The Banker Who Said No

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/03/banking-andy-beal-business-wall-street-beal.html

by dangoldin • 17 years ago

135 63 17 years ago

ggchappell2• 17 years ago

FTA:

> "This is the opportunity of my lifetime," says Beal. "We are going to be a $30 billion bank without any help from the government." (A slight overstatement: He is quick to say he relies on federal deposit insurance.)

And he pays for it, too (premiums, y'know). That's not "help" as we usually mean the word; that's a purchased service. Now, as for the bailouts -- which Beal is not getting -- that is "help".

jhancock4• 17 years ago

It is a good read and he obviously is a "good" banker for not overextending his bank. But to say he doesn't rely on government help makes it sound like he runs a normal corporation. Banks are not normal corporations. Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank. This is the rub with banks. They want to behave like private entities, but they leverage government backed currency which normal corps cannot do.

I think we need a new class of corporation for banks and possibly insurance companies. A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company. It turns out we sort of do have this class (there are lots of hoops to jump through to become a bank). But this class is built on top of the normal rights and privileges of the standard corporate entity.

jonknee• 17 years ago

> Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank.

Does your corporation have to abide by all of the banking rules? Of course not, you're a regular corporation. If you want to be a bank, start one. It's a pain in the ass but can be lucrative.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Lot of upmods for an extremely confused post.

Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank.

...oh kay.

A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company

Umm. You seem to be getting at GSEs, a standard corporate form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-owned_corporation

Generally, this doesn't seem to work out too well with financial companies, see Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (which weren't GSEs, but close enough...) The truth is, the vast bulk of banks were perfectly healthy and responsible. Almost all the trouble came from a few gigantic ones, and the reasons for their behavior were many.

ggchappell2• 17 years ago

> But to say he doesn't rely on government help makes it sound like he runs a normal corporation. Banks are not normal corporations. Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours?

You might have a point there. I guess the question (regarding whether my point was valid) is whether federal deposit insurance is underpriced. I suppose there is a good chance that it is.

kragen3• 17 years ago

You ask:

> Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not; you're not a bank.

Actually, I think that if someone loans a hypothetical non-bank US corporation money, it can legally loan out 100% of that money, without retaining any of it as a reserve. This is probably not a good idea, since it means it won't be able to pay any of its bills next week, but it's not illegal.

What you wrote makes it sound as if, when depositors loan a bank $100 000, the bank can then loan out $2 600 000. That is not the way fractional-reserve banking works. The actual amount the bank can legally loan out in that case is more like $90 000. A non-bank corporation would be able to loan out a larger amount (up to $100 000) in that case, not a smaller amount, as your post suggests.

jmtame2• 17 years ago

To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates.

Yep, he's a hacker.

BobbyH• 17 years ago

This sounds like a multi-variable linear regression he did in Microsoft Excel?

jmtame2• 17 years ago

That's very possible. Reporters tend to exaggerate certain elements, but he has a pretty strong math background. Either way you look at it, he's hacking the numbers to increase his own odds of investing in the right stuff.

jrockway• 17 years ago

Programming is more than software engineering. Some things don't need to be engineered.

joeyo3• 17 years ago

Other than excel having some floating-point arithmetic problems, what difference does it make what tool he uses?

Most things are linear to a first approximation anyway.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

One has to consider that he is simply investing after almost everyone else screwed up. This could be a great opportunity but results are not yet in. It important to consider this.

bilbo0s• 17 years ago

"To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates." - Forbes.com 2009

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas" - Warren Buffet 2008

karl113• 17 years ago

On the other hand, Warren Buffett is equally contrarian, and is doing a lot of similar things with his money, though on a larger scale (writing massive loans to Goldman, Harley, GE etc for 10-15% interest rates). He also has the same complaint about the government. His AAA rated business pays much higher rates to borrow money than Citi, BoA or any of the now gov't sponsored entities.

In any case, everyone loves a good contrarian.

catz2• 17 years ago

Didn't Berkshire Hathaway loose a lot of money because of the current mess?

karl113• 17 years ago

They went down as the market went down and did have some losses, but they also had an enormous pile of cash and not very much debt. Buffett has been waiting for the market to go down like it has so he could make his move with that cash. As a result, I think he's going to make out extraordinarily well in the coming years.

Sorry for the Buffett fanboyism, but he's the man.

smanek2• 17 years ago

Does anyone know if it's possible for an individual to buy a CDO?

Supposedly everyone wants to get rid of these things and is desperate for cash, which makes it seem like a decent opportunity for buyers. If I had $10,000 I could afford to lose (and was willing to take a long shot with) is there some market where I can buy those sort of assets?

