From Attain Capital Management:
John W. Henry – An Autopsy of One of the Greats
November 26, 2012
We’re starting to get a little morbid around here – first with the “Is Trend Following Dead?” piece a couple weeks back, and now an “autopsy” of sorts on what went wrong at John W. Henry’s self-named firm. Some of the sales teams in the industry may prefer to avoid discussing such subjects, probably thinking something along the lines that doing so will “scare away the customers,” but to hear that John W. Henry was shutting down his eponymous managed futures shop was the kind of news that draws us like a moth to a flame.
Here was an industry stalwart in every sense of the word. A man who helped put managed futures on the map, and helped his pocket book to the tune of becoming a billionaire. He is a literal Hall of Famer, having received the Futures Hall of Fame award (whatever that is) from the Futures Industry Association. This isn’t quite Paul Simon hanging up his guitar, or Steven Spielberg deciding to get out of the movie business – but it’s close in terms of shock factor in the managed futures space.This raises one huge question - well, actually, it raises hundreds of questions - but the big one is this: what in the world happened? We don’t just mean this week in the announcement that he was done, either. What happened in the past 8 years to transform a behemoth into a blip on the radar? Where did John Henry go wrong? Eight years ago he was managing $3 Billion and on top of the managed futures world, with a hot young upstart called Winton measuring in at only about 1/3 the size of Henry’s managed futures empire.Why was 2004 the top for Henry, yet just a launching point for Winton and other billion-dollar managers? But most importantly for investors - how can we learn to identify when a top-tier managers’ best days are behind them?Did he take his eye off the ball?Excuse the all too easy baseball pun here – but the easy answer for many is to say things started to go downhill when Henry started to stray from his managed futures roots and dabble in sports, buying the Florida Marlins, then Boston Red Sox, a Nascar team and an English soccer squad. If he had only spent less time analyzing pitchers and trying to hire the next Billy Beane – and instead spent more time researching new models and risk parameters for his CTA – then things might have been different… or so the logic goes.
This would be exactly the kind of shift that an ongoing due diligence program is designed to catch, and something we wrote about not long ago in a newsletter. The general idea is that by staying in close contact with a manager, you can get a feel for when things might be going awry in a way that might impact performance. There is never a guarantee that you'll see the curve ball coming, but you've always got a better chance of it if your eyes are open.The problem is that this logic starts to fall apart when we look at just when Henry started these other business ventures, which, according to the Disclosure Document for the JWH programs, began as early as 1987:
“Since the beginning of 1987, [Henry] has devoted, and will continue to devote, a substantial amount of time to business other than JWH and its affiliates.”Even if we use the later date of 1998, according to a great 2007 blog post (they had blogs back then?) from the now-deceased Greg Newton (as if this story wasn’t morbid enough already), the shift of focus to include a sports empire doesn’t appear to have affected the performance (which held up until the end of 2004).His heavy-duty distractions did not begin until he became involved in major league baseball… Henry bought the Florida Marlins in 1998....MUCH MORE
