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Strategies & Market Trends : Experienced Investors -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saulamanca who wrote (82)	10/16/2005 12:49:38 PM
From: Saulamanca	Respond to of 90

From John Mauldin: ...But first, I am compelled to make a comment on the Refco situation. Dennis Gartman has what he calls the cockroach theory. There is never one cockroach. If you see one, there are a lot of them in the walls. Observers have been seeing cockroaches at Refco for a long time. When the whole story comes out, it is not going to look good. How you can hide almost a half a billion in losses when going through a public offering is mind-boggling. Refco has had a long history of problems. Most never make the light of day, but there is one that you might recall. This is the same firm that hid the transfer of $100,000 to the account of the wife of an obscure governor in Arkansas under the guise of trading cattle futures from information in the Wall Street Journal. The fact that Robert "Red" Bone was the broker for the general counsel of Tyson Foods was just a coincidence, I am sure. Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time. (Someone put cash in the account. Go figure.) And it gets murkier. Bottom line Refco was fined $250,000 for trading practices in cattle futures during that period, then the largest fine ever by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. As an aside, Senator Clinton is the only human being in the history of the trading world who could successfully turn $1,000 into $100,000 in a few months and then walk away and never execute another trade. I guess it was just too easy for her and she needed bigger challenges... safehaven.com