Boaz Weinstein raises stakes with closed-end fund ETF
Hedge fund manager opens bet on CEFs to investors, but risks are rising
The man who harpooned the London whale is spearfishing in another obscure area of the financial markets these days — and now he is inviting ordinary investors to join him in the sport.
Boaz Weinstein, the New York hedge fund manager, is planning to launch an exchange-traded fund that will invest in closed-end funds, publicly traded US investment vehicles whose shares have looked mispriced for most of the past three years. Is he launching too late?
You may remember that Mr Weinstein made a big splash in 2012 when he took the other side of outsized derivatives trades placed by JPMorgan prop trader Bruno Iksil. Those trades were so ill-advisedly large that they earned Mr Iksil the nickname “London whale” and ended up costing his bank $6bn in losses, as well as netting Mr Weinstein a tidy return.
CEFs are small fish by comparison, rarely more than $500m in market capitalisation, but there is a reason they caught Mr Weinstein’s attention. Their shares are so illiquid, they can often trade at very large discounts to the value of the underlying assets, which in many cases are just the sort of high-yield bonds, loans and other securities that Mr Weinstein knows well.
Through his hedge fund Saba Capital, he has spent the past couple of years buying CEF shares and urging their managers to do something to narrow the discount. So prolific has he become, he might reasonably claim to be partly responsible for the narrowing of the average discount in the sector.
Take the Franklin Limited Duration Income Trust, for example. When Saba took a 14.5 per cent stake in the fund last March, it was trading at an 11 per cent discount to its credit portfolio, leading Mr Weinstein to suggest it would be better winding itself up and returning the money to shareholders. In January, the fund’s managers agreed to buy back 15 per cent of the shares at close to net asset value in a tender offer that helped narrow the discount to 6 per cent.
Action may also be brewing at the Clough Global Opportunities Fund, which invests in both stocks and bonds: since Saba revealed a stake in January, a long-time portfolio manager has left, and the fund’s discount to net asset value has shrunk from 18 per cent to 10 per cent.
Mr Weinstein was early to the CEF market, suffering as discounts continued to widen in 2015, but last year was a much stronger year, and the launch of an actively managed ETF is an attempt to capitalise on his recent record. As its name suggests, the Saba Interest Rate Hedged CEF ETF also aims to neutralise one of the main objections to investing in CEFs, namely that rising interest rates will be bad for the sector.
Many CEFs employ leverage to juice returns, so higher rates raise their borrowing costs, at the same time as the bonds in their portfolio may be falling in value. The generous monthly dividends that CEFs pay also look relatively less attractive in a higher rate environment, so shareholders may drift away from the sector, depressing share prices.
So, rising rates are bad, and that is why the average discount on fixed-income CEFs actually narrowed sharply last week when the Federal Reserve’s well-trailed quarter-point rise was accompanied by commentary that was more dovish than anticipated.
The question is what happens from here. When this column last looked at fixed-income CEF shares in September 2015, they looked a no-brainer. The discount to net assets was an average 11 per cent, worse than at any point in the past decade, outside the credit crisis.
At less than 4 per cent, the discounts are not now wildly out of whack with historical averages.
The reason discounts have narrowed substantially in the past 18 months is partly because the Fed has made it clear interest rate rises will be gradual, and partly because the activism of Saba and others has rekindled interest in the sector and put managers on notice that they must work to improve share prices.
That is not to say there will not be opportunities for profit, since funds with weak managers or those with particularly unloved investment strategies can still trade at double-digit discounts, and many contain provisions deep in their prospectuses that could be used to trigger liquidation or put other pressure on them to take shareholder-friendly action.
That will require the skill of a patient fisherman. Making money in CEFs is no longer like shooting fish in a barrel.