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 sebster wrote:
So you ask for sources, and when presented you find an excuse to not even look the book up. Not read a review or a summary, because that would require learning.

No, it simply wouldn't provide me with what I'm asking for from you. If you'd like to have obscure book titles thrown at you next time you request sources for something, though, I'll be happy to oblige.

I don't know why I'm doing this, but here you go.

Thank you.

Now, what those prove is that hedge funds didn't perform as well as general investment would have over a three year period. Would you say three year performance is a sound basis for analysis of a given investment, or an entire industry?

Also, I'd go back and read that first link you posted. It answers some of your questions about how hedge funds continue to attract investment.

Ignoring me is good advice, because I am just some guy on the internet. But your argument that investors (who you presume to be savvy and professional, possibly because of the nice suits they wear) must know what they're doing... good god damn. That is basically sucker's game #1, the absolutest fastest way to lose lots of money. I really hope your wife handles your money.

Gorgon covered the response to that better than I can. I'd go back and read it.

Don't get so angry. I didn't ignore your statement. You asked if I'd say the same thing to someone whining about how much a professional athlete gets paid, and I said I would.

Not angry - bored and dismissive. Because we've done this so many times before. I'll post something you don't like the sound of, and then we'll start going back and forth, I'll give an argument, maybe with a link or something paraphrased from somewhere, and in reply you think up ways to ignore that, making asking for a source (which when provided you ignore). And you do this without ever coming up with an argument of your own.

What's interesting here is that, if I were to describe the ongoing situation, I'd say it was more of the same in that you presented an argument, pretended no counter-argument was presented, and strawmanned away for a bit while getting progressively more angry.

About the only time I've ever seen you volunteer information and attempt constructive debate was on fighter planes, and it's like you're a totally different person.

Not my fault you don't pay attention.

But let's use that as an example here, let's say you're trying to say that some new weapons system costs too much money, and someone responds with "what do you care what the CEO and shareholders at Lockheed Martin earn?" Do you get how that is nonsense?

Depends. Was my initial post a whine about how much the CEO and shareholders of LM earn, like the initial post in this thread was regarding hedge fund managers? If not, I don't see how that's an apt analogy, because in discussing a weapons system and cost overruns, the CEO's earnings wouldn't enter into the discussion, at least from my end. You didn't start a thread about how some weapons system costs too much money, sebster, to continue to use your analogy. You started a thread about how much the CEO and shareholders of LM make.

I'm a little worried. You appear to be confused. Your thread is about the "pitiful income" of hedge fund managers, and you're getting mad when people ask why you give a gak what their income is. You didn't start a thread about something else and somehow wound up with people dragging hedge fund manage income into it. That was the whole point of your thread. And your argument is that they earn too much based on the sole metric of performance versus the market over the past three years, without considering the myriad other reasons large investors might choose to stick with them - protection from volatility, historically solid performance even in down markets, etc.

Whats awesome is that this is totally private. Its knowledegable investors and knowledgeable managers. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats awesome is that this is totally private. Its knowledegable investors and knowledgeable managers. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Nothing economic is totally private.

Don't you remember the massive price increase on ammunition when Obama took office?

 dogma wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats awesome is that this is totally private. Its knowledegable investors and knowledgeable managers. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Nothing economic is totally private.

Don't you remember the massive price increase on ammunition when Obama took office?

Has nothing to do with the issue.

 Seaward wrote:
No, it simply wouldn't provide me with what I'm asking for from you. If you'd like to have obscure book titles thrown at you next time you request sources for something, though, I'll be happy to oblige.

When you personally haven't heard of an author, it doesn't make him obscure.

Now, what those prove is that hedge funds didn't perform as well as general investment would have over a three year period. Would you say three year performance is a sound basis for analysis of a given investment, or an entire industry?

Go read the obscure book. Or go read an online summary of it somewhere. There you'll learn what I've been saying to you over and over again - that hedge funds have been poor performers for a decade, and that poor performance has been more than enough to wipe out all the good work done through the 1990s. ANd I will say it again, if you read that book, then you will learn that an investor who put his money in to t-bills will have generated a greater return than an investor who invested in hedge funds.

That is a terrible return.

