Anyone remember Cramer's old "Buzz Beat" columns, about a fictitious hedge fund run by Buzz Gould and Batch Hammer? He described how these momentum operators would run up the price of their existing holdings at the end of every month by buying more shares at wildly inflated prices. As long as their fund performance looked great and brought in new capital every month, they could keep the game going... Here's a collection of the columns: http://www.cdn.thestreet.com/story/933623/1.html Reading about Michael Lauer, it seems he played a variation of the same game: http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/1226/096A.html So was he a Market Wizard, or a Market Lizard?
I read Soros' book about the crash of 08 last week and he went into 08 long China and India indexes and short the $. unfortunately, emerging markets crashed hardest and the dollar posted it's biggest rally in decades. This is a well conected top trader who positioned himself reasonably wrong (he was also short europe and US which did good) ahead of such a crash although he did see some kind of crisis looming. Obviously Soros didnt blew up (I believe he was flat to slightly up in 08?) but still it's comforting in a way to find out even the fat cats are just basically 'guessing' as much as the next guy.
Interesting to read the interview with Richard Dennis. He was warning about the credit crunch way back in 1988 !! Looks like traders do have some insight into the fundamentalist future forecast. How right he was. Pity Clinton and Bush took no notice. That goes for Greenspan and Bernanke too. If there was any justice they would be suffering it a lot more personally for making such a cock-up !! imho Like existing outa garbage bins like some other folk have to.
I remember reading Soros ended the year up 10%, but was red all the way into Oct/Nov. He made his year on that EUR spike I believe in early December. Supposedly, Soros bet the farm on that rally.
Linda Raschke closed down her LBR Pacific Fund or merged it into something else sometime in the 90s. Losses weren't all that bad around 28%. I
No disrespect to Richard Dennis, but how can you say that was a good call when he called it 20 years too early?
Rashke did indeed bust out early in her career. She ended up owing money to the clearing corp and had to pay it back over time.
No surprise there. Many of her technical trading strategies were absolutely terrible....losers-at-best.
I reckon it was a good call because if the Fed had tightened up the rules of not lending vast amounts to losers then the whole planet would not have been affected later. The bubble had 20 years to mature and fester. I think RD stopped trading about then but what he did next I would be interested to know