<p>Not so much</p>
<p>Hedge</a> Funds May Cut 20,000 Jobs as Losses Erode Fees (Update1) - Bloomberg.com</p>
<p>Who expected HFs to “pick up the hiring slack”? Seriously?</p>
<p>^Barrons is just trying to feel better about his years of inferiority to those that are smarter and wealthier than he is now that some of them are negatively impacted by the economic downturn.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure you are not smarter. I have two homes and six cars and they are all paid for. I really don’t need much more. You folks that are left better take a long hard look in the mirror. You values suck and the mess you got this country and world into is sickening.</p>
<p>When you put it that way, I must now rethink my life… oh wait no. I wonder how you got a mortgage for your two houses and loans for your six cars?</p>
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<p>barrons, C-Revs just ripped you a new one. Please leave this thread with the little dignity you have left. End of discussion.</p>
<p>Um, a lot of people I know turned down I banking offers for less stressful careers. Or for careers where they’d have greater social impact. There’s this assumption that everyone takes the highest paying job available to them. </p>
<p>It’s also funny that you guys keep repeating the “we help allocate capital” BS. This crisis came about because of the total misallocation of capital on Wall Street’s part. Economists are all pretty much in agreement about that. There are truly perverse incentives in capitalism where well all lose when we self optimize. For example, hedge funds, on average, cannot beat the market over time. Yet they gleefully extract two percent of AUM and 20% of performance, yet are insulated from being fully liable from the downside risk. There is no service, no lasting wealth creation in exchange for these fees…just a transfer of wealth. I know, hedge funds help arbitrage away mispricings, in the aggregate. But an incentive already exists for individual investors to exploit those mispricings. That’s just one example. How about the incentive to issue overly bullish analyst reports to win over IB business? That just generates informational inefficiency, to the benefit of the bank. </p>
<p>BTW, I’m not hating on i-bankers or traders. I’m going into consulting, but I would love to work for an emerging markets hedge fund in the future. Some of the smartest, overall best human beings I know currently work for or have worked for BB I banks and hedge funds. And yes, the depth and breadth of capital markets is key for a country’s economic development. But to say that Wall Street is without tremendous fault is ridiculous.</p>
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<p>I don’t think anyone on here is saying that fault shouldn’t be attributed to Wall St. but treating everyone there as the bad guys isn’t accurate either.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t talking about me, but those who work in IB or in HFs, both of which I have worked in, but neither any more. My whole career has been on Wall Street and I and the vast majority on Wall Street are not responsible for the mess and to lump everyone together as evil and sickening is simple-minded and inaccurate. It’s interesting that you defend your supposed superior values right after boasting how many houses and cars you have. How does having superior values relate to celebrating the demise of others?</p>
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Wall Street is the domain who want to get rich as quickly as possible and yet risk very little. Nothing commendable to speak of.</p>
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<p>Please explain and provide a contrasting example of a professional domain where more is at risk, aside from obvious ones like Blackwater.</p>
<p>^is that a sick joke? The guys who blew up managing LTCM had no problem starting another hedge fund, which has now pretty much blown up. Just a small example.</p>
<p>That’s not a fair analogy. First of all, they were some of the most brilliant minds in the field, so no wonder they didn’t have tons of trouble. Secondly, the original failure, while ridden with awful risk management, was not exactly a failure. The trade they put on turned out to be correct, but their credit dried up before this happened (due to the defaulting of Russia).</p>
<p>If Warren Buffett made a bad trade tomorrow that wiped out most of his equity due to an outlier event (like a MAJOR nation defaulting), do you think he wouldn’t be able to raise capital a year or two later? (and yes, this isn’t a perfect comparison either but you get the point).</p>
<p>Not everyone can bounce back from that, you’re average trader might not be able to. Not everyone on Wall Street is this superstar, its like any other profession.</p>
<p>Uh, being massively over leveraged forced LTCM to liquidate their positions…doesn’t matter if it was a good position trade. Their risk management didn’t take fat tails into account…</p>
<p>Modern Portfolio Theory is garbage. I wouldn’t call them geniuses.</p>
<p>The whole point is that the whole super star thing is mythology. Over the long haul, managers cannot offer superior risk adjusted returns to the market. Just look at Bill Miller. Managers that appear to be generating superior risk adjusted returns are either Frauds, a la Madoff, or they are hiding serious risks that are exposed during a crisis like this. The couple of mega funds that keep beating the indices have preferential treatment from their prime brokers and have enough clout to manipulate markets.</p>
<p>That’s your opinion, particularly about not being able to “beat the market”. I disagree. Call it a difference of opinion, not worth arguing. Either way, the original point was that the Financial Crisis was not the fault of everyone who works on wall street or in finance.</p>
<p>Miley,
Some professions that have more at risk?? Darn near any of them; lets try medical, engineering, heck my factory workers who make aircraft parts have more at risk than any of these Wall Street mutts do. Make a mistake and kill someone…or a few hundred.
