The controversial financial research finding of the week (or maybe year) goes to a new-ish paper (Red and Blue Investing: Values and Finance) looking at the relationship between mutual fund and hedge fund manager performance, and political contributions. The paper, by Harrison Hong and Leonard Kostovetsky, is more generally an [...]

A few quick links to get people going "hmmm" on this foggy Friday (here in San Diego, anyway): Resurgent bearish macro hedge funds have people seeing next Soros (Bloomberg) Copper thieves cause delay in cancer surgery (LA Times) Live ATask updates from YHOO annual meeting (Twitter) Nice new realtime news [...]

Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on the other side." Okay, now some thoughts about moral hazard: The definition of moral hazard (as taken from that scholarly [...]

The end is neigh was what many despondent investors were starting to believe as the past week kicked off with volatile trading amid concerns that US regional bank IndyMac's demise was a harbinger of many more bank failures. Furthermore, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to rescue the Government Sponsored Enterprises [...]

Hedge fund manager -- and Fannie Mae short-seller -- Bill Ackman's presentation on "saving" wildly wayward mortgage finance company Fannie Mae. | View | Upload your own[...]

By my calculation, the two largest U.S. banks, Citi and Bank of America, have over the last year lost roughly as much in market capitalization as is the current value of the other six U.S. banks combined. To be specific, Citi and BofA have together lost $296-billion in market capitalization [...]

There is a new Africa ETF out and trading, courtesy of the people at Van Eck Global. Modeled on the Dow Jones Africa Titans 50 Index, the Africa Index ETF is intended to give investors direct exposure to African economies via companies with the largest presence there, whether headquartered there [...]

Chief: Now listen carefully: [gives a series of complex instructions] Did you get that? Max: Not all of it. Chief: Which part didn't you get? Max: The part after 'Now listen carefully'.          From Get Smart (1965-1970) You had to know hedge funds would find a way to mess up [...]

According to a Bridgewater study leaked by a Swiss paper today, total financial losses from the the current credit crisis will hit $1.6-trillion, well above most current estimates. Here is the German/English translation: Explosive Study: The banking crisis will be much worse Westport (USA) - The expected losses from the [...]

Great 10,000-word read in the August Vanity Fair from Bryan "Barbarians at the Gate" Burroughs about the collapse of Bear Stearns. On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the [...]

Having said a few unhappy things about Predictably Irrational earlier this week, here are notes on a few books, new and old, I've liked recently: Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century. Despite a bad and breathless title, it's worth a [...]

This quote from a Deutsche Bank report on the differing approaches to rate-setting in the EU and in the U.S. is fascinating and instructive: Recent and prospective differences between the Fed and the ECB in the conduct of monetary policy have been striking. The ECB has launched a Martian frontal [...]

So, the venture capital "asset class" is in crisis. Or at least that's what the NVCA is saying today as it rings the alarm bell asking for politicians, regulators, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, dogcatchers, presidential candidates, philatelists, etc., to do something -- anything! -- about it. Of course, readers of this [...]

I like this quote from Andy Rappaport of August Capital about social investing -- the idea that you can do good via investing in social funds: A lot of socially responsible funds have this idea that they'll provide a social return, but you'll have to accept a below-average financial return. [...]

Last week I cited a welling@weeden interview with two Credit Suisse strategists that made the case for inflation rapidly coming down, here is a Gavel report -- albeit somewhat graph-happy -- that makes the same case. The crux of the piece is the following two graphs. The first shows the [...]

And here is Felix Salmon's reply as the next installment in the "analysts should own their stock picks" debate I'm having with the man from Portfolio: ------------ Hi Paul -- Sorry for the delay in replying, I was watching Germany beat Turkey 3-2 in the semi-finals of Euro 2008. Gotta [...]

It's not often that Wall Street strategists notice the tiny semi-asset class otherwise known as venture capital. But that's what happened today as Merrill's Richard Bernstein wrote in a contrarian strategies report that it may just be time for investors to take VC more seriously again: There may be two [...]

There is riveting reading in the just-decided case of CSX Corporation vs. Children's Investment Fund. Yes, it's a court filing, but nowhere else are you likely to get so detailed and lucid a discussion of how a major investor works to play disclosure tricks at the market's periphery. Defendants seek [...]

Buried in meetings and travel, so a few quick links: The truce between humans and fires has burst in an era of megafires (American Scholar) Controversial stuff on VGchartz as NPD usurpers in market research (Radar) Special issue on angel investors, including good Ron Conway interview (TheDeal) How Keith Olbermann [...]

A few quick links as I get ready for a morning of meetings: Using the iPhone and Sense Networks to mine data for fun and profit (GigaOm) The income-adjusted impact of gasoline prices across the U.S. (NYT) The only place you can still get mortgages with no money down? The [...]

On-point Reuters piece this weekend talking about the above-the-ground issues curtailing oil supplies. The gist: resource nationalism -- countries nationalizing and controlling their domestic oil industries -- is changing the way global oil markets respond to higher prices. After all, when you can revenue acceleration from a finite resource without [...]

Don't miss the fireworks today as hedge fund manager George Soros testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee. He apparently will say that oil is a bubble, and that commodities are not a legitimate institutional asset class. Right, but are commodities an attractive nuisance, like venture capital? That's what we really [...]

Venture capital, as an institutional asset class, is pretty much dead. Sure, you can get returns from some smaller and more aggressive funds, but any supposed institutional financial asset class that a) can provably thrive only with teensy amounts of cash, and b) whose entire annual returns are bound up [...]

Lots of people have been talking about the collapse of the auction-rate securities market, but related troubles in the catastrophe reinsurance market have gone largely overlooked. With credit markets gone AWOL, you won't be entirely surprised to hear that finding buyers for catastrophe-related bonds has become increasingly tough, at least [...]

Does the Sprott IPO issue today mark a kind of energy/resources market top, much the same way that Blackstone et al., going public did the same thing for private equity? After all, when a highly successful energy/resources fund manager decides that he can make more money being public and decides [...]