The financial firm Long-Term Capital Management was founded in February 1994 with a capital of 1.25 billion dollars and had a significant impact on financial markets in the 1990s. The firm operated as a hedge fund and used precise mathematical models in their trading strategies. They focused mainly on spread trading, the most common of which were convergence bond trading and trading in equity pairs. As the spreads between prices were usually very small, they were traded with high leverage. LTCM achieved great success in the first years of trading, but then two financial crises occurred that their models were not able to predict. Between the two crises, spreads between prices started to widen and LTCM traders started to resort to increasingly riskier trading strategies, such as volatility trading, which brought the firm to the brink of collapse. The collapse of LTCM’s fund would have triggered a global financial crisis due to its size and the involvement of many banks around the world, so the Federal Reserve stepped in and helped liquidate LTCM’s hedge fund with the help of Wall Street’s leading investment banks. In our thesis we present the firm LTCM, its trading strategies, its success and its collapse.
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