With all the recent talk lately about hedge funds shorting stocks (here and here, it’s important to remember that the information marketplace is a big place. Something that may seem like a keen insight to one investor is dismissed as baseless negative information by another.
With that backdrop, remember Long Term Capital Management? Back during the latter stages of the stock market bubble of the late 1990’s, the Federal Reserve organized a rescue of LTCM, which was a large and prominent hedge fund that was on the brink of failure. The Fed intervened because of Clinton Administration concern at the time about possible dire consequences for world financial markets if the hedge fund were allowed to fail. As it turned out, the Fed’s concerns about the effects of LTCM’s failure on world financial markets were exaggerated and the Fed’s intervention simply helped the LTCM shareholders and managers get a better financial deal for themselves than they deserved or would otherwise have obtained (and none got indicted). The intervention also was misguided from a public policy standpoint, but that’s a subject for another post.
In this interesting post, Ed Sim passes along an observation from a friend about something that reminds him of LTCM:

I was having lunch with a friend recently who was telling me about some of his dealings with Google over the last year. As an ex-Wall Street guy, it struck him that some of the meetings he had with Google were like the ones he had at Long Term Capital years ago.

Read the entire post. But short Google at your own risk. ;^)