Archive - Jan 11, 2009 - Story

Even as Barnes and Noble posts a scary -7.7% comp store number for the "holiday" period, two major holders play hot potato with a big chunk of the retailer's equity.

People suffering from a morbid obsession with titanium dioxide and its principal producer, Tronox Inc., are frantically clicking refresh on Pacer to see the moment the company files for Chapter 11 in Southern District of NY on this cold evening. Reuters cites sources that the filing should come any moment.

Steel Partners, the fund of activist investor and up-to-now wunderkind manager Warren Lichtenstein, has fallen for some tough times.

And Mayhem it is, as investors are running for the hills, unwilling to find out who the next Madoff turns out to be, and end up stuck with a big fat donut. According to an analysis done by Hedgebay, a secondary hedge fund interest market maker, the average dollar invested in hedge funds traded for an all time low of 87 cents as of November (waiting for December numbers with baited breath).

We all know about West vs. East, 2-Pac vs. Notorious B.I.G., LA vs NY, etc... How does this express itself in the HF community where most managers are either grads of Steinberg-Dietrich Hall (that Huntsman hall phallic monstrosity will never take the place of the brick facade that Saul Steinberg's Reliance renovated with a whole pile of hard-earned, scandal-free dollars) or ex-Yale Lacrosse players, yet where on occasion you may find the odd Westsider... And they can be quite floral....

Well the 2008 hsbc numbers are out. In a year that one would be shocked there were any winners at all (except for Paulson of course... Paulson could make money on Pluto, blind, limbs chopped off, without oxygen, a bloomberg terminal or his copy of Dow 100,000: Fact or Fiction), here are the funds that will shortly need to raise all gates once investors realize these are likely the only places where money can still be redeemed:

Just as our funny-speaking cousins 3 hours east of us (via Concorde; probably more like 15 hours if using one of American Airlines' retrofitted B-707 with almost two wings and a fully operational engine, and that includes the 8 hour unairconditioned tarmac wait at JFK and Heathrow) thought that the Waxman witch trials would be confined to the likes of Jim