Hedge (finance)
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In finance, a hedge is a position established in one market in an attempt to offset exposure to the price risk of an equal but opposite obligation or position in another market — usually, but not always, in the context of one's commercial activity. Hedging is a strategy designed to minimize exposure to such business risks as a sharp contraction in demand for one's inventory, while still allowing the business to profit from producing and maintaining that inventory. A typical hedger might be a farmer with 2000 acres of unharvested wheat in the ground, who would rather tend her crop without the distraction of uncertain prices. She's a farmer, not a speculator, yet her unharvested "inventory" may have lost 35% of its value ($285,000) in the three months she's been planning her planting. She might have decided she could live with a price of only eight or nine dollars a bushel, and to offset her planted position with an approximately equal but opposite position in the market for wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange by selling ten wheat futures contracts for December delivery. This farmer is thereby a hedger indifferent to the movements of the market as a whole, and has reduced her price risk to the difference between the price she will receive from a local buyer at harvest time, and the price at which she will simultaneously liquidate her obligation to the Exchange. Holbrook Working, a pioneer in hedging theory, called this strategy "speculation in the basis,"[1] where the basis is the difference between today's market value of (in this example) wheat and today's value of the hedge. If that difference widens, she earns a little more at harvest time. If that difference narrows, she earns a little less. She has mitigated, but not eliminated, the risk of losing the value of her wheat as of the day she established her hedge.
Some form of risk taking is inherent to any business activity. Some risks are considered to be "natural" to specific businesses, such as the risk of oil prices increasing or decreasing is natural to oil drilling and refining firms. Other forms of risk are not wanted, but cannot be avoided without hedging. Someone who has a shop, for example, expects to face natural risks such as the risk of competition, of poor or unpopular products, and so on. The risk of the shopkeeper's inventory being destroyed by fire is unwanted, however, and can be hedged via a fire insurance contract. Not all hedges are financial instruments: a producer that exports to another country, for example, may hedge its currency risk when selling by linking its expenses to the desired currency. Banks and other financial institutions use hedging to control their asset-liability mismatches, such as the maturity matches between long, fixed-rate loans and short-term (implicitly variable-rate) deposits.
A hedger (such as a manufacturing company) is thus distinguished from an arbitrageur or speculator (such as a bank or brokerage firm) in derivative purchase behaviour.
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Origins
The term is derived from the phrase "hedging your bets" used in gambling games such as roulette. The hedges on a roulette table are the lines between numbers or number groups. Placing a hedged bet is one where the chips lie across one or more hedges (i.e. on a line between two numbers or on a corner between three or four numbers). The bet then covers all the numbers involved at an appropriately reduced stake (e.g. 1/2, 1/3, 1/4).
The term gradually moved into common usage within English-speaking cultures and today covers a broad range of risk-reduction activities or conditions.
In the finance lending industry, the term "hedge loan" has come to mean a specific type of financial product based on the melioration of price fluctuation risk in a stock portfolio serving as collateral for a nonrecourse debt structured stock loan.
Example hedge
A stock trader believes that the stock price of Company A will rise over the next month, due to the company's new and efficient method of producing widgets. He wants to buy Company A shares to profit from their expected price increase. But Company A is part of the highly volatile widget industry. If the trader simply bought the shares based on his belief that the Company A shares were underpriced, the trade would be a speculation.
Since the trader is interested in the company, rather than the industry, he wants to hedge out the industry risk by short selling an equal value (number of shares × price) of the shares of Company A's direct competitor, Company B. If the trader was able to short sell an asset whose price had a mathematically defined relation with Company A's stock price (for example a call option on Company A shares) the trade might be essentially riskless and be called an arbitrage. But since some risk remains in the trade, it is said to be "hedged."
The first day the trader's portfolio is:
- Long 1000 shares of Company A at $1 each
- Short 500 shares of Company B at $2 each
(Notice that the trader has sold short the same value of shares.)
On the second day, a favorable news story about the widgets industry is published and the value of all widgets stock goes up. Company A, however, because it is a stronger company, goes up by 10%, while Company B goes up by just 5%:
- Long 1000 shares of Company A at $1.10 each – $100 gain
- Short 500 shares of Company B at $2.10 each – $50 loss
(In a short position, the investor loses money when the price goes up.)
