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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ild who wrote (88704)	1/20/2001 6:56:29 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 132070

ild, I once got a tube of ChapStik sent to me and the co. paid the $3.95 in shipping. Nutso. <g> I ordered much more, but the ChapStik was all they had in stock. Hedge funds and private investors are, for the most part, small players on a macro basis. A man with $100 million in the market is a rarity. A mutual fund or pension fund without that amount is in danger of being shut down for lack of interest. So, they do little for big markets like stocks and US bonds. They are big players in lesser markets, like currencies and some commodities. Most MFs cannot short stocks. Most can't even use options. The few who can short stocks do it so sparingly that it is a non-event. The big short sellers are brokerage firms. When I was at The St. Paul and I wanted to buy half a million shares of T, Morgan Stanley got natural sellers for a lot of it and shorted the rest to me for their own account. They hedged their positions six ways to sunday. The way big institutions pick brokers is usually how much capital they are willing to risk to position their trades. Let's face it: Fidelity Magellan cannot just call up a broker and send a full position buy or sell order to the floor. And this is how the trading desks make profits or losses. If they make too much, the customers cut commissions. If they lose money, the entire desk is often fired. I personally put three bond desks out of business, and not on purpose. Just that the fund I managed was so large that to compete for my business made brokers take huge risks, and one mistake killed a few of them. Robertson and Soros got caught going the wrong way with too much leverage. Smart guys, but, with leverage, you sometimes only get one loss. Is it possible for Saddam Hussein to be rational? Much easier for him than the market. Not impossible, just not the way to bet. I got VASO from one of my full service brokers, Robert Schilling at Janney Montgomery in Bohemia, New York. He also introduced me to Duramed. Of course, I did my own due dili on both, but I would have never heard of them if Robert hadn't called me. I think a big co. will buy them out. A fair price would probably be in the mid 20s. If the stock gets into the teens again and holds it, that is when the big cos. will have the courage to make an offer. It is not like they are brainiacs. They like to buy high, not low.