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| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 180 Registered: 8-2003 |
Here is another good trading story. Anybody remember the name T. Boone Pickens? He was one of the big leveraged buyout artists from the eighties going after firms like gulf oil, what some said was simply a synonym for hostile take over raiders, but whatever you want to call him that's where he made his first fortune. Unfortunately great things don't always last, eventually luck turned it's back on him, and he was left with his takeover vehicle that was producing usd 15 million in annual overhead costs alone, but without any takeovers that were succeeding. What does he do? He spends 15 minutes a day on speculative trading and actually manages to cover his firms 15 mill overhead from his trading profits for several years. Effort and results by no means have to be positively correlated. The story gets better. At some point he is totally forced out of his firm by a hostile takeover - life writes better stories than any movie script sometimes - and he's left without anything to do. To get out of the rut he decides to start up a commodity futures and spot fund funded with USD 35 million from himself and some friends in 1997. That fund starts out with a gut wrenching drawdown of 90% to less than usd 4 mill. 1999 is more or less flat, but with the advent of 2000 it goes on an exponential equity explosion taking it up to usd 252 mill, and, on top of those realised gains, up by another 148 mill in 2001, for a total of usd 400. The article from fortune.com is long but very definitely worth a read: "FORTUNE T. BOONE PICKENS Return of the Raider At 73, former takeover artist T. Boone Pickens Jr. is doing deals, making big money, and learning--at long last--how to be happy. FORTUNE Monday, May 27, 2002 By Joseph Nocera Pickens' Posse Ron Bassett, 59, manages Boone's personal finances and works on his ranch business. So far Boone has bought and sold six ranches, for about $6 million in profit. Mike Boswell, 62, the former CEO of Sunshine Mining, works on the equity fund and the water deal. Boone wants to sell water that lies beneath 150,000 acres in the Texas Panhandle. Garrett Smith, 40, helps run Boone's equity fund and is CFO of ENRG, the natural gas fueling company. With a revenue goal of $50 million for this year, an IPO may be in the works. Bobby Stillwell, 65, was Mesa's longtime lawyer and Boone's confidant. When he retired from Baker & Botts last year, Boone said, "You're coming with me, aren't you?" Stillwell did. "Do you think I've changed?" Boone asked. It was late on a gorgeous spring afternoon in Dallas, and T. Boone Pickens Jr. was in a contemplative mood. He was leaning back in his comfortable leather office chair, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his feet propped up on his desk. Though he'd been getting hammered in the natural gas futures market recently, he looked like a man without a care. Boone has lived in Dallas since 1989, but his spacious office reminded me of the one he'd had in Amarillo, Texas, when I first met him 20 years ago, back when he was running Mesa Petroleum and preparing to take on the world. There was the sports memorabilia from Oklahoma State University, his beloved alma mater. The oil painting "Trails in the Palo Duro," by the Western artist G. Harvey. The framed Mesa stock certificates. The little mementos commemorating old deals. There were a few new things as well. Pinned against the back wall was an enormous map of a four-county area in the Texas Panhandle that includes Boone's 27,000-acre ranch. It serves as a constant reminder of his audacious--and yet unrealized--plan to drill water from the aquifer that lies under that land and sell it to some water-starved Texas city like Dallas or San Antonio. There were also at least two dozen pictures of family members in prominent places all over the office: Boone's daughter Pam with her three children; Boone hunting quail with several of his grandsons; Boone with his new wife, Nelda; Boone's new stepson with his wife and children. Maybe it's just the haze of memory, but I don't remember seeing many family pictures in his office in the old days. It certainly wasn't something he talked about much. Of course 20 years ago Boone didn't have much truck with contemplation either. He was too busy shaking up the established order as the most feared and famous of the 1980s corporate raiders. And it wasn't his style in any case. Like most CEOs I've known, he viewed serious reflection as a big waste of time. He resisted all attempts at journalistic psychoanalysis. He seemed to harbor no doubts about anything. When he did reminisce, he tended to repeat the same well-honed stories--stories in which he always came out on top. But Boone's approaching 74 now, and he's been through things he could scarcely have imagined back when he was taking on the likes of Gulf Oil and gracing the covers of FORTUNE and Time. In the mid-1990s he lost Mesa, his life's work, a company he'd founded 40 years earlier--a deal made all the more painful by the fact that the company was put in play by a former protege. That was followed by an ugly and protracted divorce from his second wife, Bea. He struggled with depression. Some long-standing relationships--with employees, old friends, and even some of his children--became strained to the breaking point. I was among those whose relationship with Boone had ended badly. As a young staff writer with Texas Monthly magazine in the early 1980s, I wrote about him extensively, and we became friends. When, at the peak of his fame, he decided to write his autobiography, he hired me as his ghostwriter. But after we started working on the book, I could sense him souring on me, and halfway through it he fired me. I was angry and hurt, and we didn't speak for more than 15 years. Not long ago, Boone sent me a nice note, which I took to be an olive branch, and we began to reconnect. As we got reacquainted, I started to realize that, septuagenarian or no, Boone was involved in a surprising array of businesses and deals--and not just the water deal, which has gotten a fair amount of publicity. Boone owns 25% of a company he founded, called ENRG, that markets natural gas as a substitute for gasoline. It's doing well enough that an IPO may be in the works next year. He runs a hugely successful commodities fund that speculates in natural gas futures. He's started an equity fund that invests in undervalued energy companies. He even has a profitable little business buying ranches, fixing them up, and then selling them to wealthy hunters. I also couldn't help noticing the money Boone was making: an astonishing $150 million in 2000 and another $100 million or so last year, thanks largely to the success of the commodities fund. Even in his heyday Boone never earned anything close to that. After the divorce in 1998, Boone was worth $37 million. Today his net worth is upwards of $200 million; he's made more money in his 70s than in the rest of his life put together. As we spent more time together I began to sense something else: The man I was getting to know again was in many ways different from the raider I'd met two decades before. After 30 years of knowing only success, he had spent a decade being humbled, and that experience had changed him. As to how it changed him, well, I eventually realized one last thing: Answering that question--the question he'd just asked me--was what this story was really about. He told me to meet him at the entrance of a New York office building; we could fly back to Dallas together in his private jet. "We can catch up on the ride back," he said--just like we'd always done in the old days. The old days, indeed. Boone had come to New York on this early April morning for a meeting with the chairman of a small energy company called Penn Virginia. A few weeks earlier Boone had filed a document with the SEC disclosing that he--or more precisely, the BP Energy Equity fund, his new $125 million equity fund--had taken a 7.1% stake in the company. In the document Boone described Penn Virginia as "undervalued" and said that the company might be a candidate "for a leveraged buyout or sale." It was one of two stakes he has publicly disclosed, the other being an 8.4% ownership in a larger energy company called Vintage Petroleum. In other words, Boone was approaching his 74th birthday by getting back into the corporate-raiding game--or at least some small, genteel version of it. By the time I got to the office building, Boone was already outside. