Blackstone is Watching Us and Just Admitted a Major Misrepresentation
(May 2023)
By Craig McCann and
Regina Meng
You can download a pdf of this article to print or email here.
BREIT this week eliminated a prominent marketing graphic touting inflated after-tax yields and tax-equivalent yields after we pointed out that it was false and misleading.
In December 2022 we predicted a run on BREIT and then in April 2023 we identified 7 major areas in which we believe Blackstone and BREIT have been misleading investors.
Blackstone's Choice: Let BREIT Crash or...
Blackstone's Choice: Let BREIT Crash or Collapse It Slowly?
(Dec 2022)
By Craig McCann and Regina Meng.
Introduction
Last week, Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust ("BREIT") announced that it was not going to honor redemption requests from investors in excess of 2% per month and 5% per quarter. In response, Blackstone's stock price fell 7% the first day and another 7% over the following week.
In this note, we explain how BREIT smoothed and inflated its reported returns for years, leading to extraordinary accolades, a prominent role in important regulatory...
$8 Trillion of Broker-Sold Reg D Offerings
(Nov 2022)
By Craig McCann[1], Mike Yan[2] and Chuan Qin[3].
We previously published Reg D Offerings Summary Statistics describing the aggregate issuance totaling over $20 trillion between 2009 and July 2022. You can read that post here.
In this post we provide summary statistics for Reg D offerings sold by broker dealers. You can get a pdf copy of this post to print or email by clicking here. Next week, we will be posting information on the extremely high failure rates for Reg D offerings.
I....
SLCG Research: Structured Product Indexes
(Nov 2013)
Most research on structured products focuses on what is known as initial date mispricing -- the difference between what a product costs and how much it is worth, as of the issue date. If you look at any of our structured product reports (let's take this reverse convertible, for example), you can see that the product was issued at a price of $1,000, but that the present value of its resulting cashflows only comes out to $960.40. The difference, $39.60 or 3.96%, represents an expected loss to...
SLCG Research: Priority Senior Secured Income Fund
(Oct 2013)
In our experience, retail investors are being sold increasingly obscure and non-conventional investments. An investment that raised our eyebrows recently is the Priority Senior Secured Income (PSSI) Fund. The PSSI Fund is the first regulated investment company that invests primarily in leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligation (CLO) tranches lower in their capital structures.
Unlike the mutual funds with which most retail investors are familiar, PSSI Fund investors are not able to...
SLCG Research: Structured Product Based Variable Annuities
(Sep 2013)
In 2010, AXA Equitable began issuing a new kind of variable annuity that, in addition to traditional mutual fund-like subaccounts, also included an option for a structured product-like crediting formula linked to an underlying index such as the S&P 500. Our firm had done a lot of work on both structured products and variable annuities, so in late 2011 we started analyzing the structured product embedded in AXA's product, eventually writing a short research paper on the subject which we...
SLCG Research: Structured Certificates of Deposit
(Jul 2013)
Lately, we've been fascinated by structured certificates of deposit (CDs), also known as 'market-linked CDs', 'equity-linked CDs', 'market contingent CDs', etc. Structured CDs are bank deposits that have interest payments linked to market indexes, individual stocks, commodities, or any other underlying asset. Unlike structured products, which have public SEC disclosure documents, structured CDs are not well studied and even the size of the market is not perfectly clear. We covered the basics...
Welcome to Muni Markup Week on the SLCG Blog
(Jun 2013)
Today SLCG posted a new working paper titled "Using EMMA to Assess Municipal Bond Markups". In it, our colleagues Geng Deng and Craig McCann report a veritable pandemic of excessive markups charged to retail investors in the municipal bond market. This work has been highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Jason Zweig. Jason's looked at markups generically in the past and we're happy this story has caught his attention.
The primary findings of the paper are that:
Update on Apple-Linked Structured Products
(May 2013)
A few months ago, SLCG issued a working paper that studied the decline in value of Apple-linked structured products. Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal also wrote a piece about these findings, most notably that Apple's stock price decline had serious repercussions in the structured product market. Apple's stock price has continued to fall and we recently updated the paper to show how this decline is still affecting investors in structured products.*
Since reaching $700 in September of...
SLCG Research: Dual Directional Structured Products [Update]
(Jan 2013)
We have significantly updated our working paper on dual directional structured products (or simply dual directionals). Since our first version of the paper, our work has been covered by RISK.net and in November of 2012 RISK.net named a dual directional as their trade of the month. The latest version of the paper is available from the SLCG website and SSRN.
In this version of the paper, we expanded our scope by studying all dual directionals registered with the SEC since 2008. We divide dual...
