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Yes, my $7-8 bottom is starting to look shaky now (if I am a real analyst, I would be revising my price target downward now, but I am not, so I am stick to the call). See this news article...

Here is the news article: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?source=blq/yhoo&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo&guid=%7BDF01D229%2D7FD8%2D4297%2D9DD8%2DDDEBAAC81CEA%7D Quote, " ... Liberty Corner Capital was paid for telling Refco's auditors that it owed the debts even though Bennett's...

At this point, I don't think there is a possibility of outright fraud on client seg funds. So far it is just what some auditors call "receivable shuffle" accounting trick (illegal if not disclosed, of course) to make the bottom line look better. And the good thing is that Refco, is that they...

The simple answer is that because this is how the hedge fund industry works. If you won't do it at 2/20 (which, is already a bit on the high side for a $100M block), the next person with a similar strategy and return will, it is that simple. There is never any concept of "fairness", just a...

Thomas H. Lee and Scott Schoen has always been known as quite trusting, in the first place. THLee is the anti-KKR, if you will. They will only do buyouts on firms that want to be bought out. However, the disclosures made it look like that this is a "regular" shifting of uncollectible...

And this just got worse, see the latest press release from Refco: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-11-2005/0004165909&EDATE= What is troubling is that this shows this is not just one transaction, but rather a continuous sequence of transactions...

I don't know about others. But even if I am aware of any possible loopholes, I won't risk my own registrations to provide advice as to how to by-pass regulation. As an aside, CFTC have since 2001 started to hand out fairly severe fines for pyramid type of structures. However, if you are...

Why I am commenting I have no idea. Being somewhat familiar with SEC regulations (I was with a hedge fund, and did prime brokerage with ibank for years), I believe that their claim to be a "hedge fund" would constitute "illegal" marketing. Since as I understand their prospectus, they are not...

You are absolutely right, I am not sure they will emerge from this still as an independent entity as well. Comparatively, Refco doesn't have the size nor muscle of Tyco, for instance. In fact, when Dennis Kozlowski went under SEC probe, Tyco stocks did a similar tumble, it has since...

Now this is something I may know something about. Bill Sexton was mainly focused on the ops and technology side of Refco. The key person was Joe Murphy. Now, I maybe biased since I really liked Joe Murphy in the couple of times I met him. The fact that he was promoted today after the fiasco...

Maybe I don't know all the facts on this one. However, I believe that the SEC investigation is related to the IPO. If the receivable is of poor quality, by having the related entity buyiing the receivables off of Refco's books, it would make the IPO more attractive, the credit rating higher...

An obvious trick is that the Receivable was purchased so that the overall Refco Receivable would appear to be higher quality than it actually is, therefore push up the value of the IPO. Since Bill Bennett personally profited from the IPO, therefore the perception of IPO fraud is what everyone...

I won't call him a market wizard, he is very very very good, but he struggles with parameter tuning and strategy optimization like everybody else. I know a lot about his background (especially in the last 3-4 months, him and I gotten to know each other pretty well), it is pretty vanilla. He...

To take profit, yes, more or less that is the philosophy. The market making side of the strategy is just so that I have a mechanism to consistently get good fills, being that I basically make a few ticks on the profitable trades, good fills would make a decent amount of difference. Of course...

I do neither. In the purest sense, I statistically model the market micro-structure (the book, the fills, etc), combine the model with an automatically adjusted theoretical valuation engine. Pure stat arb is not something with my level capitalization can afford. I used to have have a stat...

Let me add one more category, market making or pseudo-market making, which while not available most of the retail traders, have worked. My strategies purely automated. It is about 65% pseudo-market making and 35% trend following. At a high level, my system mostly put on a pair of orders...

In a sense, the scenario you described is no different than an option oriented small hedge fund. Would the Trader A do option complex? Butterflies? Condors? Complex strategies tend to be a little more problematic since it would require more possible combinations. Let me think as a pure...

I was the person who noted the situation in the second paragraph. The scenario was not a normal one, it was a professional trader (not retail) that made approximately 700% annualized return on 2-3M of capital, trading frequently (a black box), and with a sharpe ratio of > 2.5 (unheard of)...

It depends on the situation. Of course, if I ran into someone at a party (for instance), and he says he is with a hedge fund, I wouldn't ask him about his strategy (and he likewise won't ask about mine), it is the unwritten confidentiality rule. However, if you ran into the *same person* at a...

This is incredibly true based on my experience as well. I would be open to discuss the method and philosophy of the trading strategy without going into the specific parameter tuning. I have met some very good traders and strategists, almost all of them are very open to general philosophy...