Tangurena• 17 years ago

To start with, you have to be what is commonly called an "accredited investor." This is a requirement because almost none of the "investments" sold as CDOs are registered with the SEC. The accredited investor loop-hole is the one you'll need to invest in hedge funds and the like: it means something like you're a big boy now, and you don't need the feds protecting you from crooks. Alternatively, your organization will need to be qualified as an institutional investor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_investor

Ask your broker if they've got any they want to unload.

smanek2• 17 years ago

I'm a bit short of the wealth requirements to be called an accredited investor ... (1M net worth + 200K/year income).

That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a different set of rules for the rich.

ctkrohn• 17 years ago

I'd stay away from CDOs, but there are great opportunities in cash subprime and Alt-A mortgage bonds. If you know how to analyze the deal structures, it can be very lucrative. If you run the bonds to extremely draconian default and loss scenarios, you can still end up with 15-20% yields.

$10,000 is too little -- for agency MBS, $15,000 is the minimum purchase size, and I think the rules are similar for non-agency bonds. Most of the high-end brokerage firms can help you, though. I know Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns Private Client Services (now a division of JPM) deal in mortgage bonds for individual investors.

chris11• 17 years ago

I really doubt you could buy a CDO for a fair price. The banking crisis basically happened because banks had their assets overvalued and over leveraged their securities.

And I believe that through some accounting tricks, most bulge bracket banks are still overvaluing their securities. And in some cases once the securities are correctly valued, the banks will be insolvent. That is one problem the bailout money is for, to enable banks to correctly value securities.

So I believe that if a bank actually sells any CDO's at a fair price, there will be major problems with keeping the rest of the securities overvalued.

And from the way I understand it, most of these over valued securities are based on multiple assets, so one CDO is going to track other CDO's, you can't pick a CDO that is solely based on correctly valued assets.

Compare it to a local bank that is insolvent.And this bank has overvalued their assets. So I am looking to buy a house, and see that the bank has called the loans on two houses that would be in my price range. Except one of the houses has been used as a meth house, and the owner would have to pay an extra 60-70k to make the house habitable. Well, it would be an easy choice for me, I would want to buy the other house for less than the value of the loan. Only in this comparison that doesn't work. See, the bank found out that if they grouped the mortgages together, they could sell overpriced pieces of the mortages. So I would not be able to buy anything from the bank that would give me legal ownership of property. And the mortgages are grouped together, so for every dollar I invested in one property I would be investing a dollar in that meth house.

Nobody really knows what the CDO's will be worth in 10 or 15 years, but I do know that the banks don't have a strong desire to price CDO's low enough to actually sell them.

gills• 17 years ago

I think it's pretty telling that this guy was investigated for not consuming the fraudulent crap coming out of Wall Street.

Wouldn't that be like a 1999 startup being investigated because they didn't have exponential growth projections in the IPO prospectus?

ori_b• 17 years ago

Well, if someone does something completely out of the ordinary for [what the investigator thinks are] no apparent reason, then that should raise red flags to investigate.

I'm not surprised he was investigated; Massively different investments, raising money without buying anything apparent, and not trying to cash in whenever possible do point to an anomaly -- possibly even a fraud -- happening.

So long as he's not wrongfully convicted, I don't have a problem with investigations.

endtime• 17 years ago

Well, if someone does something completely out of the ordinary for [what the investigator thinks are] no apparent reason, then that should raise red flags to investigate.

Yeah, that's the point...that it was extraordinary to behave sanely (as opposed to "consuming the fraudulent crap coming out of Wall Street").

wyclif• 17 years ago

Buy low, sell high. This is not rocket science.

grinich• 17 years ago

However, he does know that too.

numair• 17 years ago

> Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars.

I have always respected a man who drives his cars hard and plays a mean game of backgammon -- and actually makes money while doing it. Upvoted.

kqr22• 17 years ago

He's also behind the Beal Conjecture which offers a $100,000 prize for either the proof or counterexample:

http://www.math.unt.edu/~mauldin/beal.html

BEAL'S CONJECTURE: If A^x +B^y = C^z , where A, B, C, x, y and z are positive integers and x, y and z are all greater than 2, then A, B and C must have a common prime factor.

toffer• 17 years ago

This is a great article.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Andy Beal's million-dollar poker games with the best players in the world in 2001, you should check out this book: "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time", by Michael Craig. It's got a pretty complete profile of Beal, and tells all about the games.

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Beal Bank? I am more interested in the story of how he started the bank. How can an individual with the government's blessing can start a bank like that. Don't they need huge funds and deposits and a million financial and security hurdles? Where did he get it all?

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Furhtermore, I wouldn't trust my money to a bank where the owner spends millions playing poker and brags about it. WTF?

nsrivast• 17 years ago

Poker inculcates many of the skills needed for finance, and if you're good it can simply be a profitable investment.

The Banker Who Said No

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