Wall Street Folly

It's Official: We've moved! Our new home is www.wallstreetfolly.com

Please join us over at our new Wall Street Folly site.  We're still working out some kinks, but it's up and running! (Note, if for some reason you're not directed to that site, keep trying.  It gonna take a bit for the redirection of our wallstreetfolly.com url to be propogated through the system.)

Forbes billionaires list: The hedge funders and private equity guys

FINalternatives has culled through the Forbes list for all of the alternative investment guys who are represented.  Notably missing: Allen Stanford.  Here's the list:

Merrill will be in deep doodoo if they misled Congress on those bonuses; Stanford flips off the SEC and pleads the Fifth; 2 new Ponzi schemes; Will bank bondholders take a hit?

Merrill may have misled Congress on bonuses: Cuomo Stanford pleads the fifth amendment SEC Accuses California, Virginia Firms of Running Ponzi Scams Banks’ Bondholders May Be Next to Share Bailout Pain Lions Gate, Icahn End Talks on Investor’s Board Role

Hedge Fund 13F Chart Study update: Icahn Associates

 Here's the 13F Chart study for Carl Icahn's Icahn Associates updated for Q4 2008. 

13F Hedge fund chart studies were updated over the weekend

The 13F hedge fund chart studies we track were updated over the weekend.  You can find them here.

13F Hedge Fund Chart Study: Icahn & Co

Here are charts for the stocks included in the recently released 13F for Carl Icahn's Icahn & Co:

Activists are hurting, including Carl Icahn, who's facing investor redemptions

With the current investment landscape openly hostile to activist investors with hedge funds pursuing that strategy battered and bruised  and taking major hits, one of the best known of the lot is facing redemptions from investors.  Carl Icahn has been putting more of his own money into his $6.6 billion funds -- $500 million since 6/30/08. External investors are said to be planning to withdraw 15% of the funds total assets by the end of the year.  According to SEC filings, the funds have around $2.9 billion in cash.  External investors had $4.3 billion in the funds as of 9/30, with Icahn and the publicly trading company in which he has a 91% interest own the other $2.3 billion.

If you have a spare $37 million lying around, you can buy Carl Icahn's yacht

Cityfile.com reports that Carl Icahn's 177 foot long putt-putt Starfire is up for sale for a meager $37 million.  They note that he'd been renting it out for a couple of months at $250K a week.  Is he economizing, given the state of the market or possibly even trading up?  We'd guess the former:  We took a gander at the stocks that Carl reported in his last 13F (as of 6/30, so there could have been changes).  The 13F charts are below. With the exception of Imclone, they're not pretty.

Where have we been?

We've gotten emails asking where we've been in the past couple of days since posting has been light.  Yes, we've been AWOL.  Given the choice to watch the market continue to crap out or to go to the Value Investing Conference to listen to the likes of Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn, we actually donned a suit and chose the latter.  Mea culpa.  :)

It was an interesting conference indeed.  A lot of glum faces, a lot of nervous jokes about the state of the market and comparisons to the crash in '87, just about universal complaining about the misguided short selling ban (at least among those we spoke to, although maybe that's a function of the company we keep), but there was also a sense of optimism, that maybe all of the moves in the past week or so might actually start to take hold.  And people are also talking about the many opportunities they're seeing in stocks as well as the astronomically huge yields on some of the high yield bonds out there.  After a two year period where we've been extremely bearish, we're even starting to become a bit more optimistic.  We don't think that the market has bottomed yet, but we're more likely to nibble. 

Carl Icahn sees more downside in the market

The market carnage isn't over according to Carl Icahn.  He doesn't see the market near a bottom even after the Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac bailout.  From Dan Dorfman's column in the NY Sun:

Why such a gloomy Gus? "Because we're far from out of the woods and it remains a tough, dangerous market," Mr. Icahn says. "The subprime loan problem is still on bank balance sheets, it has to be fixed and the economy is trending downward, which means," he tells me, "you have to be extremely cautious."

His words clearly suggest that Mr. Icahn, who manages a $7 billion hedge fund and boasts an estimated net worth of about $14 billion, believes the downside risk is high even despite the substantial market decline. "It has been a tough year," he says.

Icahn: Danger Ahead - NY Sun (Dan Dorfman)

Icahn's Most recent 13F charts