On Dec 18, 2007, at 4:56 PM, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> But Doug wasn't the reason for hedge funds to make headway when stock
> markets aren't? What about the promise of making a profit even when
> the market is moving in a narrow range? Seems illusory now.
Yup. Just goes to show you, for the thousandth time, that unless your name is Soros, Buffett, or Schwarzman, you can't beat the market.
> But if hedge funds are a false promise, it does seem that the stock
> of idle liquid money capital looking for real investment
> opportunities is indeed mounting.
No matter how many times you prove the above (you can't beat the market) people will continue to try anyway. This will no doubt be dismissed as rank subjectivism by partisans of High Objectivity and Impersonal Law, but folks who are drawn to the profit-making business always assume themselves to be smarter than the masses. "The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is 'to beat the gun,' as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow" (Keynes, General Theory, p. 155). One is, of course, never the other fellow.
Doug