How RenTec Made More Than $34 Billion In Profits Since 1998: “Fictional Derivatives”

Ten days ago Bloomberg reported that as a result of various tax dodges, one of the fastest-trading hedge funds in the US, Jim Simmons’ Renaissance Technologies, had managed to avoid paying ordinary income tax on billions in profits, by classifying trades that often times had a holding period of minutes if not seconds, as a long-term capital gain. As part of this finding, it was reported that there would be a hearing chaired by none other than Carl “Shitty Deal” Levin scheduled for tomorrow morning when yet another tax loophole abused by not only RenTec but all of its high churn and HFT peers (because the “friends and family” Medallion is at its core the original HFT fund) would be exposed for all to see. Moments ago, in advance of tomorrow’s 9:30 am hearing, the permanent subcommittee on investigations released a 93 page report on just how it was that RenTec engaged in the “improper use of this structured financial product, known as basket options.“

As the preamble to the report notes:

The report outlines how Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Bank PLC, over the course of more than a decade, sold financial products known as basket options to more than a dozen hedge funds. From 1998 to 2013, the banks sold 199 basket options to hedge funds which used them to conduct more than $100 billion in trades. The subcommittee focused on options involving two of the largest basket option users, Renaissance Technology Corp. LLC (“RenTec”) and George Weiss Associates.

The hedge funds often exercised the options shortly after the one-year mark and claimed the trading profits were eligible for the lower income tax rate that applies to long-term capital gains on assets held for at least a year.  RenTec claimed it could treat the trading profits as long term gains, even though it executed an average of 26 to 39 million trades per year and held many positions for mere seconds.

Data provided by the participants indicates that basket options produced about $34 billion in trading profits for RenTec alone, and more than $1 billion in financing and trading fees for the two banks.

And considering the topic of tax-evasion and loophole abuse is a rather sensitive and politically-charged one nowadays, to say the least, one can be certain that tomorrow’s hearing, full of sound and fury targeting America’s wealthiest tax evaders, will be quite a spectacle.

The highlights from the report:

For the last decade, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has presented case histories showing how financial institutions, law firms,  accountants, and others have designed and implemented complex financial structures to take advantage of and, at times, abuse or violate U.S. tax statutes, securities regulations, and accounting rules. This investigation offers yet another detailed case study of how two financial institutions – Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Bank PLC – developed structured financial products called MAPS and COLT, two types of basket options, and sold them to one or more hedge funds, including Renaissance Technologies LLC and George Weiss Associates, that used them to avoid federal taxes and leverage limits on buying securities with borrowed funds. While that type of option product was identified as abusive in a public memorandum by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2010, taxes have yet to be collected on many of the basket option transactions and its use to circumvent federal leverage limits has yet to be analyzed or halted.

The basket option contracts examined by the Subcommittee investigation were used by at least 13 hedge funds to conduct over $100 billion in securities trades, most of which were short-term transactions and some of which lasted only seconds. Yet the resulting short-term profits were frequently cast as long-term capital gains subject to a 20% tax rate (previously 15%) rather than the ordinary income tax rate (currently as high as 39%) that would otherwise apply to investors in hedge funds engaged in daily trading. While the banks styled the trading arrangement as an “option” under which profits from short-term trades would be treated as long term capital gains, in essence, the banks loaned the hedge funds money to finance their trading and allowed them to trade for themselves in highly leveraged positions in the banks’ proprietary accounts and reap the resulting profits. The banks offering the “options” benefited from the financing, trading, and other fees charged to the hedge funds initiating the trades. In the end, the trading conducted by the hedge funds using the basket option accounts was virtually indistinguishable from the trading conducted by hedge funds using their own brokerage accounts, and provided no justification for treating the resulting short-term trading profits as long-term capital gains.