How to short bitcoins (if you really must)

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

How to short bitcoins (if you really must)

Bitcoin Accepted Here [by freeborn] (Photo credit: Adam Crowe)

By Quartz

Los Angeles, Apr.2, stock advice .- The rise of bitcoin, an electronic currency traded on an online exchange, has generated a media frenzy. Once scoffed at, its value has risen by 631% (denominated in dollars) since the start of 2013.

Lots of people think that means we’re in a bitcoin bubble and it will eventually pop. But if you’re one of these bitcoin bears, the company doesn’t make it easy for you to “short” it—i.e., bet that its value will go down.

The usual way to short a currency is to use a currency pair—something like EUR/USD, the value of a euro denominated in dollars—which trades as a single unit. For example, if the euro was trading at $1.3000, you would “borrow” a currency pair from your broker, which you have to return within a certain period of time, and sell it on the open market, pocketing $1.30. If after an hour EUR/USD is trading at $1.2950, you can buy the currency pair at that price and return it to your broker, making a profit of $0.0050. (If you’re wrong, you lose out.)

Most of the exchanges which allow you to trade bitcoins, however, don’t currently offer anything like currency pairs, nor any other futures or derivatives. Which means you would have to amass a stock of actual bitcoins to bet on them. That gets expensive.

One day, if bitcoin becomes well established, institutional foreign exchange dealers could make markets in bitcoins. (Among the current obstacles: There are only 11 million bitcoins in existence, and there can never be more than 21 million, so it’s not a very liquid market. If a way ever emerges to break bitcoins up into small fractions, that might solve the problem.) But for those looking to short bitcoins right now, there are two notable ways to do it:

Bitfinex: A Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange based in Hong Kong, Bitfinex allows ordinary bitcoin holders to act like brokers and lend bitcoins to people who want to trade them. The exchange does a lot of this automatically.
ICBIT: ICBIT allows traders to make bets using futures—financial contracts in which a buyer agrees to buy a security, in this case a bitcoin, at a future date at a predetermined price. Futures contracts can be bought and sold, so you can make money without buying the actual bitcoins themselves. This platform will also let you trade commodities, such as oil, in bitcoins.

Still, do you really want to short bitcoins? The market is still pretty volatile, and because it’s an unfamiliar mix of currency and equity, it’s likely to stay that way for a while. Remarks Cullen Roche, the founder of Orcam Financial Group, “You’d probably be better off just going to Vegas though. You’ll have more fun, about the same odds, and the drinks in the casino will be free.” ...

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Benjamin Graham Was A Crappy Hedge Fund Manager

Jack Bogle, the outspoken godfather of index funds and passive investing strategies, didn't approve of a recent Wall Street Journal article defending hedge funds.

In particular, he took issue with the author's reference to Benjamin Graham, the legendary Columbia finance professor who literally wrote the book on Security Analysis and mentored Warren Buffett.

Bogle wrote a letter to the editor. Here's an excerpt: Citing Benjamin Graham as the first "hedged fund" operator is an especially unfortunate example. "The trick," Mr. Rice writes, was Graham's "clever way to make money . . . whether it [the market] continued to rise, or started to fall." ...

Proposal for New Hedge Fund Fee Structure: 1% + 33% of Alpha

By The Big Picture

One of my pet peeves is the way that insiders -- whether corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elected politicos -- capture compensation (or credit) for normal cyclical gains they had little or nothing to do with.

This is the approach favored by the Crony Capitalists — those people pretending to be free market participants, and who merely pretend to be creating value. They are taking credit for structural successes that would have occurred with or without them. What they are actually doing is capturing value, not creating it — and then transferring it from its true owners (shareholders/investors) to themselves.

This is wrong; it is legalized theft.

If you want to see a good example of how CEOs transfer shareholder wealth to themselves, a good place to start is Roger Lowenstein’s 2004 book, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. The section on CEO compensation is astounding; these guys were essentially getting wildly overcompensated for being CEOs during a bull market. The prime example was the CEO of Heinz, who gave himself (with the tacit approval of his Board of~~Crony~~ Directors) a $90 million bonus. And this was back in the early 1990s, when $90 million was real money.

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www.ritholtz.com

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BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupé.

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