Prime brokerage
Prime brokerage is the generic term for a bundled package of services offered by investment banks, wealth management firms, and securities dealers to hedge funds which need the ability to borrow securities and cash in order to be able to invest on a netted basis and achieve an absolute return. The prime broker provides a centralized securities clearing facility for the hedge fund so the hedge fund's collateral requirements are netted across all deals handled by the prime broker. These two features are advantageous to their clients.
The prime broker benefits by earning fees ("spreads") on financing the client's margined long and short cash and security positions, and by charging, in some cases, fees for clearing and other services. It also earns money by rehypothecating the margined portfolios of the hedge funds currently serviced and charging interest on those borrowing securities and other investments.[1]
Each client in the market of a prime broker will have certain technological needs related to the management of its portfolio. These can be as simple as daily statements or as complicated as real-time portfolio reporting, and the client must work closely with the prime broker to ensure that its needs are met. Certain prime brokers offer more specialized services to certain clients.
For example, a prime broker may also be in the business of leasing office space to hedge funds, as well as including on-site services as part of the arrangement. Risk management and consulting services may be among these, especially if the hedge fund has just started operations.
The following services are typically bundled into the Prime Brokerage package:
In addition, certain prime brokers provide additional "value-added" services, which may include some or all of the following:
Counterparty risks[edit]
The prime brokerage landscape has dramatically changed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Hedge funds who received margin financing from Lehman Brothers could not withdraw their collateral when Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to a lack of asset protection rules (such as 15c3 in the United States) in the United Kingdom. This was one of many factors that led to the massive deleveraging of capital markets during the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
Upon Lehman's collapse, investors realized that no prime broker was too big to fail and spread their counterparty risk across several prime brokerages, especially those with strong capital reserves. This trend towards multi-prime brokerage is also not without its problems. From an operational standpoint, it is adding some complexity and hedge funds have to invest in technologies and extra resources to manage the different relationships. Also, from the investors' point of view, the multi-prime brokerage is adding some complexity to the due diligence as it becomes very complicated to perform proper assets reconciliation between the fund's administrator and its counterparties.[3]
Fees[edit]
Prime brokers do not charge a fee for the bundled package of services they provide to hedge funds. Rather, revenues are typically derived from three sources: spreads on financing (including stock loan), trading commissions and fees for the settlement of transactions done away from the prime broker. The financing and lending spreads, which are charged in basis points on the value of client loans (debit balances), client deposits (credit balances), client short sales (short balances), and synthetic financing products such as swaps and CFDs (Contract for difference), make up the vast majority of prime brokerage revenue.
Therefore, clients who undertake substantial short selling or leverage represent more lucrative opportunity than clients who do less short selling and/or utilize minimal leverage. Clients whose market activities are principally fixed income-oriented will generally produce less prime brokerage revenue, but may still present significant economic opportunity in the repo, foreign exchange (fx), futures, and flow business areas of the investment bank.
Prime Brokers facilitate hedge fund leverage, primarily through loans secured by the long positions of their clients. In this regard, the Prime Broker is exposed to the risk of loss in the event that the value of collateral held as security declines below the loan value, and the client is unable to repay the deficit. Other forms of risk inherent in Prime Brokerage include operational risk and reputational risk.
Large prime brokerage firms today typically monitor the risk within client portfolios through house-designed "risk based" margin methodologies that consider the worst case loss of a portfolio based on liquidity, concentration, ownership, macroeconomic, investing strategies, and other risks of the portfolio. These risk scenarios usually involve a defined set of stress test scenarios, rules allowing risk offsets between the theoretical profit and losses (P&Ls) of these stress test scenarios for products of a common underlier, and offsets between groups of theoretical P&Ls based on correlations.
Liquidity penalties may be established using a rule-of-thumb for days-to-liquidate that 10% of the daily trading volume can be liquidated without overdue influence on the price. Therefore, a position 1x the daily trading volume would be assumed to take 10 business days to liquidate.
Stress testing entails running a series of what-if scenarios that identify the theoretical profits or losses for each position due to adverse market events.
Examples of stress test scenarios include: