\u201cWhat ever happened to Gary Cooper?\u201d is a theme carried throughout The Sopranos \u2013 a question that Tony keeps asking as observes the men he is surrounded by.<\/p>\n
Lately, I have been asking myself a similar question as I survey the hedge fund landscape. I don\u2019t know what happens after the screen goes dark at the end of Tony\u2019s world, but I do know what is happening in the hedge fund community and, friends, it is not good.<\/p>\n
Today, right now as 2008 gets started, every Tom, Dick, Harry and Sue Wall Streeter thinks that they can become a hedge fund manager. They think that because they buy expensive jeans, wear expensive shoes and may have made a few bucks that they know how to make money in the markets. They believe that without a doubt they can turn themselves into the next Soros, Steinhardt and Robertson combined.<\/p>\n
Wall Street has become all about hedge funds. You can\u2019t talk to anyone about anything to do with the market without the phrase \u201chedge fund manager\u201d coming into the conversation. It\u2019s a wild and wacky thing that we\u2019re all experiencing. The fact is that most \u2014 and I do mean most \u2014 of the people who call themselves hedge fund managers at cocktail parties and while making investor pitches are full of BS. These people, to quote the great Gecko, \u201cDon\u2019t know preferred stock from livestock!\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing to see these people in action. It used to be that they were relatively easy to pick out of the crowd. Today they are the crowd. They believe they really have nothing to lose in the only business in the world where you can invest so little and potentially make so much. That\u2019s what the hedge fund world has become, and it\u2019s scary, really scary.<\/p>\n
You need more than a shoeshine, a smile and a couple of hundred thousand dollars of seed money to become a great hedge fund manager. You need to have a special chip in your head that allows you to process information in a way that makes money. There are very few in the grand scheme of things that have this kind of chip, not to mention the ability to act promptly on the information the chip serves up. Most so-called managers are just bit players glomming on to the hottest trend.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s spotting trends, not following them, that keeps winning hedge fund managers ahead of the pack. Right the followers seem to be everywhere and the spotters nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n
\u00a9DASP 2008 All Rights Reserved<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWhat ever happened to Gary Cooper?\u201d is a theme carried throughout The Sopranos \u2013 a question that Tony keeps asking as observes the men he is surrounded by. Lately, I have been asking myself a similar question as I survey the hedge fund landscape. I don\u2019t know what happens after the screen goes dark at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aandcadvisors.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}