patrick.net

Marko Dimitrijevic, the hedge fund manager who survived at least five emerging market debt crises, is closing his largest hedge fund after losing virtually all its money this week when the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly let the franc trade freely against the euro, according to a person familiar with the firm.
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/01/it-only-takes-one-hedge-fund-manager.html#xomEsGAdlqVaxoGP.99

How about a food and blanket drive for this guy?

I have loose change on a table by my car keys - about $1.85, I think.

I call that a GOOD START.

Wipe em ALL out.

From the linked article:

"Morals of the Story
***
When you are speculating with other people's money, especially when you take in a 20% performance fee, there is a huge incentive to make leveraged bets."

The particular genius of "the two and twenty crowd" is to get clients (including pension managers) to pay 2% of principal plus 20% of gains each year. Nobody can predict the future, but if you run enough funds with different strategies, you'll probably have some winners that you can advertise to make you look like a winner.

An old stock scam illustrates the point. The scammers would phone 100 marks with a free and phony "tip" to buy a particular stock that they said would go up in the coming days. The scammers used a different stock for each mark. Some of those stocks did go up, coincidentally, so the scammers would call those marks back and repeat the same procedure with a different stock. After around three weeks of free and phony tips, the scammers would close the deal on the mark. The marks whose tips had turned out to be successful thought the scammers could predict the future, but it was only a scam.

I don't get the wah-wah crying about currencies.

Currencies come and go. The planet will survive. The planet is always changing. There are whale carcasses on mountaintops.

curious2 says

Nobody can predict the future, but if you run enough funds with different strategies, you'll probably have some winners that you can advertise to make you look like a winner.

The future cannot be predicted. However, one can most certainly make profitable forecasts some of the times.

One cannot aim to *survive* crises. One must thrive on surprises.

BTW, what kind of moron would make a leveraged short bet on a *capped* currency?