Piezoe,this is exactly what occured,and it occurs over and over again to exceedingly smart people.I was the head trader of equity derivatives at a major wall street firm who was fortunate/unfortunate enough to merge with another firm whose traders were clearly more intelligent and better educated than I was.I had countless discussion regarding mean reversion,volatility hedging and SIZE/Leverage. Not only was I was talked down to,but anything I said,which was not earth shattering ,was completely ignored.I can only tell you that 400 million dollars later,they still feel their method was 100% correct,and the risk managers closed them out "too early".Neiderhoffer and LCTM are models for this sort of behavior,and I doubt they will ever learn from their folly...
Arrogance and sophistry blend so nicely together. If someone must lose in the markets, who else would you rather that it be?
Six of one, half dozen of the other. The beauty part is that they were so confident of the turn before it actually happened and continued levering themselves in the face of contradictory evidence. As I noted earlier, if there is anyone who actually deserves to lose... The Fed has learned nothing. It continues to be a supplier to all-or-nothing leverage junkies, replenishing them with copious quantities of moral hazard whenever required.
it's the public, like it or not. VN has returned far more to his partners than he has lost over all. no one ever recalls how much money LTCM made prior to the blow up. how about the partners/investors who pulled their money out of LTCM prior to blow up? as a trader or trader of traders, one must always remain flexible as edge is forever changing and the baton is passed from famous to the unknown time and time again, the public just loses, loses and loses again. your unrestrained schradenfreude, when the greats stumble, doesn't change this fact. regards, surf
As this thread originally involved Dennis, check <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/directors.html">CATO's board of directors</a>.
I read Lowenstein's book, yes, but I have also read about LTCM elsewhere, relying on a number of different sources. Most recently, I read about it in Richard Bookstaber's A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation: http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Our-Own...bs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196039141&sr=8-1 I brought this book to your attention a while back. In a response post, you advised that you had ordered it. Have you forgotten, or have you just limited yourself to reading the jacket cover as you seem to normally do before giving us your assessment? Surfer, I really think you should think twice before you accuse other people of being shallow, implicitly or otherwise.