Also, I'd go back and read that first link you posted. It answers some of your questions about how hedge funds continue to attract investment.

Are you really going to play that dumb? You have articles asking why people would put money in there, and concluding that funds are splashing money around in order to diversify. And you walk away from that thinking 'yep, question answered, that's clearly an essential service worth their 2 and 20'.

Come on.

Gorgon covered the response to that better than I can. I'd go back and read it.

Yeah, Gorgon's post was quite good, and I responded to that, and am looking forward to his response. This stuff from you, on the other hand...

What's interesting here is that, if I were to describe the ongoing situation, I'd say it was more of the same in that you presented an argument, pretended no counter-argument was presented, and strawmanned away for a bit while getting progressively more angry.

And you still haven't presented a counter argument. Just asked me to provide sources, refused to even look up one of them, and gave a particularly silly reading of the others.

Not my fault you don't pay attention.

Go read your stuff in one of your fighter pilot threads. Count the facts you contribute per post. Then count the facts you contribute per post in efforts like this. The first will be quite high, maybe three or four pieces of information per post. But in threads like this it's zero, none, not one actual fact or statement, just pissiness and complaints about the information other people are bringing to the table.

Depends. Was my initial post a whine about how much the CEO and shareholders of LM earn, like the initial post in this thread was regarding hedge fund managers?

And here you are making an active effort to fail to understand this. Choosing to be as stupid as your imagination will let you.

If not, I don't see how that's an apt analogy, because in discussing a weapons system and cost overruns, the CEO's earnings wouldn't enter into the discussion, at least from my end. You didn't start a thread about how some weapons system costs too much money, sebster, to continue to use your analogy. You started a thread about how much the CEO and shareholders of LM make.

Where do you think the fees go? Do you honestly not understand the relationship between high fee active trading funds, and the income of people who control those funds?

Your thread is about the "pitiful income" of hedge fund managers, and you're getting mad when people ask why you give a gak what their income is.

And here you are, again, pretending there's no known way of commenting about an industry without targeting specific people's incomes. Notice, by the way, I didn't mention any individual's names - Forbes posted the list recently but I didn't link to that, because I really don't give a gak about the individuals. That billions are flowing to a handful of people simply because of market structures, when they deliver very little to anyone... that's worth commenting on.

Just like if a person felt that, I don't know, the Yankees were spending too much on scoring power and not enough of defence, and you responded with 'why do you care how much A-Rod earns?' It would be an inane, ridiculous response. Just as your response here is just as inane, just as ridiculous.

And you still haven't presented one single argument justifying your claim that hedge funds do better than the market. Not one. Not a single piece of information. Just the same old pissiness.


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 Frazzled wrote:
Whats awesome is that this is totally private. Its knowledegable investors and knowledgeable managers. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Now its you and Seaward making that claim. Where did this craziness come from? There's nothing in economics that suggests we can't ever look at the price of labour and suggest that something might drive it too high or too low. In fact economics is full of studies looking at that very thing. And given that, by definition, every transaction is someone's income, doesn't this mean we basically can't ever look at anything in the economy ever again? What an incredible argument it is.

And there's two of you posting it now... where did you read this incredible piece of nonsense? Or did you both just make it up, independant of each other?

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats awesome is that this is totally private. Its knowledegable investors and knowledgeable managers. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Sure, it's private. It's not like Citadel and Paloma got taxpayer dollars via the AIG bailout, right? No one else's business.

AIG was an insurance company...

I'm aware of that. Did taxpayer money go to those 2 hedge funds - yes or no? Thus negating the idea that it's private business between them?

 Ouze wrote:
I'm aware of that. Did taxpayer money go to those 2 hedge funds - yes or no? Thus negating the idea that it's private business between them?

I don't know. As policy I am fully behind no financial bailouts for anyone.

 Frazzled wrote:
I don't know. As policy I am fully behind no financial bailouts for anyone.

That's just easy rhetoric. It ignores the complex relations in the financial sector, esepcially once derivative exposures are taken in to account - the end result being a handful of 'bad' banks dragging the whole sector down. Which in turn would have shut down lending to any start up that needed bridging funds. It would have played havoc with any company that worked with banks with plus/minus cash flow management, Any company looking to borrow to modernise operations and remain competitive would have lost access to funds. And from there, millions more would be out of work, which would then flow through to every other company as they lost sales, and so they reduced their operations, leading to even greater reductions in sales, and so on.

