ides of March 2010

3-15-2010--To begin with, there’s Steve Eisman, who had started out “a strident Republican” and was on his way “to becoming the financial market’s first socialist” as he grew increasingly convinced that “an entire industry, called consumer finance,” basically “existed to rip people off.” Mr. Eisman and his team “had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street,” Mr. Lewis writes, and by performing the sort of nitty-gritty credit analysis on mortgages (that should have been done before the loans were made in the first place), they realized that they could make a fortune by shorting the worst of the worst.
Then there is Michael Burry, a doctor with Asperger’s syndrome, who’d become obsessed with investing and started a fund with money from a small settlement his family received when his father died after a medical misdiagnosis. Dr. Burry immersed himself in studying the bond market in 2004 and became convinced that lending standards had declined so alarmingly that he could make money by shorting subprime mortgage bonds; by the end of 2007, Mr. Lewis reports, “he would have realized profits of more than $720 million” for his fund.
Finally, there is the “garage band hedge fund” started by Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley in 2003 with a Schwab account containing $110,000 and housed in a shed in the back of a friend’s house in Berkeley, Calif. Mr. Ledley believed, Mr. Lewis writes, “that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.” In this case, his contrarian instincts told him, in Mr. Lewis’s words, that “the markets were predisposed to underestimating the likelihood of dramatic change.”
Four and a half years later the American economy was in trouble, and, Mr. Lewis says, the fund run by Mr. Ledley, Mr. Mai and their partner, Ben Hockett, would net more than $80 million.—NYT –Review of Michael Lewis’ THE BIG SHORT (author of LIAR’S POKER)