Wall Street is filled with a bunch of greedy slobs who think that the rules apply to everyone else. Obama should create an entire agnecy just to sit on top of these bums to ride herd over them. Create some value will you.</p>
<p>packers: …Engineering? Fund managers bounce back from mistakes, just like surgeons do. Traders and fund managers risk people’s money. I don’t know about you, but I always feel a tremendous amount of burden and responsibility when I’m looking after someone else’s things. </p>
<p>And I’ll definitely create value. For my cousins who need help with college tuition and my parents to live a good life. Oh, and a slew of pump & dumped club girls along the way. Finance pays well. And trading is pretty interesting. I want to maximize my own happiness and the happiness of people I care about. </p>
<p>wutang: You say MPT is garbage but you cite an example that actually supports MPT?</p>
<p>“And I’ll definitely create value. For my cousins who need help with college tuition and my parents to live a good life. Oh, and a slew of pump & dumped club girls along the way. Finance pays well. And trading is pretty interesting. I want to maximize my own happiness and the happiness of people I care about.”</p>
<p>Thanks, Miley for showing us your values. I was worried there for a moment that they might have been a bit less than stellar ones. Silly me. On behalf of the slew of pumped & dumped club girls, let me say thanks for all the care, affection, financial and emotional support you have provided throughout the many years. We couldn’t have done without it. You truly are god’s gift to the women of New York.</p>
<p>P.S. Perhaps CC should institute a maturity rating in order to be allowed to post on here. It might cut out a bit of the riff-raft.</p>
<p>Different strokes for different folks. Some people admit they get satisfaction from partying and having a good time. Others garner satisfaction from mounting high horses and preaching from soap boxes. Some people prefer the happiness of themselves, friends and family to that of strangers. Others don’t or perhaps claim not to. </p>
<p>It’s a straw man to imply that I declared that I’m a gift to anybody. Everyone’s just looking for a good time. I have a good time, so do they. </p>
<p>And your post script adds nothing to your writing aside from being an attempt to create for yourself a sense of authority and legitimacy.</p>
<p>Miley, I don’t want to imply moral authority–and if you want to have fun, more power to you. Just spare us the inane descriptions (“pumped and dumped party girls”).</p>
<p>This is what we can do without–and what shows your total lack of maturity.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Miley Cyrax here.</p>
<p>DAMN! It feels GREAT to be a banker! Only as a banker can you get millions and billions in bonuses even after your company loses $62 billion! </p>
<p>You toileteers and non-bankers are just JEALOUS because we bankers are ELITE, and WEALTHY. And we get to pump and dump club girls because of our WEALTH and ELITE status. WE bankers are SO ELITE that we can literally destroy the economy and still get paid billions in bonuses!!!</p>
<p>Don’t hate the player, hate the game if we bankers are thriving even in this economic crisis while you lose your jobs and homes! </p>
<p>This is why I became a banker! All you need is to go to a name school! Don’t need any real skills or experience. Just know how to use excel, bull$hit, and come from a name school. It’s all about da image, man! Just like Hollywood needs to have pretty, good looking people, the investment banking industry and Wall Street needs to have people comin’ from name schools to give the illusion that banks like, hire from da best and brightest! </p>
<p>Yep, being an ibanker has its perks from pumping and dumping girls at da clubs to getting millions in bonuses despite losing billions in money and being responsible for this economic crisis.</p>