HUGH HENDRY: I want to say I think that it's
obsessed me and it's another thing which motivated
those tweets and the reappearance of my public
persona was these very, very rare events when
volatility goes up with stock prices.
As far as I believe, or I can say, it's only
happened in Weimar.
The really weird stock market places like
Venezuela and-- RAOUL PAL: It did happen in
'99, right?
HUGH HENDRY: I don't know if it did.
I know for sure it happened in the-- RAOUL
PAL: I remember taking 100 vol equities in
'99 in the blow off, and it was extraordinary.
That's the only other time I've seen it.
HUGH HENDRY: Tell me more because that-- I
don't recognize that data point.
You're saying 1999, you're saying in the midst
of the tech bubble, as we were just approaching
the final surge, yield curve going up.
RAOUL PAL: Yeah.
We saw those, some of the tech names trading
100 vol, which was extraordinary.
That's fine because it was in a bear market.
HUGH HENDRY: Yeah, you're right because the
1998 to the finale was punctured with 50%,
60% peak to trough corrections in those positions,
which gave.
What I want to say is they were rising with
a high level of volatility, and so when they
had-- and that if you go that normalized,
volatility was an average of-- the vol went
to 120 when they halved ad then it reverted
when they went back up.
What I want to say to you is that actual surges
in stock price is higher-- because I spent
a lot of money researching as a newt, maybe
other people watching this could come back
and land any of their observations if they
can, but I am pretty sure that the only time
since 1987, the crash of '87, the only time--
and maybe still in the time of the stock index
that the stock index went higher and vol surged
higher at the same time was when, what's he
called, the Japanese Prime Minister, Abe.
Because he'd been Prime Minister like a long
time ago and was discredited being too nationalistic
with the whole Second World War and stuff.
Then he got reinvented, they came back with
this 3Rs if you remember.
The Nikkei just went boom, and vol went boom
at the same time.
Now, for sure, there was some special factors
because Japan being first into zero interest
rates had been the first financial society
to weaponize vol into a fixed income security.
This old [?], I want to say, instruments got
caught by, everything went wrong at the same
time but even over and above that, there was
this remarkable moment.
We've been looking at a trade and we just--
we then put the treat on in 2013.
Just saying, okay, so it's happened and let's
not see the unthinkable and there's no rule
of nature that says vol can go up with stock
prices surging higher, it's just that it's
really never happened.
The only point being that Japanese experience.
The genie's out of the bottle, and we saw
it with this-- and it was the most insane,
I'm going to try and flesh out the position
we are doing and try and put it on Twitter
maybe today or tomorrow, but if we had-- you
do the skew, puts are always-- we had out
of the money puts, and always like two times
more expensive, they get holes on the indices,
but you-- and why?
Why?
Just because of the observational data that
equity vol surges when prices fall so the
puts are more expensive.
If that world changes, and you can sell those
out of the money puts, you can buy so much
calls, but then of course, you had to structure
it whereby you couldn't make it to being wrong.
That hence the complexity.
Then there was it required a lot of carry
and so we had to engineer, and we had to trade
to create the carry but if stock prices had
moved 20% quickly, we had-- gold is fantastic,
but this position, rock and roll.
This is the position that really Chris Cole
from Artemis, the volatility trading platform,
that he had written up.
If you want, my favorite ever independent
thought piece on the stock market was Volatility
at World's End by Chris Cole.
That's what I wasted a year trading that early
because, of course Japan was in the midst
of the vol regime of 2008 to last year, and
of course vol just went down and so that trade.
It was a negative carry trade that just did
nothing.
What if in this world, like you say, with
the deflation that's coming and therefore
you know what the policy action is, does that
mean that volatility just continues to just
be subdued or does this mean that we move
into the new world, the new post-virus world,
is a world where just possibly volatility
may lose the prejudice of people's expectations?
RAOUL PAL: Does that mean that you're suggesting
that in this environment, there could be a
surprise and the fact that the equity market
goes higher and not lower?
Because it ends you're owning an asset that
maybe has some value perceived against the
debasement of the currency for example.