The bail out wasn't nice, and felt a lot like people getting away with being reckless, so it's easy to understand why it isn't popular. But that doesn't mean it wasn't necessary.

It wasn't necessary.

When one looks at the 1% of earners (USA only data) the spread is extremely wide.
from 2012 returns:

"A taxpayer needed a taxable income of $307,000 to enter the top 1%, a figure that hardly qualifies as "rich" today, especially in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. "

"...the top 1% consists primarily of salaried executives at nonfinancial businesses (30%) and secondarily of doctors (14%), people working in finance (13%) and lawyers (8%). Among the "super rich" in the top 0.1% (about 110,000 households), the distribution still favors business executives (41%) over people in finance (18%). "

"The typical "rich" person today is someone who works for a salary and accumulates stocks and bonds through savings, retirement plans and (for business executives) stock options."

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579352551767664072

 dogma wrote:


That depends on what sort of debt you incur. Tax evasion will get you sent to jail, defaulting on student loans will not.

Maybe:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/08/department-education-raid-default-student-loans_n_873272.html

Although the DOE claims it was not due to defaults; the bigger issue is: WHY does the DOE need a swat team?

Not to drag it too offtopic but my stance on bailouts is sort of midway between you guys. I think the idea is morally repugnant but possibly necessary, if we employ the following two rules:

1.) The system is broken: bailouts are employed to save the financial sector, and sweeping legislation is pushed to ensure the root causes are addressed, including nationalizing and then breaking up any banks "too big to fail" once things stabilize - after all, if it's so big the economy is now dependent upon it, that's a pretty prime eminent domain example, and/or

2.) The system worked as it should but some people broke the law and subverted the system, which caused this to happen. Bailouts occur but people go to jail.

Generally speaking though we didn't do any of those things, a few small examples aside. That's a problem imo.

Anyway sorry to keep this tangent going.

 Doomsdave wrote:
Although the DOE claims it was not due to defaults; the bigger issue is: WHY does the DOE need a swat team?

They don't, which is why the only place they have one is in the derp-o-sphere media. Note the prominent retraction, because that's how journalism works now. Another retraction from Politico. Even Michelle Malkin kinda-sorta walked it back.

PS: That guy that had no idea what was going on and was totes innocent? About that.

 Frazzled wrote:
It wasn't necessary.

My god, now that you've explained it so thoroughly I have seen the light. Is there anything more to your position?

 Ouze wrote:

 Doomsdave wrote:
Although the DOE claims it was not due to defaults; the bigger issue is: WHY does the DOE need a swat team?

They don't, which is why the only place they have one is in the derp-o-sphere media. Note the prominent retraction, because that's how journalism works now. Another retraction from Politico. Even Michelle Malkin kinda-sorta walked it back.

PS: That guy that had no idea what was going on and was totes innocent? About that.

I'm not defending the criminal. The larger point is still valid. The DOE has a SWAT team at its disposal on loan from the OIG thanks to provisions in the Homeland Security/Patriot Acts. The OIG is supposed to be policing misconduct within govt. agencies. That was its original mandate. Sorry I was not more clear. This guy + accomplices was an ID thief. He could have been apprehended by local law enforcement at the request of or under direction from Federal Marshals or FBI etc.

Sorry for OT post.

they do not have a swat team

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that the officers that raided the home were not a SWAT team, although the man who lives there thought they were one.

Per the Department of Education.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/oigstatement.pdf

I posted that when I originally addressed that issue.

 Ouze wrote:
they do not have a swat team

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that the officers that raided the home were not a SWAT team, although the man who lives there thought they were one.

I heard you the first time

The OIG used "special agents" dressed in vests with more than handguns, who then kicked down a door to execute a warrant on an embezzler/ID thief. It doesn't really matter what you call them they sound like a SWAT team. I conceded that I should have said OIG rather than DOE in my original post. But, again, the Inspector General does not need to employ its own agents in swat style tactics for this type of arrest. It appears you objected to the term SWAT team. Fair enough. My point (however ineptly presented originally) is that there are too many armed federal agents at the disposal of departments acting outside their mandated purpose.


