during the war, business continues for hedge funds

Several hedge funds have been very active since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The amount of transactions in Russian or Ukrainian assets has increased two or three times compared to before the war, according to data for the month of March published in several media last week.

“I get a lot of calls from my old acquaintances in the hedge fund world asking if they should buy cheap Russian assets [à cause de la guerre]. I tell them it would be like buying German ‘bonds’ from the time of the Holocaust. A little decency!” This daring parallel is signed Bill BrowderCEO of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management and long-time critic of Vladimir Putin.

This American businessman was worried, at the beginning of March, regarding the greed of certain speculators who would see above all in the war of invasion carried out in Ukraine by Moscow an opportunity to do business in the East.

Russian tank columns do not stop speculators

And a month later, the first figures circulating prove him right. “Trading volumes on Russian and Ukrainian corporate debt rose from less than $100 million before February 24 to between $300 million and $500 million in early March. And since then, the amount of transactions has remained largely above 100 million dollars”, noted Alexandre Baradez, financial analyst at IG France, contacted by France 24. “There have never been so many transactions on Russian securities since March 2020”, adds Bloomberg.

In other words, there are those who are desperate to get rid of Russian or Ukrainian assets that they had in their portfolio. It’s no wonder: “The big institutional funds and banks have no desire to end up with shares of companies from a country hit by unprecedented sanctions. It’s very bad for the reputation, and the clients of these funds often seek not to be associated with wars”, explains Alexandre Baradez.

But what is more surprising is that, on the other side, there are those who buy. The columns of Russian tanks advancing on kyiv, the intensive bombardments on Ukrainian cities did not prevent specialists in speculation such as the Aurelius, Silver Point or GoldenTree funds from jumping at the chance, tells the Financial Times on March 24. “These are funds generally specialized in the purchase and resale of sovereign debt of countries in financial difficulty and which have estimated that there was money to be made in Russia and Ukraine”, specifies Alexandre Baradez. He estimates that there must not be more than a few dozen hedge funds that currently dare to trade in Russia.

Their calculation is simple: institutional investors who held Russian or Ukrainian debt will seek to get rid of their assets… at any price. “Prices have fallen by 75% to 80% on certain assets”, specifies the analyst from IG France. These speculators said to themselves that it is not a few bombs or sanctions that “are going to make certain Russian banks which are among the largest in the world or Russian oil and gas giants worth only a few hundred million dollars when before the war, these groups were worth tens of billions of dollars”, detailed the American economic channel Bloomberg on March 30.

Yandex, Gazprom, Lukoil or even Russian Railways are popular

These hedge funds have rushed into the assets of the Russian Internet giant Yandex, the ubiquitous Gazprom, the main Russian oil producer Lukoil, the steel specialist Novolipetsk Steel or the railway operator Russian Railways, says Bloomberg.

These traders have even managed to buy Russian sovereign debt, which is no small feat, discovered Bloomberg. “Due to international sanctions, Russia is not authorized to raise money by issuing Treasury bonds and this debt cannot be exchanged on the financial markets”, recalls Alexandre Baradez. To obtain it, it is therefore necessary to recover the title from hand to hand, explains the New York Post.

>> To read also: “War in Ukraine: should we be afraid of a payment default from Russia?”

Transactions almost under the coat which can pay off big, underlines the American newspaper. “A Russian bond that matures in September recently traded at 48 cents, which means that if Moscow can repay at that time the original value at which the ‘bond’ was issued, these creditors might make a profit of more than 100%”, underlines the New York Post.

But it’s not just Russian debt that interests speculators. They are also on the lookout for anything from Ukraine. Several investors acquired Ukrainian sovereign debt following the start of the war and “intend to continue to buy more”, notes the Financial Times. Again, the chaos and destruction sown by the war scared off most investors, but “with stocks plummeting by 80%, some say there’s no way a country backed so massively by the West might default, which means that these assets will eventually regain in value,” explains Alexandre Baradez, the financial analyst. “The only scenario in which I see this sovereign debt losing all its value is if Russia completely occupies Ukraine for a long time,” one of these speculators told the Financial Times.

Extremely risky bets

Most of these speculators prefer to stay out of the media spotlight. “They are there to make money, not to make noise”, summarizes Alexandre Baradez. But some are more vocal than others. This is the case of David Amaryan, an Armenian investor and director of the investment fund Balchug Capital, who explained at length to the Wall Street Journal on April 3 why he had started buying Russian assets “the day Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine”.

David Amaryan has spent millions of dollars buying shares in Rosneft, Lukoil, Gazprom and even Sberbank. His rationale? “I called my clients to ask them if they had a problem with me investing their money in Russian companies, they told me to do my job and bring them money,” he sums up. -he.

Today, more than 50% of the funds he manages are invested in Russian securities. He knows that these crises can pay off big, he had already followed the same path in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, notes the Wall Street Journal. “Bad phases always come to an end,” he says. According to him, it would be enough to put blinders on his morals and be patient.

“These are extremely risky bets,” wants to believe, for his part, Alexandre Baradez. Admittedly, speculators do what they do in every crisis and buy when no one else wants to. But making money from the deadly fighting in Ukraine is perhaps more dangerous than trying to speculate on the financial crisis of 2008 or the bankruptcy of Argentina in 2001, for example.

International sanctions can still be extended. The discovery of the mass grave at Boutcha caused Europe to increasingly seriously consider an embargo on Russian coal, gas or oil. Assumptions that speculators who bet on Gazprom, Lukoil or Rosneft did not believe possible.

Firebird Management, a hedge fund specializing in Russia, is going once morest the grain of some of its colleagues and is currently looking to sell some of its Russian assets, reports the Financial Times. This fund had gained a lot following the annexation of Crimea, but it had also lost a lot in 1998, following the bankruptcy of Russia. And he knows that although all things come to an end, sometimes they can end in a knockout