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket and a Western-style monogrammed shirt with no tie--Boone almost never wears a tie anymore, even when he's visiting the chairmen of companies he has taken a position in. He looked older, of course, but not substantially different. A lifelong health fanatic, Boone is still in great shape, though he now has a slight paunch he can't get rid of no matter how much he exercises. He sometimes wears hearing aids, though he didn't have them in on this day. Rather, he had a cellphone pressed against his ear. I knew he had to be checking in with the office. Some things never change. Walking next to him was his longtime consigliere, Robert Stillwell. For 33 years, as a lawyer with the Houston firm of Baker & Botts, "Bobby" Stillwell served as Mesa's outside counsel; for most of that time he was Boone's closest advisor and confidant. Boone, Stillwell says, is a man of "tremendous loyalty," but he had long demanded total loyalty in return, and his definition of loyalty could be pretty taxing. Stillwell was one of the few who always passed the test, who accepted the fact that with Boone, you had the chance to do some pretty exciting things, like lead the hostile takeover and shareholder rights movements, but you were also expected to get involved in Boone's more quixotic causes. Since joining Boone full-time at the beginning of the year upon reaching his firm's mandatory retirement age of 65, Stillwell had been deeply involved in the new equity fund, which he enjoyed. But he was also working on the water deal, which was fraught with difficulty and steeped in politics--and had as much to do with Boone's desire to stick it to his old hometown of Amarillo as it did with his desire to make money. We drove to the airport, strapped ourselves into the plane, and headed for Dallas. Even before we were in the air, the two men began recounting the Penn Virginia meeting. They sounded like nothing so much as an old married couple. "I think they were expecting us to make a buyout proposal right there," laughed Boone. Stillwell agreed. "Can't see why else they would have had all those people in the room"--including the company's lawyers and investment bankers. "We told them we were just coming up there to introduce ourselves, now that we're shareholders," said Boone. During the meeting, he added, he had told the chairman that he had no interest in running Penn Virginia himself, no matter how the deal played out. "Those days are over," he said now. "No more of that Phillips Petroleum stuff." This was a reference to his 1985 takeover battle with Phillips, during which he'd said publicly that he would move to Bartlesville, Okla., where Phillips was headquartered, if he acquired the company. "Bea said she wouldn't go." He let out a small chuckle. "Boy, wouldn't that have been great?" Boone had started the equity fund last August, seeding it with $90 million, money that was supplied not only by him but by old friends like Alan "Ace" Greenberg, the longtime chairman of Bear Stearns, and Fayez Sarofim, the wealthy Houston money manager. Boone believes strongly that the energy industry is headed for a new round of consolidation; the fund was a way to play his theory. The small team he'd assembled--all people he'd worked with in the past and with whom he was extremely comfortable--would find energy companies that seemed like potential acquisition candidates. Then they would buy stock in these companies and either wait for someone else to take them over or begin pressing for a sale or an LBO. Late last year the fund acquired stakes in several companies that wound up being bought out even before Boone had a chance to disclose his holdings. As a result the fund was up 17% by the end of the year, and he felt his concept had been validated. Boone wants to make things happen pretty quickly. "At my age," he says, "you don't have time to plant small trees." But he isn't much interested in "going hostile" anymore. These days it's almost impossible to take over a company that doesn't want to be acquired. Just about every state has enacted anti-takeover legislation--laws prompted, in large part, by the political reaction to Boone and other raiders like Carl Icahn and Irwin Jacobs. And anti-takeover defenses such as poison pills make it awfully difficult to engage in the kind of hardball tactics Boone used in the 1980s. On the other hand, the world has changed since Boone's raiding days. People who buy large stakes in poorly performing companies aren't called raiders anymore; they're called "shareholder activists." And company managements are now under intense pressure to get the price of the stock up and reward their shareholders. One reason Boone engaged in hostile takeovers in the old days is that whenever he became a big shareholder of a company, management just told him to go away. ("They used to say, 'Screw the stock price, let's get him,' " recalls Stillwell.) That doesn't happen anymore; "creating shareholder value" is simply too important in today's business culture. Without question, Boone had a lot to do with that transformation; to my mind, helping bring about that change is his legacy. Penn Virginia may not have been happy that he was a big stockholder, but the company would certainly be looking for ways to get the share price up, even if he did nothing more. "I've got the strong sense that they're already working on a plan," said Stillwell. Boone agreed. That subject exhausted, I asked Boone about his water deal. He controls the underground water rights to 150,000 acres in the Panhandle north of Amarillo, including his own ranch. He wants to build a pipeline that could transport that water to some parched city; depending on the pipeline's route, it could cost anywhere from $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion. Boone's plan is highly controversial in Amarillo, where many people accuse him of trying to profit by diverting water, as in the movie Chinatown, that "belongs" in the Panhandle. Three years since coming up with the idea, Boone has spent $4 million on studies, consultants, and lawyers, and he still doesn't have either a permit to drill for water or a customer that has agreed to buy it. But he has no intention of giving up. "We're going to win this thing," he said. (As FORTUNE went to press, the permit approval was imminent.) What I wanted to know was why? Why, at his age, was he spending so much time and effort and money on a venture with such a high degree of difficulty? Especially since, by his own calculations, he was never going to make much money on the deal. His answer, essentially, was that he was trying to protect himself from the predations of his old hometown. One of the local water authorities had begun pumping water from the ranch adjoining his; since that water comes from the aquifer that lies under his property, eventually his water would be drained as well. "I don't need the money," Boone said. "I'll set it up so that I give anything I make to charity. But I'm in a tough spot if I don't do something. I'll get drained. I'll be damned if I'm going to let that happen." The fact that he could see a solution to a pressing problem also pushed his buttons. "If this pipeline runs through West Texas, we can solve their water problems for the next hundred years," he said. Mainly, though, it was just a lot of fun trying to pull off a deal this complicated. What struck me most as I listened to Boone was how calm he was about everything, how at peace he seemed. Twenty years ago he had a surface calm, but he was always roiling inside. And he had a very long memory; as Wales Madden, an old Amarillo friend, puts it, "Boone was too quick to remember and too slow to forget." But he wasn't like that anymore. I knew he was disappointed that he'd only been able to raise $125 million for his equity fund; he'd expected to have three or four times that sum by now. In part he'd assumed that his name and reputation would be enough to bring in money. But as he searched for investors, he'd discovered that a lot of 30- and 40-year-old institutional investors barely knew who he was--and were telling him his fund would have to prove itself like any other new fund. Once, Boone might have responded to questions about the fund's size with sarcasm or recriminations. Not now. "We had unrealistic expectations," he shrugged. In the old days, too, Boone would have talked my ear off all the way to Dallas, and I would have peppered him with questions at the slightest pause in the conversation. But it's not just Boone and Stillwell who've gotten older; so have I. Which is why, after an hour or so, the talk tapered off, and by the time we were over Missouri, the three of us were fast asleep. "I should have stopped after the Gulf deal," Boone said one night. "I would have been a folk hero." We were having dinner at his ranch, and the subject had turned, inevitably, to the past. When I first knew Boone, his ranch had been called the 2B--the initials stood for Boone and Bea. He raised cattle on it back then, and his small, utilitarian ranch house stood on another part of the property. After he and Bea separated, he changed the name to Mesa Vista and sold off 4,000 acres that included the original house. Now his ranch house was large and even a little