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 djones520 wrote:
Per the Department of Education.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/oigstatement.pdf

Thanks. I saw that one when the original retraction was printed.

If we're going to stretch what the definition of SWAT team so that any cop with a shotgun wearing a vest is now a member, then... that's essentially debating Calvinball.

As their mandated purpose is de facto law enforcement, I'm not sure that I agree that having them armed is an issue. But it's debatable, it does seem like something that could be co-ordinated with local law enforcement, although I imagine there is a funding issue there as well.

 Ouze wrote:
If we're going to stretch what the definition of SWAT team so that any cop with a shotgun wearing a vest is now a member, then... that's essentially debating Calvinball.

As their mandated purpose is de facto law enforcement, I'm not sure that I agree that having them armed is an issue. But it's debatable, it does seem like something that could be co-ordinated with local law enforcement, although I imagine there is a funding issue there as well.

I can't imagine coordinating with LLE is more expensive then flying your small cadre of LEO's all over the country looking for guys who aren't paying their student loans.

Not that I'm arguing against the DOE having LEO's. Hell... I don't even know why I'm getting involved in this convo.

 djones520 wrote:
[ then flying your small cadre of LEO's all over the country looking for guys who aren't paying their student loans.

Holy gak, you guys are sort of amazing. It's like you have a 2+ save vs what actually happened.

What I meant with the funding issue was that at some point, won't LLE complain that their resource are being eaten by servicing OIG warrants?

you know, we should start another thread about this, this is well and truly offtopic now, my apologies.

 Ouze wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
[ then flying your small cadre of LEO's all over the country looking for guys who aren't paying their student loans.

Holy gak, you guys are sort of amazing. It's like you have a 2+ save vs what actually happened.

What I meant with the funding issue was that at some point, won't LLE complain that their resource are being eaten by servicing OIG warrants?

you know, we should start another thread about this, this is well and truly offtopic now, my apologies.

Doubtful, since they'd just bill the FedGov for their time and resources.

I work for AMC, when AFCENT tasks me to go to certain training before I deploy, AFCENT pays for it, not AMC. Just as an analogy.

 Ouze wrote:
If we're going to stretch what the definition of SWAT team so that any cop with a shotgun wearing a vest is now a member, then... that's essentially debating Calvinball.

As their mandated purpose is de facto law enforcement, I'm not sure that I agree that having them armed is an issue. But it's debatable, it does seem like something that could be co-ordinated with local law enforcement, although I imagine there is a funding issue there as well.

Fair Play. I see your point.

 Frazzled wrote:
It wasn't necessary.

One of the conundrums of policy that avoids disaster is that if you do it effectively and avoid disaster, no-one realises what you did.


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 Doomsdave wrote:
When one looks at the 1% of earners (USA only data) the spread is extremely wide.
from 2012 returns:

"A taxpayer needed a taxable income of $307,000 to enter the top 1%, a figure that hardly qualifies as "rich" today, especially in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. "

"...the top 1% consists primarily of salaried executives at nonfinancial businesses (30%) and secondarily of doctors (14%), people working in finance (13%) and lawyers (8%). Among the "super rich" in the top 0.1% (about 110,000 households), the distribution still favors business executives (41%) over people in finance (18%).

That's why it is important to understand that 1% is a catch phrase. The 0.01% is not used simply because it doesn't roll off the tongue as well, even though it is more accurate in describing when incomes get crazy high. But then, just look at the graph in my OP if you want to understand the problem.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
Not to drag it too offtopic but my stance on bailouts is sort of midway between you guys. I think the idea is morally repugnant but possibly necessary, if we employ the following two rules:

'Morally repugnant but necessary' is exactly my opinion. And yeah, financial regs should have been built up again afterwards. But the failure of legislators to pass needed reforms doesn't mean that we ought to have just let the whole thing fall down.

 motyak wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
It wasn't necessary.

My god, now that you've explained it so thoroughly I have seen the light. Is there anything more to your position?

No. Confidentiality and all that.

Misread title as the pitiful income of Hedgehog managers, was disappointed.