The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [56]
They asked Schnall if they might visit him, to ask a few questions before they made an investment. "All we really wanted to do," said Charlie, "was to see if he seemed like a crook." They found him totally persuasive. Interestingly, he was buying stock in his own company. They left thinking that Capital One's dispute with its regulators was trivial and that the company was basically honest. "We concluded that maybe they were crooks," said Jamie, "but probably not."
What happened next led them, almost by accident, to the unusual approach to financial markets that would soon make them rich. In the six months following the news of its troubles with the Federal Reserve and the Office of Thrift Supervision, Capital One's stock traded in a narrow band around $30 a share. That stability obviously masked a deep uncertainty. Thirty dollars a share was clearly not the "right" price for Capital One. The company was either a fraud, in which case the stock was probably worth zero, or the company was as honest as it appeared to Charlie and Jamie, in which case the stock was worth around $60 a share. Jamie Mai had just read You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, the book by Joel Greenblatt, the same fellow who had staked Mike Burry to his hedge fund. Toward the end of his book Greenblatt described how he'd made a lot of money using a derivative security, called a LEAP (for Long-term Equity AnticiPation Security), which conveyed to its buyer the right to buy a stock at a fixed price for a certain amount of time. There were times, Greenblatt explained, when it made more sense to buy options on a stock than the stock itself. This, in Greenblatt's world of value investors, counted as heresy. Old-fashioned value investors shunned options because options presumed an ability to time price movements in undervalued stocks. Greenblatt's simple point: When the value of a stock so obviously turned on some upcoming event whose date was known (a merger date, for instance, or a court date), the value investor could in good conscience employ options to express his views. It gave Jamie an idea: Buy a long-term option to buy the stock of Capital One. "It was kind of like, Wow, we have a view: This common stock looks interesting. But, Holy shit, look at the prices of these options!"
The right to buy Capital One's shares for $40 at any time in the next two and a half years cost a bit more than $3. That made no sense. Capital One's problems with regulators would be resolved, or not, in the next few months. When they were, the stock would either collapse to zero or jump to $60. Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions. For instance, it assumed a normal, bell-shaped distribution for future stock prices. If Capital One was trading at $30 a share, the model assumed that, over the next two years, the stock was more likely to get to $35 a share than to $40, and more likely to get to $40 a share than to $45, and so on. This assumption made sense only to those who knew nothing about the company. In this case the model was totally missing the point: When Capital One stock moved, as it surely would, it was more likely to move by a lot than by a little.
Cornwall Capital Management quickly bought 8,000 LEAPs. Their potential losses were limited to the $26,000 they paid for their option to buy the stock. Their potential gains were theoretically unlimited. Soon after Cornwall Capital laid their