opulent, and though he still had a small cattle operation, he used the property primarily to hunt quail, to entertain family (especially his 14 grandchildren)--and to find solace. "Did I ever tell you about the time Drew Lewis came up here?" he asked. Lewis, a Transportation Secretary under Ronald Reagan, was CEO of Warner Amex Cable at the time of the visit. "It was right after the Time cover story," Boone continued. Lewis had just come from a meeting of the Business Roundtable, and he told Boone that the organization had decided to start a public relations campaign against him. "Ol' Drew said they'd raised something like $10 million right there on the spot." The Business Roundtable, of course, comprised the big old-line companies that Pickens had made suddenly vulnerable with his takeover attempts. "He said that I'd better dig a hole and get in it, because they were coming after me," Boone said. The Time magazine cover story had come out in the spring of 1985, less than a year after the Gulf deal--his most breathtaking raid by far and his most financially successful. It was the third of the six big hostile takeovers he attempted between 1982 and 1987, and though he didn't take over the company in the end--let's be honest here; he never did land one--he did ultimately force the oil giant into the arms of Chevron, netting Mesa $404 million for its Gulf stake. The Gulf battle had been a high-stakes drama, transforming Boone, for a brief moment, into the most famous businessman in America, the folksy yet swashbuckling corporate raider. It also made him seem invincible. But he wasn't. Within a few years, Boone's world began to slowly fall apart. Not that he could see it coming. With a hubris born of that early success, Boone launched hostile raids on Phillips and Unocal, fully expecting even greater victories. Though Mesa made a little money on Phillips, Unocal handed him a defeat so resounding that it pretty much ended his corporate-raiding career. After that, says a former lieutenant, "it was just a long, slow, grinding decline." Mesa by the mid-1980s was the largest independent exploration company in the country. But 80% of its reserves were natural gas, and the price of natural gas was sinking. Boone, however, was convinced that over the long term, natural gas prices had to go up--and he bet the company on that belief. He borrowed money to purchase reserves that made economic sense only if gas prices rose, which they didn't. Worse, he had begun to pay a large distribution to Mesa's shareholders in a deliberate attempt to show that he, at least, was a CEO who put his shareholders first. As gas prices declined--and Mesa could no longer afford to pay the distribution from cash flow--Boone borrowed money to make the payments. Ultimately, Mesa paid $1.1 billion to its shareholders--and wound up saddled with $1.2 billion in debt. That debt became the noose that strangled the company. When I asked Boone what had been his biggest mistake in business, he didn't hesitate. "Giving all that money to the shareholders," he said. "I thought there would be a huge outcry if we stopped doing it." But when, in 1990, he realized he had to stop paying the distribution, there was no outcry at all. "I was astounded," he said. "It just wasn't that big a deal." As for his bet on natural gas, the price did eventually rise, but far too late for Mesa. As he's fond of saying, "You can be dead right--and dead." As Mesa and its stock slowly sank, so did Boone's mood. "I think he was embarrassed somewhat," says a former aide. "In 1985, Boone could say he had a 20-year record of returning shareholders a 28% compounded rate of return. But over the next ten years, that record got chipped away, and it wasn't so great anymore. All the people who used to slap him on the back and thank him for making them money, they weren't doing that anymore. It weighed on him." Indeed, his relationship with the entire city of Amarillo seemed to go bad. Boone became a polarizing figure in town, a lightning rod for criticism. When he got involved in local affairs--as with his stormy tenure as the head of the board of regents at nearby West Texas State University (now known as West Texas A&M)--his critics accused him of highhandedness. Boone, who thought he should be embraced for lending a hand to local institutions, bristled at the criticisms. Of course his view was also that he was right and his critics were wrong, and that didn't help either. The symbol of this deteriorating relationship was Boone's feud with the Amarillo Globe-News. Even during the glory years, it always bothered him that the paper insisted on labeling him a raider. (He still hates the label: "I never liked being called a raider," he says. "I never destroyed anything.") Like a ballplayer who starts yelling back at the fans when he's in a slump, Boone began writing critiques of articles and sending them to the editors. He dispatched emissaries to the newsroom to complain about the coverage of him--and threatened to leave Amarillo if things didn't change. Boone even set up an organization, run by Mesa executives, urging people to cancel their subscriptions. He handed out bumper stickers that read i cancelled. When Globe-News general manager Jerry Huff was transferred to a paper in Georgia, Boone hung a banner from the top of the Mesa building that read good-bye, jerry. It was a sad spectacle, and for many Mesa executives, extremely distasteful. Most of them were young men who had joined Mesa in the expectation that they'd be doing bigtime Wall Street deals. In the mid-1980s, working for Mesa had been exhilarating--"the most fun I ever had in business," one of them says now. But feuding with the Globe-News was not what they'd signed up for, and they started to leave. In 1989, Boone decided he'd had enough. He and Mesa moved to Dallas. By then his marriage to Bea--whom he'd wed in 1972--was in bad straits, though like his business decline, it unraveled in slow motion. His relations with his four children from his first marriage, now grown, were chilly. (His fifth child, Liz, is Bea's youngest; Boone adopted her after he married Bea.) Some nights, after he got home from a difficult day at the office, he would head for the driving range and hit buckets of golf balls, just to be out of the house. Boone now believes his depression began in the early 1990s. "When you're depressed," he says, "you don't have any energy. I was tired all the time." At the least, he was under a lot of stress and not handling it well. Humor had long been his saving grace; now it took on a hard, unpleasant edge. He would denigrate former lieutenants after they left the company--or even before they left. He railed at those he felt had wronged him. He also felt enormous pressure to turn Mesa around--all by himself. "He used to say, 'I got us in this ditch. I'm going to get us out of it,' " recalls Sidney Tassin, who spent 14 years at Mesa before leaving in 1994. "I isolated myself," Boone agrees. "I felt like I had to both throw the ball and catch it. That's a pretty tough thing to do." By the mid-1990s, Mesa was in terrible shape: its cash dwindling, its billion-dollar debt coming due, its ability to raise money on Wall Street largely gone. From 1989 to 1994, Mesa lost between $60 million and $200 million annually. Anyone paying attention could see that Boone needed to restructure Mesa. Unfortunately for him, one of the people playing closest attention was his former chief strategist, David Batchelder, who had left Mesa in 1988 under the usual strained circumstances. Smelling opportunity, Batchelder rounded up some wealthy investors, including billionaire Marvin Davis. They took a stake in Mesa and publicly demanded that Boone find a way to get the stock price up--or else. Thus it was that the student turned the tables on the teacher. What followed was a battle that Boone never really had a chance to win. "Mesa just had a poor set of cards," says Tassin. The spat between Boone and Batchelder turned into a public humiliation. The press delighted in the irony of seeing Boone on the receiving end of a hostile takeover. When Boone pushed for poison pill and golden parachute provisions, he was mocked as a hypocrite. It infuriated him that Batchelder had set in motion events that caused him to be held up to such scrutiny and ridicule--and if the truth be known, it still bothers him. In Boone's view Batchelder had come to Mesa as a young man, learned a tremendous amount, and left with $8 million in his pocket. And this was the thanks Boone got? Batchelder, for his part, claims that Boone's ire was never justified--that his motives were always benign. "Boone knows our intent was never to have the company taken over," he says. "The sole intent was to make some money off something I was convinced he would do--deleverage Mesa." In the end, though, Mesa was taken over. In February 1996, seeing no way out of his predicament, Boone agreed to hand over control to Texas investor Richard Rainwater, whom he had known for years and with whom he cut a deal. Rainwater wound up recapitalizing Mesa with just $300 million of new equity, of which Rainwater himself put up $130 million. Though Boone stayed on the board for another year, he was effectively out. In late 1997, Boone sold his Mesa stock for $35 million. Less than a year later he left the board. In retrospect it was good that Boone left Mesa--good for the company (which is now called Pioneer) and good for Boone, who desperately needed a fresh start. And he's happy to admit as much. But he still can't look back without shaking his head. "Gawd almighty," he exclaims. "It only took $300 million to recapitalize the company! There's no way I couldn't have raised $300 million. But I was so beaten down. It really shows you that I wasn't thinking clearly." He has always been a great speculator. I remember traveling with Boone in the 1980s, watching in amazement as he bet big on cattle futures, pork bellies, you name it. Eventually he abandoned those markets to concentrate on natural gas and crude oil futures. He may have been wrong about the long-term price of natural gas, but when it came to betting on short-term trends, he had few peers. