market based on historical data.

William Poundstone's book "Fortune's Formula" gives additional background on Richard Merton, and other geniuses who exploited probabilities and market anomalies to make money. Ed Thorpe's exploitation of convertible arbitrage is particularly interesting. The Kelly formula and Merton's early forays into finance are also mentioned. While the geniuses in Poundstone's book start out with discipline, they often succumb to speculation and greed. The thrill of the easy money game seems irresistible even to geniuses. For financiers, Tavakoli gives background in "Credit Derivatives and Synthetic Structures 2nd Edition.". She talks about hedge funds leveraging returns using total return swaps and how they refused to disclose the volume of these off-balance sheet transactions even to the banks doing business with them. For finance professionals it is good background to how banks got in over their head by supplying implied loans to LTCM without asking for sufficient collateral.

This is a good read even without that background, and I highly recommend "When Genius Failed" even to people without a background in finance as an insight into how human intelligence can be compromised by pride.



"The Barbarians At The Gate" For The 1990s   September 18, 2000
Michael E. Strupp (St Croix, US Virgin Islands)
20 out of 24 found this review helpful

This book reads like a horror story: we know John Merriwether and his arbitrageurs shouldn't ratchet up their leverage again and again but we can't tear our eyes away when they do it. Already knowing what ultimately happens to the Fund does nothing to alleviate the suspense and trepidation as a wave of panics begins to richocet from seemingly unrelated financial markets to trigger a worldwide financial crisis with LTCM square in the middle. Lowenstein's detailed description of the daily losses the Fund experienced will take your breath away.

All in all, this book provides a vivid portrait of how sensible, seemingly "safe" investment strategies can go terribly wrong when greed overcomes prudence and positions are pushed to the limit. Yet LTCM is not the only one who comes off bad here: Goldman Sachs is portrayed as shameless front-runners, Alan Greenspan looks like he is more out of touch than Ronald Reagan and Wall Street brokers and bankers appear as rational as rabbits in heat as they fall over themselves to extend credit to LTCM without charging hardly any margin whatsoever. This "easy credit" is what let LTCM leverage their assets up to an incredible 100X by the time of their downfall.

I promise you this: "When Genius Failed" will become "The Barbarians At The Gate" for the 1990s. And it will rightfully go down as one of the best books of business history of the last 25 years.