The trader might regret the hedge on day two, since it reduced the profits on the Company A position. But on the third day, an unfavorable news story is published about the health effects of widgets, and all widgets stocks crash – 50% is wiped off the value of the widgets industry in the course of a few hours. Nevertheless, since Company A is the better company, it suffers less than Company B:
Value of long position (Company A):
- Day 1 – $1000
- Day 2 – $1100
- Day 3 – $550 => $450 loss
Value of short position (Company B):
- Day 1 – -$1000
- Day 2 – -$1050
- Day 3 – -$525
Without the hedge, the trader would have lost $450. But the hedge - the short sale of Company B - gives a profit of $475, for a net profit of $25 during a dramatic market collapse.
Types of hedging
The example above is a "classic" sort of hedge, known in the industry as a "pairs trade" due to the trading on a pair of related securities. As investors became more sophisticated, along with the mathematical tools used to calculate values, known as models, the types of hedges have increased greatly.
Natural hedges
Many hedges do not involve exotic financial instruments or derivatives. A natural hedge is an investment that reduces the undesired risk by matching cash flows, i.e. revenues and expenses. For example, an exporter to the United States faces a risk of changes in the value of the U.S. dollar and chooses to open a production facility in that market to match its expected sales revenue to its cost structure. Another example is a company that opens a subsidiary in another country and borrows in the local currency to finance its operations, even though the local interest rate may be more expensive than in its home country: by matching the debt payments to expected revenues in the local currency, the parent company has reduced its foreign currency exposure.
Similarly, an oil producer may expect to receive its revenues in U.S. dollars, but faces costs in a different currency; it would be applying a natural hedge if it agreed to, for example, pay bonuses to employees in U.S. dollars.
One of the oldest means of hedging against risk is the purchase of insurance to protect against financial loss due to accidental property damage or loss, personal injury, or loss of life.
Categories of hedgeable risk
For the following categories of the risk, for exporters, that the value of their accounting currency will fall against the value of the importers, also known as volatility risk.
- Interest rate risk – is the risk that the relative value of an interest-bearing asset, such as a loan or a bond, will worsen due to an interest rate increase. Interest rate risks can be hedged using fixed income instruments or interest rate swaps.
- Equity – the risk, or sometimes reward, for those whose assets are equity holdings, that the value of the equity falls
- Securities lending - Hedged portfolio stock secured loan financing (see HedgeLoan) is a form of individual portfolio risk reduction that results typically in a limited recourse loan.
Futures contracts and forward contracts are a means of hedging against the risk of adverse market movements. These originally developed out of commodity markets in the nineteenth century, but over the last fifty years a huge global market developed in products to hedge financial market risk.
Hedging credit risk
Credit risk is the risk that money owing will not be paid by an obligor. Since credit risk is the natural business of banks, but an unwanted risk for commercial traders, naturally an early market developed between banks and traders: that involving selling obligations at a discounted rate. See for example forfeiting, bill of lading, factoring, or discounted bill.
Hedging currency risk
Currency hedging (also known as Foreign Exchange Risk hedging) is used both by financial investors to parse out the risks they encounter when investing abroad, as well as by non-financial actors in the global economy for whom multi-currency activities are a necessary evil rather than a desired state of exposure.
For example, labour costs are such that much of the simple commoditized manufacturing in the global economy today goes on in China and South-East Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.). The cost benefit of moving manufacturing to outsource providers outweighs the uncertainties of doing business in foreign countries, so many businesses are moving manufacturing operations overseas. But the benefits of doing this have to be weighted also against currency risk.
If the price of manufacturing goods in another country is fixed in a currency other than the one that the finished goods will be sold for, there is the risk that changes in the values of each currency will reduce profit or produce a loss. Currency hedging is akin to insurance that limits the impact of foreign exchange risk.
Currency hedging is not always available, but is readily found at least in the major currencies of the world economy, the growing list of which qualify as major liquid markets beginning with the "Major Eight" (USD, GBP, EUR, JPY, CHF, HKD, AUD, CAD), which are also called the "Benchmark Currencies", and expands to include several others by virtue of liquidity.
Currency hedging, like many other forms of financial hedging, can be done in two primary ways: with standardized contracts, or with customized contracts (also known as over-the-counter or OTC).
