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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (45993)	1/29/2009 5:04:17 PM
From: Snowshoe	1 Recommendation Respond to of 217768

From the sidebar on the previously linked article... THE SOROS INVESTMENT YEAR: Positions I took were too big for ever more volatile markets Although I positioned myself reasonably well for what was coming last year, one thing I got wrong cost me dearly: there was no decoupling between markets of the developed and developing worlds. Indian and Chinese stocks were hit even harder than those in the US and Europe. Since we did not reduce our exposure, we lost more money in India than we had made the year before. Our Chinese manager did better by his stock selection; we were also helped by the appreciation of the renminbi. I had to push very hard in my macro-account to offset both these losses and those incurred by our external managers. This had its own drawback: I overtraded. The positions I took were too large for the increasingly volatile markets and, in order to manage my risk, I could not go against the market in a big way. I had to try to catch minor moves. That made it difficult to maintain short positions. Although I am an experienced short-seller, I got caught several times and largely missed the biggest down-draught, in October and November. On the long side, where I stuck to my guns, I lost an enormous amount of money. I was impressed by the potential in the new deep-water oilfield in Brazil and bought a large strategic position in Petrobras, only to see it decline by 75 per cent at one point in time. We also got caught in the developing petrochemical industry in the Gulf. We did get out of our strategic long position in CVRD, the Brazilian iron ore producer, in time for the end of the commodity bubble and shorted the other big iron ore groups. But we missed an opportunity in the commodities themselves – partly because I knew from experience how difficult it is to trade them. I was also slow to recognise the reversal of fortune for the dollar and gave back a large portion of our profits. Under the direction of my new chief investment officer, we did make money in the UK, where we bet that short-term interest rates would decline and shorted sterling against the euro. We also made good money by going long on the credit markets after their collapse. Eventually I understood that the strength of the dollar was due not to people choosing to hold dollars but to their inability to maintain or roll over their dollar obligations. In a very real sense the strength of the dollar, like the fever associated with sickness, was a measure of the disruption of the financial system. This insight helped me to anticipate the downturn of the dollar at the end of 2008. As a result, we ended the year almost meeting my target of 10 per cent minimum return, after spending most of the year in the red. ft.com

To: Snowshoe who wrote (45993)	1/29/2009 9:53:30 PM
From: Little Joe	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217768

Basically if you read between the lines he wants the government to bail out businesses when they make bad decisions. But it was the implicit government assurances that created the moral hazard that created the mess in the first place. Most of these failed enterprises were involved in fraud many of the officers and directors should be prosecuted, stripped of their wealth and sent to jail for a long time. Those who were not involved in fraud certainly breached their fiduciary duty to their stockholders and to their depositors so at a minimum should pay back the money. In our country the president seeks them out as economic advisors (Bush-Paulson, Obama-Rubin) What a joke. lj