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, Boone actually covered Mesa's $15 million annual administrative overhead by playing the futures market. "He used to do it out of his back pocket," marvels Stillwell. "He'd spend 15 minutes a day on it." So it was hardly a surprise when, after exiting Mesa, Boone decided to set up a small commodities fund that would concentrate on natural gas futures. He gathered a small team of loyalists to staff it and rounded up the usual suspects to help fund it, including Ace Greenberg and Fayez Sarofim. The BP Capital Energy fund opened for business in May 1997 with $36 million in capital. In his office one day Boone showed me a chart of the fund's five-year performance record. It goes up a little at first before making a long, steep descent; by the end of 1998, the fund is down almost 90%, to less than $4 million. It recovers a little in 1999, and suddenly, with the arrival of 2000, it leaps straight up. By the end of 2000, the fund is up to $252 million for an eye-popping gain of 5,400%. The following year--last year, that is--it's up another $148 million. "What Boone did in 2000 constitutes one of the greatest individual trading runs of all time," says Tassin. My own view is that his performance last year was even more impressive. After all, in 2000 gas prices finally went up, just as Boone had been predicting. But in 2001, they fell--from $10 per thousand cubic feet to around $3--and Boone still made buckets of money. Yet as I looked at the chart, I couldn't help noticing something else. It may be just a coincidence, but its fall and eventual rise almost perfectly mirror Boone's emotional state during those years. If the late 1980s were dominated by Boone's feud with Amarillo, and the early and middle 1990s by the troubles at Mesa, then the middle to late 1990s constituted the Years of the Divorce. It was brutal--a knock-down, drag-out battle that lasted for two years and didn't end until mid-1998. It was filled with charges and countercharges, with bitterness and recriminations. It consumed Boone. Combined with the way he had lost Mesa, the divorce nearly destroyed him. It got to the point where people didn't want to be around him, knowing they'd be harangued about Batchelder or Rainwater or Bea. It got to the point, in fact, where Boone was spending more time talking to his divorce lawyer than to just about anyone else. Which, it turns out, was a damn lucky thing. The man's name is John McShane; he's been doing divorce law for 35 years, and he's seen just about everything--though, he says, the Pickens case was "about the toughest I've ever been involved in." After they got to know each other, Boone and McShane became very close, and pretty soon Boone was confiding in him, expressing his deepest fears and his innermost thoughts in a way he'd never done with anyone before. McShane was thus in a position to see firsthand the emotional damage Boone was suffering--but he was also in a unique position to do something about it. Early in 1997, McShane confronted Boone. He told Boone that he thought he was suffering from clinical depression and needed help. Once, Boone might have waved him off or made some joke to deflect his concern. Not now. "What do you recommend that I do?" he replied. Boone went to see a psychotherapist, and he spent a short time taking antidepressants. Pretty soon he was back to his old self. Except that he wasn't his old self anymore--not really. Something happened as he emerged from the darkness, something good. As his daughter Liz puts it, "He really did become a kinder, gentler Boone." Part of it, Liz believes, had to do with the simple fact that the divorce came to an end. "I so desperately wanted them to stay together," she says. "But now it's clear that they're both so much better apart." Another part of it is that Boone started to think hard about how he'd spent his life and how he wanted to spend the rest of it. The old bitterness and resentments, most of them, went away. He abandoned old grudges. He regained his sense of humor. He just became--there is no other way to put it--nicer. "He knows who he is and what he's about," says one old friend, "and that hasn't always been the case." He wasn't trying to impress the world anymore, or change it, or make people see that he had it all figured out. He was instead a man in his 70s who'd lived a pretty interesting life and wanted to enjoy what was left of it. Suddenly he was a lot of fun to be around. Of course it didn't hurt that in 1999 he met a woman named Nelda Cain and fell madly in love. They met on a blind date, and, she says, the attraction was immediate. Nelda, 52, a family therapist, has had her share of rocky times; she's twice divorced and has raised a son largely on her own. As she and Boone grew closer, she says, "we were both scared to death." They broke up for six months, during which time she moved to Aspen. But Boone kept calling. Finally he asked her to come to Dallas for a party, and she consented. She never went back. They flew to California on a vacation and had a long talk about whether they should get married. When Boone proposed, he began with the immortal words, "Neither one of us can afford to book another loss." She laughed out loud. I couldn't help wondering if Nelda would have fallen in love with the person Boone used to be. I have my doubts--and so does she. When she talks about him, she uses words like "openness" and "honesty." She talks about his "generous heart" and "dry wit." She says things like, "He's gotten more forgiving of himself and others." I had dinner with them one night; a year and a half into their marriage they still act like newlyweds. "It's nice to see," says McShane. "It's such a contrast to the dark days." Boone did one other thing to repair his personal life. Two days before Christmas in 1999, he wrote a letter to his children admitting that in his quest for business success, he'd often left them behind. He asked for the chance to repair the relationship while there was still time. Even before the letter, his daughter Pam, now a broker in Tulsa, had begun the process of trying to mend her relationship with her father. "It was hard, growing up in our house," she says. "But my dad has changed. He's more giving, and more generous with his time. And he's remorseful for things that happened." She adds, "My relationship with my father is a huge part of my life, and I get a lot of fulfillment out of it." Still, Boone remains estranged from several of his children. It's the great, lingering sadness in his life. "How's your golf game?" I asked Boone one day in the office. "Terrible," he groaned, and then explained, with a grimace, that his swing had abandoned him. It got so bad that Boone would lift his club and then just freeze at the top. Boone has no idea why this has happened. He'd seen a golf psychologist and consulted with his friend Mike Holder, the Oklahoma State golf coach, but to no avail. He gave me a pained shrug. "I'll tell you something," he said. "If I could get my golf game back, I'd give all this up in a minute." Then he laughed. In fact, it's hard to believe that Boone could ever give up coming to the office, even for golf. "Boone's always had the ability to make money," says Stillwell, but it's more than that. Making money is what he does for fun--for relaxation, even--and he's making more of it now than he ever has before. He's surrounded by people whom he knows and trusts and likes. He does only things that interest him. If he wants to give away millions to charity--and he does--who's going to tell him he can't? In the old days, Boone, like most CEOs, used to be scheduled practically to the second. Now