Leveraged and inverse ETFs – the exotic side of exchange-traded funds

Julian Oakland

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are supposed to be simple and straightforward, and for the most part they are, but one group punches well above its weight when it comes to market impact. In this post, I show that leveraged and inverse (L&I) ETFs generate rebalancing flows that: (1) are always in the same direction of the underlying market move; (2) grow significantly with both increasing and inverse leverage; and (3) must be transacted towards the end of the trading day. These features give rebalancing flows the potential to amplify market moves when markets are at their most vulnerable. L&I ETFs do not currently pose a risk to UK financial stability, but this could change if they grow in popularity.

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‘There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid’: margin calls and liquidity demand in volatile commodity markets

Gerardo Ferrara, Gerardo Martinez, Pelagia Neocleous, Pierre Ortlieb and Manesh Powar

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and subsequent sanctions led to unprecedented increases in key commodity prices. While prices briefly abated in late spring and early summer, these surged again over late July and August, with EU and UK gas prices reaching new peaks on 26 August. These moves created a sudden and significant demand for liquidity from market participants with derivatives positions. This post examines how non-financial firms (henceforth ‘commodity traders’) reacted to this liquidity pressure, and how their reactions impacted the functioning of commodity derivatives markets. Commodity derivative markets are important for the real economy and the recent events underscored the need to better understand the interdependencies between margin and counterparty risk management practices.

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2020 hindsight: what can supervisors learn from the collapse of Barings Bank 25 years on?

Ben Dubow

This year marks 25 years since the failure of Barings Bank. On Sunday 26 February 1995, the 200-year old merchant bank blew up thanks to derivatives trading, which it believed was both risk-free and highly profitable. It was neither of these things. The firm’s star trader was illicitly pursuing a strategy akin to ‘picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller‘. The steamroller arrived in the form the Kobe earthquake. The star trader’s losses ballooned and he doubled up on his bets, unsuccessfully. Barings went bankrupt. The episode captured the public imagination, and helped lead to the creation of a new regulator in the UK.

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Margin call! Cash shortfall?

Marco Bardoscia, Gerardo Ferrara and Nicholas Vause

Participants in derivative markets collect collateral from their counterparties to help secure claims against them should they default. This practice has become more widespread since the 2007-08 financial crisis, making derivative markets safer. However, it increases potential ‘margin calls’ for counterparties to top up their collateral. If future calls exceed available liquid assets, counterparties would have to borrow. Could money markets meet this extra demand? In a recent paper, we simulate stress-scenario margin calls for many of the largest derivative-market participants and see if they could meet them – including because of payments from upstream counterparties – without borrowing. We compare the sum of any shortfalls with daily cash borrowing in international money markets.

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Fluttering and falling: banks’ capital requirements for credit valuation adjustment (CVA) risk since 2014

Giulio Malberti and Thom Adcock

The financial crisis exposed banks’ vulnerability to a type of risk associated with derivatives: credit valuation adjustment (CVA) risk. Despite being a major driver of losses – around $43 billion across 10 banks according to one estimate – there had been no capital requirement to cushion banks against these losses. New rules in 2014 changed this.

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A balancing act: the case for macroprudential margin requirements

Cian O’Neill and Nicholas Vause.

Certain policy actions require a high level of precision to be successful. In a recent paper, we find that using margins on derivative trades as a macroprudential tool would require such precision. Such a policy could force derivative users to hold more liquid assets. This would help them to meet larger margin calls and avoid fire-selling their derivatives, which could affect other market participants by moving prices. We find that perfect calibration of such a policy would completely eliminate this fire-sale externality and achieve the best possible outcome, while simple rules are almost as effective. However, calibration errors in any rule could amplify fire-sales and leave the financial system worse off than if there had been no policy at all.

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Life below zero – the impact of negative rates on derivatives activity

James Purchase and Nick Constantine.

In 1995, Fischer Black, an economist whose ground-breaking work in financial theory helped revolutionise options trading, confidently stated that “the nominal short rate cannot be negative.” Twenty years later this assumption looks questionable: one quarter of world GDP now comes from countries with negative central bank policy rates. Practitioners have been forced to update their models accordingly, in many cases introducing greater complexity. But this shift is not just academic. Models allowing for a wider distribution of future rates require market participants to hedge against greater uncertainty. We argue that this hedging contributed to the volatility in global rates in early 2015, but that derivatives can also play an important role in facilitating monetary policy transmission at negative rates.

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Mean and modal Bank Rate expectations

Will Dison and David Elliott.

Financial market prices provide information about market participants’ Bank Rate expectations. But central expectations can be measured in different ways. Mean expectations, derived from forward interest rates, represent the average of the range of possible outcomes, weighted by their perceived probabilities. On the other hand, modal expectations, which can be estimated from interest rate options, represent the perceived single most likely outcome. Currently, these market-implied mean and modal expectations for the path of Bank Rate over the coming few years differ starkly, with the mode lying well below the mean. In this post we argue that this divergence primarily reflects the proximity of the effective lower bound to nominal interest rates.

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