The financial investor may be a hedge fund that decides to invest in a company in, for example, Brazil, but does not want to necessarily invest in the Brazilian currency. The hedge fund can separate out the credit risk (i.e. the risk of the company defaulting), from the currency risk of the Brazilian Real by "hedging" out the currency risk. In effect, this means that the investment is effectively a USD investment, in Brazil. Hedging allows the investor to transfer the currency risk to someone else, who wants to take up a position in the currency. The hedge fund has to pay this other investor to take on the currency exposure, similar to insuring against other types of events.
As with other types of financial products, hedging may allow economic activity to take place that would otherwise not have been possible (as a loan, for example, may allow an individual to purchase a home that would be "too expensive" if the individual had to pay cash). The increased investment is assumed in this way to raise economic efficiency.
Related concepts
- Forwards
- A contracted agreement specifying an amount of currency to be delivered, at an exchange rate decided on the date of contract.
- Forward Rate Agreement
- A contract agreement specifying an interest rate amount to be settled, at a pre-determined interest rate on the date of the contract. This is also known as FRAs.
- Currency option
- A contract that gives the owner the right but not the obligation to take (call option) or deliver (put option) a specified amount of currency, at an exchange rate decided at the date of purchase.
- Non-Deliverable Forwards (NDF)
- A strictly risk-transfer financial product similar to a Forward Rate Agreement, but only used where monetary policy restrictions on the currency in question limit the free flow and conversion of capital. NDFs are, as the name suggests, not delivered, but rather, these are settled in a reference currency, usually USD or EUR, where the parties exchange the gain or loss that the NDF instrument yields, and if the buyer of the controlled currency truly needs that hard currency, he can take the reference payout and go to the government in question and convert the USD or EUR payout. The insurance effect is the same, it's just that the supply of insured currency is restricted and controlled by government. See Capital Control.
- Currency correlation
- Risk management
- Currency swap
- FX swap
- Interest rate swap
- Basis swap
- Quanto swap
- Diff swap
- Interest rate parity and Covered interest arbitrage
- The simple concept that two similar investments in two different currencies ought to yield the same return. If the two similar investments are not at face value offering the same interest rate return, the difference should conceptually be made up by changes in the exchange rate over the life of the investment. IRP basically gives you the math to calculate a projected or implied forward rate of exchange. This calculated rate is not and cannot be considered a prediction or forecast, but rather is the arbitrage-free calculation for what the exchange rate is implied to be in order for it to be impossible to make a free profit by converting money to one currency, investing it for a period, then converting back and making more money than if you had invested in the same opportunity in the original currency.
- Distributed Funds Transfer Hedge (DFT-hedge)
Hedging equity and equity futures
Equity in a portfolio can be hedged by taking an opposite position in futures. To protect your stock picking against systematic market risk, you short futures when you buy equity. Or long futures when you short stock.
There are many ways to hedge, and one is the market neutral approach. In this approach, an equivalent dollar amount in the stock trade is taken in futures. Buy 10000 GBP worth of Vodafone and short 10000 worth of FTSE futures.
Another method to hedge is the beta neutral. Beta is the historical correlation between a stock and an index. If the beta of a Vodafone is 2, then for a 10000 GBP long position in Vodafone you will hedge with a 20000 GBP equivalent short position in the FTSE futures (the Index that Vodafone trades in).
Futures hedging
If you primarily trade in futures, you hedge your futures against synthetic futures. A synthetic in this case is a synthetic future comprising a call and a put position. Long synthetic futures means long call and short put at the same expiry price. So if you are long futures in your trade you can hedge by shorting synthetics, and vice versa.
Contract for difference
A contract for difference (CFD) is a two way hedge or swap contract that allows the seller and purchaser to fix the price of a volatile commodity. For instance, consider a deal between an electricity producer and an electricity retailer who both trade through an electricity market pool. If the producer and the retailer agree to a strike price of $50 per MWh, for 1 MWh in a trading period, and if the actual pool price is $70, then the producer gets $70 from the pool but has to rebate $20 (the "difference" between the strike price and the pool price) to the retailer. Conversely, the retailer pays the difference to the producer if the pool price is lower than the agreed upon contractual strike price.
In effect, the pool volatility is nullified and the parties pay and receive $50 per MWh. However, the party who pays the difference is "out of the money" because without the hedge they would have received the benefit of the pool price.
See also
- Arbitrage
- Asset-liability mismatch
- Cash flow hedge
- Hedge fund
- Immunization (finance)
- List of finance topics
- Option (finance)
- Spread
- Foreign Exchange Hedge
- Risk in Finance (category)
- PaperTrading