he usually comes to the office with a looser agenda--no more than a couple of planned meetings--and spends the rest of his time on the phone, which has always been his lifeline. People want to hear what he thinks about oil and gas prices, and he tells them. He trades market information and gossip with Wall Street pals. He calls friends in the Panhandle to find out what's going on up there. He constantly watches the ebb and flow of natural gas prices. Sometimes he works from the ranch, where he has a huge computer screen against a wall in his bedroom. Sometimes he even goes on vacation--though he still checks in with the office ten times a day. In the old days he used to stay late or go back to work after dinner. Now he leaves the office at a reasonable hour to get home to Nelda and his dog, Murdock. He's even enjoying himself when he's not making money, which was decidedly the case in early April, when I was reporting the bulk of this story. Early in the year, sensing a temporary oversupply in the gas market, Boone had shorted gas futures. For the first two months of the year, his strategy worked beautifully. But he kept the position too long, and in March the market turned against him. As a result both of his funds were underwater. (The equity fund uses natural gas futures as a complicated hedge.) Like all great speculators, Boone was completely unruffled by the situation. His focus was on figuring out where to go from here. So he'd gather his small team in the conference room, and they'd sit for a couple of hours, hashing over the state of the markets, the state of their funds, the state of their fundraising efforts, the state of the water deal, the state of just about anything that popped into their heads. They made lots of jokes, as often as not about their ages. They wandered in and out searching for snacks. They kept a constant eye on the big computer screen that tracks the prices of energy stocks and futures contracts. As I watched them, the image that came to mind was that movie from a few years ago, Space Cowboys, in which four old codgers, astronauts from an earlier era, have to go up into space one last time to save the world. Boone and his gang are the Wall Street version of Space Cowboys. They've all been around the block a few times, but they can still show the young whippersnappers on Wall Street a thing or two. Having the market turn against you--hell, that's just part of the deal sometimes. Indeed, by the end of April the commodities fund was back in the black, and Boone was now long natural gas. "If gas prices rise the way we think they will, we're going to have a good year," he said happily. The only person who seemed really agitated was Boone's futures trader. Then again, he's 25. One day I was sitting in an office next to him, and I overheard him talking to a trader on the other end of the phone. "You never heard of Boone Pickens?" he said. "He is large! He used to own Mesa Petroleum. He tried to take over Gulf Oil. That's my boss." I had to smile. It was on my last afternoon in Dallas that Boone asked me the question that begins this story: Did I think he had changed? I had been thinking about this for days, of course, but I was still caught off guard when he asked it, and I stumbled for an answer. I responded by ticking off the things that would seem obvious to anyone who hadn't seen him in a long time. His tongue wasn't as sharp as it used to be, I told him. He had more patience. He let things roll off him that he once would have picked at like a scab. He was easier to be around. What I didn't say--but wish I had--was that Boone finally seemed happy. And that I was happy that it had turned out this way for him. Boone stared up at the ceiling as I recited my little litany. "I agree with all that," he said. "I'll tell you something else. I'm a better listener too. Back then, nobody could tell me anything. I knew everything." He shook his head in dismay at the memory of his former self. "I didn't, of course. But I thought I did." Just then, his daughter Liz called. "You're smiling today," she began after he'd said hello. "Yeah," Pickens replied with a chuckle, "we finally made some money today." She knew that he'd been taking a beating in the market recently, and they talked for a few minutes about whether natural gas prices were finally going in his direction. Then he gently changed the subject. "Listen," he said, "I got ol' Joe Nocera in here, and we're working." "So you're cutting me off?" she laughed. "Yeah, I guess I am." "Well, okay. Goodbye. I love you." "I love you too," said T. Boone Pickens Jr. www.fortune.com | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 168 Registered: 8-2003 |
Hi Zak, I'm trading for myself these days, running a fund would probably give me the same nightmares / ulcers Marty Schwartz developed when he gave that a fling, lol. The idea of having to explain drawdowns regularly to people from outside the biz who expect their funds to just happily compound without hickups is a bit too unpleasant to fathom, at least for now. But, yeah, Buzzy is where I got my handle from, I really respect him and his track record trading his own funds, his honesty, how down to earth he has remained, etc... A great guy. Found sthg on Soros that some here might find interesting, the figures quoted are his personal share of profits: Financial World The Wall Street 100 By Stephen Taub, David Carey, Amy Barrett, Richard J. Coletti and Jackie Gold July 10, 1990 Page 57 No. 8 GEORGE SOROS At least $60 million Appreciates the value of freedom more than most. During World War I, his father was captured by the Russians but managed to escape. Then during World War II, his family hid from the Nazis after Hungary allied itself with Germany. Came to U.S. in 1956 with economics degree in hand. In 1969, started Quantum Fund with James Rogers, who broke with him in 1981. Today, as a 70% owner of $2.1 billion Quantum, the world�s largest offshore investment fund, Soros and the other six managing directors split 15% of the annual profits. He spends most of his time in his home in England and helping fellow Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans reacquaint themselves with capitalism. To bankroll that effort, he created the Open Society Fund in 1979 and the Soros Foundation-Hungary in 1984. Known as "an alternate ministry of culture," the foundation helped establish a management training center in an old castle outside Budapest. Now there are foundations in 10 Central and Eastern European countries aimed at cultural and economic revitalization. Soros, 59, is the author of The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, in which he outlines, somewhat circuitously, his "theory of reflexivity," which holds that perceptions change events which in turn, change perceptions. This is not his first attempt at writing. Soros did extensive work several years earlier on a philosophical book that was never completed. His new book, Opening the Soviet System, is due out this month. Financial World The Wall Street 100 By Stephen Taub and David Carey with Alison M. Smith July 21, 1992 Page 40 No. 1 GEORGE SOROS Soros Fund Management At least $117 million Despite the fact that Hungarian-born George Soros spends much of his time these days touting capitalism in former East Bloc countries, he was still able to find a way for his $3.2 billion offshore Quantum fund, which rose around 63%, to outperform most managed porfolios and market indexes. Who says bigger can't also perform better? After he claimed a chunk of Quantum's 15% incentive fee and the fund's entire 1% management fee, Soros's personal take computed into 9 fitures. Not too shabby, considering how much time the 61-year-old globe-trotter spends away from home. One of his more recent pet projects has been the establishment of the Central European University in Budapest and Prague. In the past year or so, he still found time to launch three spin-off funds - Quasar International Partners, Quantum Emerging Growth and Quota. Financial World The Wall Street 100 By Stephen Taub, Nanette Byrnes, and David Carey July 6, 1993 Page 40 No. 1 GEORGE SOROS Soros Fund Management At least $650 million How do you make $650 million in one year if you�re not Mike Milken? Simple. First, start the year with about $800 million of your own money and other $4 billion of other people�s�nearly $5 billion in all under management. Then hire crack managers and traders who rack huge returns trafficking highly volatile currencies and derivatives instruments. Finally, charge hefty management and incentive fees. Result: Last year 62-year-old George Soros�s Quantum Fund was up 68.1% after fees; Quantum Emerging, up 57%; Quasar International, 55.7%; and Quota, 37.4%. Quantum and Quasar charge 1% management fees and 15% of the appreciation while the other two funds charge 1% plus 20%. Moreover, Soros invests a big portion of his assets in currencies and index-linked