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Ira Sohn 1 Year Post-Mortem: Absolutely Abysmal
Today begins the 17th annual pilgrimage of hedge-funders near and far to the Ira Sohn conference, where some of the "best and brightest" share their top picks with everyone else in an attempt to generate a buying (or shorting) frenzy and more hedge fund hotel traps. Sadly, this is what to many passes for alpha these days. Yet does the Ira Sohn conference actually lead to any outperformance? Well, Absolute Return has compiled the 1 year return of the recommended investments from last year's conference. The results are absolutely abysmal. Which makes us wonder if the time of groupthink has peaked, and instead the time to fade absolutely everything to come out of such conferences, where analysts pretend to do homework by piggybacking on others' often times very, very wrong research, and which confuse beta expansion with alpha, has come.
Behold the results which would have caused an equal-weighted portfolio of all picks to lose at least 50% in the past year.
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But probably they are doing the opposite of their public recommendations so this looks good.
i tell you one thing:
if JPM is losing 2 billion in change, someone else is MAKING 2 billion. The problem with the media is they focus on the losers instead of the winners ....
i wouldnt be suprised if some of these guys were able to pick up some of that change left behind by the gorilla ....
I'm pretty sure Jim Chanos was actually shorting those POS stocks. Agreed on everyone else though.
He might have since he issued a short recommendation.
It's hard to pick a winner in a dropping market...
Never invest with a firm named after an extinct animal.
Hugh Hendry (Eclectica Asset Mngt) is having a good year but he is an exceptional asset manager.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/hugh-hendry-back-full-eclectica-letter
Just wait until they ALL buy Facebook.....it will make their year........sarc
A poo flinging monkey would have outperformed those guyz.
and the winner is... Jim Chanos... both shorts dropped their shorts...
yes the chart is backwards, the results for Jim Chanos should be positive since he said to short and the stocks fell, resulting in a gain of around 80 percent between the two, which is a pretty good one-year return.
ohhh...
JPM just lost imaginary money anyway, so the others can run around picking up wooden nickels in front of a steamroller all they like.
Arius you deleted your whole JPM post?
I was thinking the same thing. How did he/she edit their post after you replied on it anyway?
I noticed the comment is way above too, must have been a dup.
yes ...my apologies ...
This gives "ate up with the dumbass" an entirely different meaning.
The best decisions were to short at the bottom and go long at the top.
I went to one of these, I had a front row seat. Whitney Tilson was sat next to me furiously taking notes. Lol
The face plant IPO is going to need another 100B shares, 'cause all those BTAN's and bunds aint doin so hot today.
Chanos is Da Man!
Our guy Mark Faber HOLDING IT DOWN!!!!!!
Jesus F. C. these were some atrocious calls.
My call for 2012 is to throw tons of copper pennies into a hole in the ground at the end of a random rainbow and hope to piss off a leprechaun enough to come out of hiding.
Tweet me if interested to get in early.
LOL...I like it! Sounds way better than that Faceplant IPO stuff anyway.
no one cares about hedge fund investors. what will be more interesting is when the insurance companies go up in flames - and ordinary people realize that all the money they've been stuffing in to annuities, whole-life policies, and other "safe as houses" assets is POOF, GONE.
This is why I NEVER listen to anyone else about buying and selling. I'd much rather lose money myself than letting someone else do it for me...
More and more I see stuff like this I am convinced that 90% of people in finance are morons. I work in Finance and most people have no clue, at all, and they are in high postiions like director, president, vice president.
Most of these morons caught a 30 yr bull market and seemed smart from 1982 to about 2007
Faber predicted war and inflation; the results said no war and little inflation but we are actually still in a war. Also, the CPI didn't change much, but there is an incredible amount of inflation in food and energy. The CPI does not reflect this because it is so heavily weighted in housing and because new technology that debuts for the same price as a previous model is considered deflation according to the index. Just trying to be fair.
Short naked, bitchez!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-release...
Chanos is not dis-illusioned by all the noise out there !
A simple average of the rightmost column above results in -11.7% (which by definition is equal weight). I cannot seem to duplicate or confirm the statement that an "equal-weighted portfolio of all picks to lose at least 50%" by spreadsheet calculation, so I'm left to guess as to the origin of the statement. If the author meant an equal investment in each "firm" by analyst, then the average analyst result is -8.6%, again from a spreadsheet. In either case, the figures in the "results" column do not seem to support the -50% assertion....equal weight in the stocks and funds in the results above come to -11.7%, far less sensational than a halving in value.
Perhaps the neg 50% figure derives from the more than half of the 18 analysts recommendations yielding a negative return? Anyone else looking at this?