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To: Frodo Baxter who wrote (4458)	11/2/1997 4:11:00 PM
From: tom pope	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

your problem, lawrence, is that you're not paranoid. get a grip on yourself and start seeing conspiracies around every corner just like the rest of us. i'll bet you don't even believe in the second coming, the hale-bopp spaceship, extraterrestrials and other tenets that are the bedrock of our civilization. what are they teaching the younger generation at harvard?

To: Frodo Baxter who wrote (4458)	11/3/1997 4:06:00 PM
From: Sheba	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9124

OFF TOPIC Re Mutual Funds. Not all mutual fund managers are brilliant. This was posted to the Dell board of Motley Fool: From TheStreet.com Fund Watch Features: Gray Monday's First Casualty: Famed Soros Confidant Victor Niederhoffer By Dan Colarusso and Cory Johnson Staff Reporters 10/29/97 8:23 PM ET Famed speculator Victor Niederhoffer played the same games everyone else did -- but he always played bigger. As a student of trading, he worked under George Soros; he regularly challenges grandmasters in chess and checkers; he's won repeated titles as a national squash champion. As an international futures trader, he regularly wagered hundreds of millions of dollars on margin. And on Monday, Oct. 27, 1997, he lost. Big time. Niederhoffer's three hedge funds, Limited Partners of Niederhoffer Intermarket Fund L.P., Limited Partners of Niederhoffer Friends Partnership L.P. and Niederhoffer Global Systems S.A., were wiped out Monday as losses estimated at $50 million to $100 million claimed the first high-profile victim of the market swoon. TheStreet.com has obtained a letter addressed to Niederhoffer clients in which he writes: 'Right now the indications are that the entire equity positions in the funds has been wiped out.' Acknowledging his propensity for risk, the memo added that 'this time we did not succeed, and I regret to say that all of us have suffered some very large losses.' According to the letter, Niederhoffer's losses came as a result of speculative bets on S&P 500 puts, and he was among several big traders to get tagged with huge losses, according to a source on a Chicago trading floor. Curiously, a standard bet on puts Monday would have proved prescient. Possibly, one trader said, Niederhoffer had started going long by writing puts during last week's weakness. That would have become a dangerous and costly trade on Monday as markets screamed lower. Another trader thought Ni ederhoffer had made bets based on volatility that had gone terribly awry. Niederhoffer's funds have been working with its brokers since Monday evening to meet obligations, according to the memo. According to hedge fund tracking service Daniel B. Stark & Co., Niederhoffer was up to $120 million under management in late July, but then the Thailand baht was destroyed on the currency markets -- a bad event for Niederhoffer. Other Asian currencies dropped like dominos, and Niederhoffer suffered a $50 million loss, according to published reports. Then, just as quickly, sources say he climbed out of the hole, making it all back by mid-October. He had $70 million under management by the end of September -- up 27%, or $19 million, for the month. His funds have always been volatile, but never like this. Refco, the futures commission merchant through which the funds traded, may find itself responsible for a portion of those losses; sources are putting that figure as high as $35 million. In published reports earlier Wednesday, Refco executives said the firm was in 'fine shape' and denied that any trading losses were causing problems. As Niederhoffer sorts through his funds' situation, Wall Street will recall the trader's more colorful aspects. He trades barefoot, makes the National Enquirer required reading for this staff, insists that his fellow traders learn to play chess and checkers at a master level, and never has sex right before a big trading day. (Must've been a long weekend.) He gathered this eccentric collection of theories in a 444-page tome called The Education of a Speculator (Wiley & Sons) that was the publishing world's s leeper hit of the year. Niederhoffer declined to comment for this story.