derivatives�but never for long. He flits in and out of these instruments incessantly, rarely holding a position for more than a few days. As a result, he realizes capital gains on the vast bulk of the nominal returns he generates in a given year. Do the arithmetic and you�ll see that at a bare minimum, Soros extracted more than $400 million in profits from his personal hoard. A conservative estimate of his share of his firm�s incentive fees tacks on another $200 million or so to the total. Finally, Soros awards himself all his firm�s management fees, which netted him about $50 million. Presto: $650 million, although his take might have been much higher. Today, Soros�s clutch of five offshore funds boats assets well over $7 billion, including a $525 million real estate fund he recently formed in partnership with Paul Reichmann, a former controlling shareholder with bankrupt Canadian real estate developer Olympia & York. This is not to be mistaken for Soros�s new $775 million partnership with British Land to invest in properties. What does one do with so much dough? In the case of Hungarian-born Soros, help the desperate of Central and Eastern Europe and foster capitalism on on4e�s native soil and surrounding countries. A network of 20 foundations across Central and Eastern Europe organized most of his philanthropic activity. The first was opened in Hungary in 1984. He pledged $100 million to support scientific research in the Commonwealth of Independent States last year, donated $50 million to Bosnia and financed a $25 million revolving loan to buy heating oil that helped Macedonia survive the winter. Financial World The Wall Street 100 Call it the year of the hedge funds. For this elite band, it was the best year ever. By Stephen Taub and David Carey with Andrew Osterland and David Yee July 5, 1994 Page 33 No. 1. GEORGE SOROS Soros Fund Management At least $1.1 billion In 1993, George Soros managed to earn as much individually as McDonald's did with the help of 169, 600 employees. How did he do it? Fees, great performance and the power of compounding. Let's run the numbers: To start off, the 63-year-old manages about $11 billion in several offshore funds, including the relatively well-known Quantum Fund, as well as a real estate fund. Last year each of his funds turned in spectacular performances. Leading the way: Quantum Emerging Growth, up 109% before fees, followed by Quantum and Quota, each up more than 72%. Then Soros's operation gets 15% incentive fee, which is less than the going 20% rate for hedge funds. Soros himself gets the 1% management fee on assets as of year-end and then pays all of the expenses of the firm. He also has more than $1 billion of his own capital in the funds. Add it all up, including realized gains on his own dough, and the guy made a minimum of $1.1 billion. What does a fellow do with all this money? Soros is well-known for his generosity. NOte that nine other people on the Wall Street 100 are Soros people - he rewards those who make the biggest contributions. In addition, the Hungarian native never forgot his roots. His Jewish family had to go underground in Nazi-occupied Budapest to survive. In 1947, Soros fled Hungary and enrolled in the London School of Economics. He moved from London to New York City in 1956, the same year the Soviets quashed the Hungarian nationalist uprising. Today, he is a longtime giver to Hungarian causes, and his 33rd-floor office in midtown Manhattan is decorated with paintings by Hungarian artists. His 10-year-old foundation has already given away more than $300 million through offices in many countries of the old Soviet bloc. One recent humanitarian gift: funding the connection of Sarajevo's water supply and natural gas lines. Soros has also pledged $200 million to revamp Russia's educational system and spend $15 million to keep about 28,000 Russians working for a year. Financial World The Wall Street 100 Compensation was way down in 1994 for Wall Street�s highest earners By Stephen Taub, David Carey, and Joseph Epstein July 4, 1995 Page 42 No. 2. GEORGE SOROS Soros Fund Management At least $70 million Most other mortals would have been ecstatic to earn at least $70 million in one year, but for George Soros it was quite a comedown�a drop of more than 93% from the prior year. Why the falloff? Because, like most of the other huge hedge funds and offshore funds, Soros got whipsawed by the change in the direction of global interest rates and the sudden collapse of many emerging markets. His Quantum Emerging Growth fund and Quota fund were down 13.3% and 10.1%, respectively. And although the flagship Quantum fund was up 2.7%, its premium shrank (see FW, Dec. 8). So about all poor George got by the way of compensation was his 1% management fee. At the moment, Soros, 64, is trying to liquidate the U.S. real estate fund he started with Paul Reichmann a scant two years ago. While Soros�s philanthropic efforts in his native Hungary and other Middle European countries are well documented, he makes less publicized charitable contributions. For example, the Open Society, another of his foundations, plans to give $5 million a year for three years to examine U.S. attitudes about dying. In addition, a few years ago he began giving money to the Drug Policy Foundation, a lobbying group that is exploring various drug legalization schemes. Meanwhile, the Soros Foundation is making every effort to solve the mysterious April disappearance of Frederic Cuny, the relief expert who was setting up a hospital in Chechnya for the foundation. Financial World The Wall Street 100 By David Carey and Stephen Taub October 21, 1996 Page 59 No. 1. GEORGE SOROS Soros Fund Management At least $1.5 billion Best, | ||
| zak dhabalia (Dhabaz)
New member Username: Dhabaz Post Number: 24 Registered: 7-2003 |
hi guys/telson Yes druckenmiller has left Soros and has gone back to running the funds that Soros first hired him from which is Duquesne. They split company about 2 years ago. Soros has hired other guys in the meantime but has also himself got back involved again. A few ex colleagues of mine have recently started there and will probably take over the reins at some point. Zak Zak. Are you at a fund Telson?...I notice that Pitbull is the nick name of Marty Schwartz...another of the great traders in financial markets. | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 157 Registered: 8-2003 |
Hi Jon, again, very little with which I can disagree, apart from stating that losses, and sometimes huge ones, are a part of the game, more so for those who don't trade OPM, other peoples money. I did read Liars Poker, a great book, I guess one thing is is that to an extent money, power etc can change people, after you've reached a certain age and the pinnacle of success you may no longer be as willing to face criticism, contructive or not, or even questioning that gets too close to home, to your inner most feelings etc. As for his criticism of financial markets, you're right, he did change, but so did the world, now that communism is no longer a threat to speak of, maybe he isn't all wrong on that, thinking back to almost global meltdowns like LTCM or potential current time bombs like JPMorgan. It's really difficult to assess, LTCM had, what, 3 Nobel LAureates and they didn't comprehend the basics, I would wager that there are some incredible gunslingers flying blind that have very litle respect and understanding of leverage and its potential consequences. Maybe Soros is also just using the rhetorical instrument of hyperbole to push his points across, maybe he really sees a pretty dangerous threat, I really do not know. I guess only history will tell. A site well worth having a look at is www.jimrogers.com Zak, I'd actually been under the impression, don't know where I got that from, that Druckenmiller had left Soros to focus full time on his own funds again, and that Soros had semi retired. Interesting to learn that he's still active. Best, | ||
| zak dhabalia (Dhabaz)
New member Username: Dhabaz Post Number: 23 Registered: 7-2003 |
Hi guys, I am also a speculator working on the prop desk of a major US bank doing eaxactly what Soros has done in the markets. I can tell you quite categorically that Soros is just doing the same thing as one individual that many hundreds of us do collectively. He expolits what he believes are market mispricings based to the way he sees the world. He cannot as others have said singlehandedly destroy countries or markets. The markets would have gone where they would have gone without him being involved. He is just one of many big speculators that participate in the markets. Its true that he in the recent past did delegate many decisions to stan druckenmiller but he has now once again got back involved due to the recent poorer performance that his funds have suffered. he has given hundreds of millions away to good causes and will continue to do so. his trading philosophy is based on the principles of open society and the markets are the way he tests those theories. He is still along with bruce kovner the greates speculator the world has probably seen. | ||
