“Well, God knows you don’t need any brains to buck barley bags...” — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) Alpha used to be what hedge-fund managers promised their clients. Better still, portable alpha — defined in the easy bed-time reading of finance MBAs as the “generation of excess return over a benchmark ...read more

Before you do anything precipitous — like sell your last stocks and stuff the cash into your mattress — let’s ask a few more questions. If you sell out now, what price will you get? A low price, right? So if you sell now, you will leave a lot of value ...read more

Out of the thousands of hedge funds in existence, hundreds are closing up shop and liquidating, if the latest trading action was any indication. Many of these hedge funds should never have been started to begin with, because their illusory gains during the credit bubble were too often made with ...read more

When Albert Hofmann — the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD — passed away at the start of this month, newspaper editors the world over reported it as the death of the man “who experienced the first ever bad trip.” But Hofmann’s hallucinations seem little worse than most acid-induced visions. Or so ...read more

I AM SURE GLAD TO SEE THE FIRST QUARTER of 2008 behind us. It seemed as if every couple of days there was more bad economic news. Each announcement was worse than the last. The banks, investment houses, hedge funds, etc. just pumped out the bilges with their financial gray, ...read more