It will take more than just a year for people to cease talking about the infamous London Whale trade that brought tons of bad publicity for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM). Boaz Weinstein, manager of Saba Capital, was on the other side of this trade, while JPM incurred losses exceeding $6 billion, Weinstein pocketed millions in profits.
Weinstein spoke at the Absolute Return Symposium in Manhattan held today, he said that betting against the derivatives trades dubbed as ‘London Whale’ was an easy and straight forward decision for him, NYTimes reports. Judging by the report released by US Senate that investigated the London Whaletrade, it is apparent that JPM traders also thought that their ‘hedges’ were pretty straight forward, most of the upper level management and supervisors ignored warnings of losses and continued to increase their bets on synthetic derivatives despite of mounting losses. The Senate committee slammed the negligence, irresponsibility and rule-bending practiced by the top management of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) during the infamous episode.
Weinstein also said that his substantial profits on the synthetic credit derivatives are less significant than JPM’s huge bet in favor of them and the involvement of such a large institution in such risky behavior. Weinstein’s hedge fund Saba Capital runs on computer driven algorithms that identify relative value opportunities and mispricings in the market. He is an expert derivatives trader He also added that Senate’s report makes it clear that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM)’s trades were not a hedge against bank credit risks but blatant bets that involved higher and unregulated risks.
Saba Capital Offshore Fund is down 1.07 percent for the month as of March 8 but up 2.54 percent YTD according to data from HSBC’s hedge weekly. The quant hedge fund manages more than $3.7 billion.