| Jon P. Kofod (95f355c)
Intermediate Member Username: 95f355c Post Number: 1130 Registered: 8-2001 |
Telson, Soros did achieve quite a successful life. He barely escaped the Holocaust and as you pointed out was penniless when he came to the UK. He and Jim Rogers had an incredible track record for many years. As far as Druckenmiller is concerned he also had quite a track record when he took over the Quantum fund but all that hard work disappeared during the Internet bubble when he and Soros amassed huge losses. My gripe with George is that he drastically changed his views once he started to engage in charitable activities on a large scale. He always gave money to worthy causes but after the Soviet Union fell he seemed more intent on taking an active roll in politics rather than his prior silent role (some would say a meddling role) His views changed from being a person who trumpeted the free market as a way to defeat Communism and all it's failings TO someone who constantly criticized the free market as inefficient and ill-equipped to help under developed nations. Read his early books and then compare his newer books. He does a complete 360 on the topic of free markets and open societies. Suddenly free markets are a bad thing and not conducive to open societies because it doesn't reward everyone equally (Hmm..where would he be today under such a system)? In fact Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker) which I am sure you have read, was doing a book with Soros cooperation but when Lewis started questioning Soros on all his inconsistentcies between his first few books and his last one he got quite angry and refused to cooperate any further. Instead he hired someone else with no grasp of economics or finance to publish his book. Had he operated in such a society (socialist) he wouldn't have more clout or money than you and I. He seems to forget this. No doubt he has given millions (possibly billions) to help people around the world but in recent times I have to question what his true goal remains. Regards, Jon | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 148 Registered: 8-2003 |
My pleasure, Kiyoharu. While I respect the viewpoint that he's a cagey politician, I do think there are limits, once you ride a tiger there is no telling where it'll let you off, and it looks like he's currently giving the tiger food for even more energy. Dangerous. Jon, good analysis down there, if I'll ignore the remark about "liberal baloney", that is, hehe, one thing I'd like to add is that Soros, even though he came to the USA penniless and ended up a multi-billionaire, which he still is, always had as his main interests and obsession philosophy and politics. Accordingly he hadn't been active in his hedge funds for many years, letting people like Druckenmiller run them, and instead choosing to devote his time, money and funds to his many charitable interests, where he has invested billions of his own money where his mouth was. I for one have the greatest respect for him and all he achieved in life, it's quite a story. Best, | ||
| MFZ (Kiyoharu)
Member Username: Kiyoharu Post Number: 364 Registered: 2-2003 |
Thanks Telson for posting Krugman's article on Dr. Mahathir. Just like to read other reactions to his speech. | ||
| Jim E (Jimpo1)
Advanced Member Username: Jimpo1 Post Number: 2727 Registered: 7-2001 |
Telson, do you EVER post anything Ferrari related, or are you just here to rake muck? | ||
| Jon P. Kofod (95f355c)
Intermediate Member Username: 95f355c Post Number: 1129 Registered: 8-2001 |
Guys....Telson may post a lot of what I think is liberal baloney on this site but his views on currency trading and Soros are pretty spot on regarding his currency trading. As much as I despise Soros (more on that in a minute) he didn't cause the Asian currency crisis, Russian rubble collapse or the undoing of the British pound (where he made nearly 1 billion in profit while nearly taking down the bank of England). The Asian currency crisis was the result of huge money inflows into countries that didn't have proper financial institutions to handle the inflow. In the case of the British pound Soros simply took advantage of structural problems with the Pound and the ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism). The Russian situation is the same and Soros merely speeded things up. In all three of these cases Soros didn't cause them, rather he benefited from them and some would argue speeded up the process due to his clout. I am not sure he ever had that much sway over the market but regardless the financial collapses in all three of those situations would have occurred regardless of Soros trading tactics. I have been a currency trader, involved in the Hedge fund business, and traded all sorts of global options and futures. The myth that Hedge funds cause nothing but negative currents in the gloabl economy is pure bunk. Hedge funds provide liquidity in the markets just like and other traders/investors. Soros merely traded upon the inevitable collapse of each of those situations and becasue of his huge leverage and well known noteriety was able to make huge profits. Any simple economics course in international fincance would have pointed to the same conclusions that led to the Asian Contagion, Rubble collapse, and the British Pound. None of these events shocked traders or economists. Asian countries were running huge current account deficits and all their currencies were overvalued and due to collapse. The Russian Rubble was an easy play. Anyone with 2 cents worth of brains could see that they wouldn't be able to pay their debt off and that the currency was toast. Soros incidently lost his ass when he made those stupid comments on CNBC. While he may have made some good profits on the currency drop he lost his clients millions with his Russian stock holdings. Now back to my despisment of Soros. I admired him for many years on the 80's when he was the Hedge fund king. But along the way he seemed to be unable to deal with the loss of spotlight on his dealings. During the early to mid 90's he was yesterday's news and eclipsed by a younger generation of global traders who made their money in the internet boom. With each passing currency debacle Soros had less impact. For the man who was known "to have broke the bank of England" he had little to do with the Asian Contagion and wasn't a big player. In the case of the Russian rubble he most likely had a net loss from the crash. If you read his books you will notice that at about the time his influence on the markets declined he suddenly became interested in politics and this is the stage at which I lost all respect for him. He suddenly realized that he could still get the applause on the world stage if he said what the undeveloped nations in the world wanted to hear. Namely that globalization was hurting the world and relagating the impoverished to decades of struggle. Most of us who work in the hedge fund industry consider him a "turncoat/traitor". He now makes more money selling books, speaking at engagements, and gains general applause knocking the capitalistic system that made him his fortune. If he were right it wouldn't be as bad but George doesn't believe a word of his bullsh*t political ramblings. You make your money in currency trading by taking the correct position. In politics you make your money NOT BY TAKING THE CORRECT POSITION BUT....... By taking the position everyone else wants to hear. Soros knows that the capitlism and globalization is the only way for third world nations to get themselves out of poverty (the world's governments sure as hell can't do it) yet he also knows that this is not what will endear him to the largest number of people in the world. In essence he has lost his tremendous influence over the financial markets and has shifted to gaining trememndous influence in the POLITICAL MARKET. Two very different markets. Financial markets are very efficient....political markets are not. Regards, Jon P. Kofod 1995 F355 Challenge #23 www.flatoutracing.net | ||
| Sean Ruckel (Sruckel)
Junior Member Username: Sruckel Post Number: 243 Registered: 10-2001 |
Alright, Geroge Soros! Not that I agree or disagree with him, but he's a fellow Beaver. Good to see another notorious LSE alum in the news... | ||
| Spasso (Djparks)
Member Username: Djparks Post Number: 676 Registered: 2-2003 |
Oh how I yearn for the days of dignity and honor in the White House during the Clinton years. ;o} All I see is a two edged sword from any angle. | ||
| James Dunne (Audiguy)
Member Username: Audiguy Post Number: 365 Registered: 6-2003 |
