a wealthy fund manager is not correlated with a successful fund. merely the ability to extract fees.... ever see JWH fee schedule? JG
its a little different than buy and hold. Drawdowns are substantially better in Managed Futures than buy and holding, John Henry has some of the must volatile returns in the sector, most other have substantially lower drawdowns. Returns are much better as you can see from the chart.
what a royal hypocrite u are and a horse's rear end on top of that. U start ur inflamatory threads that border on libel and then try and pull this shit on Jem. Go back to ur hack journalism marketspammer. Senor Zen
I think if an investor had been with VN for that amount of time, they would have lost about 6 fortunes, am I right Jay? Thus having a negative total return. 5yr PS I am refering to the chart above. How can you attack JWH's drawdowns and support VN when VN has lost EVERYTHING 3 times. Thats 100% drawdowns marketsurfer, 3 of them. VN sucks.
In response to jay here is one of the quotes that i have read. "From what I understand of that situation, the difference between me and Victor Niederhoffer is pretty simple," he announces. 'In 1997, Niederhoffer had already lost half of his money betting on the Thai baht All the clients that could leave him already had. But Niederhoffer had other clients under a lock-up agreement where they could only leave his fund at year-end. He needed to make back a great deal of money in a short period of time or risk the rest of his clients fleeing. Selling S&P put options was effectively a double or nothing way to try to make himself whole by year-end. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he just kept selling more options on the way down because he knew the game was effectively over anyway, unless the market came roaring back." It did, of course, but a tad too late for old Vic. http://www.ansbacherusa.com/article_artofoptionselling.htm And I remember reading other quotes about people requesting their money back prior to the blow up. However, if you tell me that your buddy denies this I will retract my statement.
It would seem that under a lock-up agreement, he would have no obligation to return the funds. Else what would be the point of a lock-up if everyone could retrieve funds on demand?
thank you, jem. i do not know if this article is accurate, however, a lock up agreement is generally standard language in hedge fund paperwork. yes, VN, blew up in 1997, he has learned the lessons and is currently ranked back in the top 5 of all funds over 45 million. can you name one other trader/fund manager who came back from a total blow up to be ranked near the top in the world once again?? jay
^^^^^^^ Think you got that lock up obligation part right Mr Buffet has an interesting new strategy- lower exspectations far lower than S&P average mentioned earlier. So Bufet may look perhaps even more brillant reguardless.
There were some fine arguments posted here by those in the know about hedge funds and the drawdowns they can expect - 20%, 30% and all that. Well done. But its the customers that get the vote - not the owners. And I 'd imagine many will vote with their feet despite the disclaimers about system drawdowns. So I say, take these men ale. And their wenches. Then hang them at first light. Geo.
Your argument is very weak. A current ranking in the top 5 funds over 45m is essentially a red herring. If you want to approach the issue with intellectual honesty, (I am agnostic as to whether you want to or not, and frankly don't care), you need to do the following: Simply compare the absolute dollar wealth that VN destroyed in his 2 or 3 blowups to his recovery absolute dollar returns. %s mean nothing if you blow up at your largest fund size my friend. I am not VN's friend, and don't claim to know the answer, but would seem that the odds of his recovery dollar earnings being greater than the 50-100% blowups he had are very slim. You are his friend apparently, so why don't you figure it out? Just a suggestion of course, you do as you please of course. On a non 'quantitative' level, imagine the distress he caused his investors in his 2-3 prior blowups. Do you really think that him being 'on top of 'current' rankings' reverses the harm done? You need to wisen up Gould. Quants, while they have a lot to offer the trading community, are far from outnumbering true fundamental/technical masterminds. To confirm, check out Alpha magazine's last issue, which has the absolute dollar winnings of the very best. The list is dominated by funda/technical giants. The only quant that stands out is Jim Simons in terms of returns and longevity. If you want to sing praises, consider Simons because he is simply phenomenal. But then pause for a second and think why ESL, Kovner, Cohen, Tudor Jones, Maverick, Griffin are at the very top and dominate year after year on huge asset size of multiple billions, not just a dinky 100m or so that 5000 other hedge funds are punting around with. At the other end of the spectrum you have folks like VN writing useless but entertaining articles for Active Trader magazine to prop their ego. Good thing he stopped, he was starting to sound awfully arrogant... As Seykota once said, good writers write, and good traders trade.