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To Catch a Trader on PBS

bobp

By bobp
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randomep Contributor

randomep

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I got half way and just could not bear it, these people are billionaires doing this..... they made billions, I can understand someone tipping their brother on some info and the brother trades and makes a million.

 

... makes me sick..... worse than Dick Fuld

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Parsad Grand Master

Parsad

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This seems sooo easy to do if you have connections and manage large amounts of money. Especially if you dont babble about it on the phone. Kinda disturbing really.

 

Especially since insider trading rules are so "vague" that one of the top hedge fund manager's in the world can't understand them and gets his lawsuit dismissed. 

 

I think if you gave a rudimentary explanation of what "insider trading" means, most 5 year-olds would be able to use enough judgment to say when a circumstance is insider trading and when it is not.  What ever happened to the common sense notion of just not doing something if you think it is too close to the line?  It's ridiculous that Cohen is not going to jail.

 

On another note, how the hell did Bethany McLean get on that show...captive hedge fund journalist who herself shed a trail of emails regarding Fairfax.  I remember this Deep Capture article covering this:

 

http://www.deepcapture.com/bethany-mclean/

 

And not only journalists like McLean!  A whole host of investment managers are as culpable who cow-towed to such personalities as Cohen and Chanos, and the minions that sprouted from their deep pockets like Adam Sender of Exis, or rotten apples that did their dirty work like Contogouris, Gwynn, Eavis, Greenberg, Hempton, Antar, Conen and Weiss.  Many were guilty, few were innocent, even though they've pretty much gotten away! 

 

This is all so passé now, but I remember the confrontations many of us had with these characters, including a couple of assholes from the Motley Fool.  How so many thought Prem was filing a lawsuit to hide problems at Fairfax, or how crazy Patrick Byrne was.  Yeah, he's a bit crazy, but he was 100% dead-on the corruption permeating Wall Street.  He had the courage to write about this stuff when no one in the media wanted to touch it, because they knew they would be cut-off from any future stories or information from those hedge funds. 

 

Even my hero Warren Buffett decided to step away from the controversies.  I remember asking Patrick Byrne back in 2007-2008 about why Buffett, a family friend of his, wasn't speaking up about all of this stuff, especially after giving a very affirmative answer to a question by Whitney Tilson at Berkshire's AGM on manipulative naked shorting.  He just said, "Well, I too was a bit disappointed that Warren did not speak up a bit."  Six years later and the world is now familiar with the government's case, many of the players, and the firms involved.  Too bad they only scratched the surface!  Cheers! 

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Guest longinvestor

Guest longinvestor

Posted
Posted

This seems sooo easy to do if you have connections and manage large amounts of money. Especially if you dont babble about it on the phone. Kinda disturbing really.

 

Especially since insider trading rules are so "vague" that one of the top hedge fund manager's in the world can't understand them and gets his lawsuit dismissed. 

 

I think if you gave a rudimentary explanation of what "insider trading" means, most 5 year-olds would be able to use enough judgment to say when a circumstance is insider trading and when it is not.  What ever happened to the common sense notion of just not doing something if you think it is too close to the line?  It's ridiculous that Cohen is not going to jail.

 

On another note, how the hell did Bethany McLean get on that show...captive hedge fund journalist who herself shed a trail of emails regarding Fairfax.  I remember this Deep Capture article covering this:

 

http://www.deepcapture.com/bethany-mclean/

 

And not only journalists like McLean!  A whole host of investment managers are as culpable who cow-towed to such personalities as Cohen and Chanos, and the minions that sprouted from their deep pockets like Adam Sender of Exis, or rotten apples that did their dirty work like Contogouris, Gwynn, Eavis, Greenberg, Hempton, Antar, Conen and Weiss.  Many were guilty, few were innocent, even though they've pretty much gotten away! 

 

This is all so passé now, but I remember the confrontations many of us had with these characters, including a couple of assholes from the Motley Fool.  How so many thought Prem was filing a lawsuit to hide problems at Fairfax, or how crazy Patrick Byrne was.  Yeah, he's a bit crazy, but he was 100% dead-on the corruption permeating Wall Street.  He had the courage to write about this stuff when no one in the media wanted to touch it, because they knew they would be cut-off from any future stories or information from those hedge funds. 

 

Even my hero Warren Buffett decided to step away from the controversies. I remember asking Patrick Byrne back in 2007-2008 about why Buffett, a family friend of his, wasn't speaking up about all of this stuff, especially after giving a very affirmative answer to a question by Whitney Tilson at Berkshire's AGM on manipulative naked shorting.  He just said, "Well, I too was a bit disappointed that Warren did not speak up a bit."  Six years later and the world is now familiar with the government's case, many of the players, and the firms involved.  Too bad they only scratched the surface!  Cheers!

 

At the height of the deepcapture/Byrne expose of this issue, I followed them closely and like you, was hoping that WEB would answer that question at the AGM. However, IMO, WEB has been addressing this in his own way, I'd argue, with more impact than just with some sound bytes. He has been inflicting body blows to the underlying root cause of this problem: the hedge funds' hefty 2/20 fee structure and more importantly their inability to beat the S&P index despite that. That overhead chart he put up last year showing this underperformance, five years into the bet is the shot heard around the financial world. The outside world will not see this published! And one can clearly see how virulently the WSJ, Forbes et al mount attacks on WEB at the drop of a hat. The mainstream media is out to shoot WEB, the messenger, because they know he is right and carries so much credibility! And, Oh, I just read that the hedge funds are all going long from here on out! Shorting don't work no more!

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