Obama Link Fest
Barack Obama Hedge Fund Link Fest
(http://HedgeFundBlogger.com) I have received many congratulatory emails over the past day from hedge fund/investment professionals in India, Switzerland, London and Singapore all thankful that Obama was elected. I found that interesting in itself and also saw a flood of articles come out discussing Barack Obama and the hedge fund industry, or Obama and the finance/investment industry in general.Yesterday I published this piece: Barack Obama & Hedge Funds... Here are excerpts and links to many of these discussions:
(I never discuss my own political views through this site throwing my opinion around regarding hedge funds is enough. I don't support any of these articles one way or another but simply provide them as an aggregation of what has been put out there over the last few days.)
1) An excerpt from a story in the New York Times followed with commentary from my Mr. Fintag.
Today's economic turmoil, it seems, is an implicit indictment of the arcane field of financial engineering — a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing. Its practitioners devised not only the exotic, mortgage-backed securities that proved so troublesome, but also the mathematical models of risk that suggested these securities were safe.
What happened?
The models, according to finance experts and economists, did fail to keep pace with the explosive growth in complex securities, the resulting intricate web of risk and the dimensions of the danger. Read more of this story...
Fintag says
My Obama mentor, now a Hedge Fund grandee living the high life in retirement told me many things. Spelling is for wimps is one but the other was never invest or trade more than 6 things at once. Now this is a little tricky when most funds are not allowed 20% concentration, but he was right. Many hedge funds boast about turnover and the number of positions in the Greg Coffey style of trading. It never works.
Again, we can blame spreadsheet jockeys and quants who always forget that humans are irrational and rational at the same time. Irrationally rational.
All of us are excited Obama is US president because he has a different skin configuration (if I hear another commentator say he is black ...it is wrong and totally irrelevant). We are being irrationally rational and how could any quant model or risk management process capture this?
That is why I love the markets. People trying to find certainty out of chaos and gamblers finding chaos in certainty.
_________________________
2) Financial Times Alphaville published this piece:
The industry has donated over $1m to Obama’s campaign, according to OpenSecrets (small change to a hedge fund manager, perhaps, but it still makes Obama the biggest recipient of the industry’s largesse this year — and is nearly double what rival presidential candidate John McCain received).
But despite the contributions, Obama’s taken a somewhat hostile stance towards the barrons of Mayfair and Stamford. Notably, he accused McCain of being the candidate of ‘Joe the Hedge Fund Manager’ as opposed to all-American blue-collar hero “Joe the Plumber.” Source
3) FinanceAsia.com published this piece:
There are several reasons that Barack Obama won the US presidential election. He won because the economy is shockingly bad. He won for his campaign promise of “change”. He won because – unlike John McCain – he was in no way tied to the Bush administration, which has been roundly blamed for the economic disaster in which the USA is currently mired.
Think about it: under Republican rule, wages – for those who have work (and often more than one job) – have flat-lined. The national debt has doubled from what it was when Bush took office and is fast approaching $10 trillion. Meanwhile, prices at the gas pump have skyrocketed, alongside the price of milk and eggs. Unemployment recently surpassed 6% – the highest level since the early 1990s – and approximately 47 million Americans have no health insurance. Do not even think about dwelling on mortgage defaults; unless your heart can take it, or you have sufficient health insurance, that is. No wonder 64% of America’s eligible voters went to the polls.
And no wonder Obama capitalised on former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s famous question to voters in 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” For most Americans in 2008, the answer is an absolute “No”. But now the president-elect faces a tougher question: Can Obama fix what ails the nation? Read more...
4) Finalternatives published this piece:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a decisive and historic victory, becoming the first African-American to win the U.S. presidency.
The Illinois senator, who just four years ago was a state senator in the Land of Lincoln, became the first Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win an outright majority of votes cast, winning such traditionally Republican states as Indiana and Virginia, both of which had last given their electoral votes to a Democrat in 1964. Obama was buoyed in no small part by the ongoing financial crisis, which he successful pinned on the policies of the incumbent Republican president, George W. Bush, and his supporters in Congress, including Obama’s rival for the presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Obama, who enjoyed the substantial financial backing of the hedge fund industry and many of its top players, has taken a bellicose tone with the industry on the campaign trail. Notably, he derisively riffed on McCain as the candidate of “Joe The Hedge Fund Manager.” McCain staked much of his late campaign on trying to win over the “Joe the Plumbers” of the electorate. Source
5) Dealbook put out this piece:
The state of Connecticut went for Barack Obama in Tuesday’s election, as did Fairfield county, which is home to Greenwich — a major hub of the hedge fund industry — as well as many hedge fund managers and Wall Street executives.
But while the county as a whole voted in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate, giving him 59 percent of the vote, some of the well-heeled towns in the county where many of those hedge funds and high net worth Wall Street types are concentrated swung in favor of his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain. Read more...
6. Which stocks will do well under Obama's rule? - Market Folly
James Altucher, managing partner of Formula Capital recently sat down with Aaron Task over at Tech Ticker to discuss stocks poised to benefit from an Obama Presidency, now that we know he will for sure be in office. Altucher mentions he likes agriculture and infrastructure and seems them both as very cheap. Specifically, he likes Mosaic (MOS) and KBR (KBR). Source
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