JPMorgan Chase

Updated | The notion that the trades which caused the losses by JPM were put on in the last six months or so seems to have been widely accepted in the media. But is this really the case?

As anyone who has ever traded CDS (or any other OTC, non-exchange traded product) knows, when you have a short risk position, unless compliance tells you to and they rarely do as they have no idea what CDS is most of the time, you always mark the EOD price at the offer, and vice versa, on long risk positions, you always use the bid. That way the P&L always looks better. And for portfolios in which the DV01 is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or much, much more if your name was Bruno Iksil), marking at either side of an illiquid market can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of unrealistic profits booked in advance, simply to make one's book look better, mostly for year end bonus purposes. Apparently JPM's soon to be fired Bruno Iksil was no stranger to this: as Bloomberg reports, JPM's CIO unit "was valuing some of its trades at  prices that differed from those of its investment bank, according to people familiar with the matter. The discrepancy between prices used by the chief investment office and JPMorgan’s credit-swaps dealer, the biggest in the U.S., may have obscured by hundreds of millions of dollars the magnitude of the loss before it was disclosed May 10, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to discuss the matter. "I’ve never run into anything like that,” said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.’s Brad Hintz in New York. “That’s why you have a centralized accounting group that’s comparing marks” between different parts of the bank “to make sure you don’t have any outliers” .... Jamie Dimon's "tempest in a teapot" just became a fully-formed, perfect storm which suddenly threatens his very position, and could potentially lead to billions more in losses for his firm.

As we predicted some time ago, it would be only a matter of time before the story of how one failed prop desk trader, in this case Boaz Weinstein who blew up DB Prop only to be resurrected as the successful head of Saba Capital, took down the London whale Bruno Iksil. Sure enough over the weekend, the NYT penned a largely one-sided if entertaining read: "The Hunch, the Pounce and the Kill" which begins as follows 'It was last November, and Mr. Weinstein, a wunderkind of the New York hedge fund world, had spied something strange across the Atlantic. In an obscure corner of the financial markets, prices seemed out of whack. It didn’t make sense. Mr. Weinstein pounced." The trade of course was the IG 9 -10 year which we have dissected infinitely in the past two days. And while the NYT story makes for great copy, and has a great narrative it is missing one crucial feature, namely what happened in those two crucial months before Boaz was pitching the IG9 trade, and thus during which he was establishing the position (because only those "hedge fund managers" who appear on CNBC discuss their positions if they haven't already built up their max positions). What happened is the following: "Saba Capital Management LP... hired Toby Maitland Hudson from JPMorgan Chase & Co. as the firm’s assets reach $4.1 billion, according to people familiar with the hire. Maitland Hudson, who started at Saba in New York last month, ran JPMorgan’s proprietary trading of derivatives tied to commercial-mortgage bonds and will focus on relative value trades."

All you need to read

All you need to read and some more.

All you need to read.

For anyone who can't see the "WHY" or "HOW" in a Muppet Manipulators suit, re: Facebook IPO, here's a step by step guide comparing my research to that of the top 4 underwriters showing exactly what they did wrong & how everyone is ignoring it

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All you need to read.

• Hilsenrath: Fed Pondering Why Inflation and Deflation Threats Ebbed (WSJ)
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• The Euro-love: Hollande's euro arguments "nonsense": Austria's Fekter (Reuters)
• Obama Campaign Does Damage Control After Dems Question Anti-Bain Strategy (ABC)
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• Is Insider Trading Part of the Fabric on Wall Street? (NYT) ... uhm, next question
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• Special Report: The algorithmic arms race (Reuters)
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• BoE's Posen: some European banks need more capital (Reuters)... some?
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• JPMorgan CIO Risk Chief Said to Have Trading-Loss History (Bloomberg)... a guy called Goldman, blowing up JPM... the irony
• Pentagon's tone softens on Chinese military growth (China Daily)
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• JPMorgan’s Home-Loan Debt in Europe Increases Anxiety: Mortgages (Bloomberg)

The last time the body language (and ex-intelligence) experts from Business Intelligence Advisors appeared on these pages, their target was Ben Bernanke, and specifically his first ever post-FOMC press conference. This time around, BIA has chosen the analyze what has been left unsaid by none other than the head of JP Morgan in the context of his $2 billion (and soon to be far larger) loss which is still sending shockwaves around the financial world. As a reminder, "Using techniques developed at the Central Intelligence Agency, BIA analysts pore over management communications for answers that are evasive, incomplete, overly specific or defensive, potentially signaling anything from discomfort with certain subjects,  purposeful obfuscation, or a lack of knowledge." So what would the CIA conclude if they were cross-examining Jamie Dimon?

There's a big, fat "I told you so" coming down the pike. 

Update: JPMORGAN SAYS DIMON TO AGREE TO TESTIFY TO SENATE. Ummmm, there was an option?

As everyone (or at least Zero Hedge) long expected, JPM's prop trading debacle just got political and senators are about to demonstrate to the world just how little they understand about modern IG9-tranche pair trades. Expect to hear much more about JPM's "shitty" prop deal.

Update: not so fast: Bloomberg reports that the whale is still beached: JPMorgan Chase Still Employs Trader Bruno Iksil, Spokesman Says. So... pile into the IG9 trade still?

Yesterday we speculated that the final confirmation that JPM has unwound its disastrous skew trade will only came once Bruno Iksil joins all the other members of the CIO team in being involuntarily retired: "As for the question of how much additional P&L loss JPM has sustained from Friday through today is a different matter entirely, and we are confident the next announcement from JPM will come momentarily, coupled with the announcement that Bruno Iksil, the last remnant of the CIO desk, and now having completed his duty of unwinding the trade that brought so much pain for Jamie Dimon, has been retired." Sure enough, the NYT reports that Iksil is now history.