Telson, Just because you find something printed in one of your ultra-liberal publications, do you read it as the gospel truth or do you try to temper what that particular author is espousing? I do not choose to believe anything I see in print without checking it out as deeply as I can go. Remember, the person who is writing this stuff is just another human being and is very capable of making mistakes and injecting his own personal opinions in for others to read. If you can base your arguments on pure fact, I will be happy to consider them. If you cannot, I will take them for what they are--another persons opinion. And like they say "opinions are like a--holes, everyone has one and sometimes it stinks". | ||
| arthur chambers (Art355)
Advanced Member Username: Art355 Post Number: 2763 Registered: 6-2001 |
Bush is apparently planning on signing the late term abortion law. That law makes no provision for the health of the mother, and in the pre-amble provides that there is no medical reason for such a procedure. Most of my doctor friends indicate that the statement is untrue. Given the decision in Wade v. Roe, this probably won't pass muster in the Supreme Court, which stated in that case that there is a balancing act, in which at each trimester, the balance changes more in favor of the fetus. Having said that, there are strong policy reasons why Soros could and should want to get Bush removed from office. A brief list of those issues would be: 1. appointment to the Supreme Court of those who would follow the law and not make up their own version of the law, such as activist judges such as Thomas Scalia, et al who under the guise of their conservatism, have re-written a good many statutes passed by congress that they (the judges) didn't like. 2. The ability to make sure that we don't enter war without a good reason, 3. The abiltity to make sure that we no longer have large deficits, 4. The ability to make sure that the economy creates jobs, not money for fat cats. Jim, hopefully Bush will be replaced with a social liberal and fiscal conservative. If you are fearful of who we will put in office, take some time, get involved, and make a difference. Art | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 144 Registered: 8-2003 |
"The New York Times Listening to Mahathir By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: October 21, 2003 The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy: They get others to fight and die for them." So said Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia, at an Islamic summit meeting last week. The White House promptly denounced his "hate-filled remarks." Indeed, those remarks were inexcusable. But they were also calculated � for Mr. Mahathir is a cagey politician, who is neither ignorant nor foolish. And to understand why he made those remarks is to realize how badly things are going for U.S. foreign policy. The fact is that Mr. Mahathir, though guilty of serious abuses of power, is in many ways about as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we're likely to find. And Malaysia is the kind of success story we wish we saw more of: an impressive record of economic growth, rising education levels and general modernization in a nation with a Muslim majority. It's worth reading the rest of last week's speech, beyond the offensive 28 words. Most of it is criticism directed at other Muslims, clerics in particular. Mr. Mahathir castigates "interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology." Thanks to these interpreters, "the study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress." A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of "What Went Wrong," the best-selling book about the Islamic decline. So what's with the anti-Semitism? Almost surely it's part of Mr. Mahathir's domestic balancing act, something I learned about the last time he talked like this, during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. At that time, rather than accept the austerity programs recommended by the U.S. government and the I.M.F., he loudly blamed machinations by Western speculators, and imposed temporary controls on the outflow of capital � a step denounced by all but a handful of Western economists. As it turned out, his economic strategy was right: Malaysia suffered a shallower slump and achieved a quicker recovery than its neighbors. What became clear watching Mr. Mahathir back then was that his strident rhetoric was actually part of a delicate balancing act aimed at domestic politics. Malaysia has a Muslim, ethnically Malay, majority, but its business drive comes mainly from an ethnic Chinese minority. To keep the economy growing, Mr. Mahathir must allow the Chinese minority to prosper, but to ward off ethnic tensions he must throw favors, real and rhetorical, to the Malays. Part of that balancing act involves reserving good jobs for Malay workers and giving special business opportunities to Malay entrepreneurs. One reason Mr. Mahathir was so adamantly against I.M.F. austerity plans was that he feared that they would disrupt the carefully managed cronyism that holds his system together. When times are tough, Mr. Mahathir also throws the Muslim majority rhetorical red meat. And that's what he was doing last week. Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low. And bear in mind that Mr. Mahathir's remarks were written before the world learned about the views of Lt. Gen. William "My God Is Bigger Than Yours" Boykin. By making it clear that he sees nothing wrong with giving an important post in the war on terror to someone who believes, and says openly, that Allah is a false idol � General Boykin denies that's what he meant, but his denial was implausible even by current standards � Donald Rumsfeld has gone a long way toward confirming the Muslim world's worst fears. Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden must be enjoying this. The war on terror didn't have to be perceived as a war on Islam, but we seem to be doing our best to make it look that way." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/opinion /21KRUG.html | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 143 Registered: 8-2003 |
MAHATIR & Shinawatra Why, the guys had an agenda, they are the ones who's currencies Soros was shorting, again, a totally normal part of trading that every single market participant world wide engages in, Soros as one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever who on top of that invested billions of his own money in open, democratic societies in Eastern Europe is just more famous, is all. Mahatir�s Brave New World : Migrant Workers Tortured in Malaysian Detention Camps and Those Who Expose the Problem are Prosecuted The trial of veteran human rights activist - Irene Fernandez - in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia continues to encounter numerous postponements, recesses and adjournments, making it the longest running criminal prosecution in the country�s history. Begun in June 1996, the lengthy trial process itself, now exceeding 260 days in court, has become a means of punishing Fernandez for exposing the sexual and physical abuse of migrant workers in Malaysian detention camps. http://www.hrdc.net/sahrdc/hrfeatures/HRF22.htm | ||
| DL (Darth550)
Member Username: Darth550 Post Number: 515 Registered: 7-2003 |
More love for Soros: >>Thaksin Slams Soros for Funding Subversion Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has requested, ahead of the opening of the APEC summit in Bangkok Oct. 18-21, that proceedings should not be derailed by political and NGO protests. His government has drawn up a list of NGO activists to be blacklisted, including the Falungong. In his statement on the subject, Thaksin declared: "Do you know who backs some of these NGOs? It's the George Soros Foundation. Remember who destroyed our baht currency six years ago? Don't forget so easily or so quickly." Thaksin dismissed Soros as a "sinner" trying to appear noble. "Some people are sinners and they want to make merit, thinking this will make them look cool. But in reality they are still sinners." Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir recently ridiculed Soros for passing himself off as a philanthropist, passing out crumbs from the money he stole from poor nations.<< DL | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 141 Registered: 8-2003 |
Dave, just look at Long Term Capital awhile ago, just look at JPMorgan right now, a current tremendously overleveraged time bomb waiting to explode, etc etc, but what Soros was doing was completely harmless in comparison, just net directional speculative trades with totally acceptable leverage, no different than Joe on the street shorting the SP futures etc. The thing about Soros was that he just traded the markets like everyone else does, heck, I do it, if on a much much smaller scale, if a currency or stock or commodity or whatever is going down its going down and nothing can stop it and vice versa because the MARKET PARTICIPANTS believe it should move where its moving, but that is what you call a market ecomomy, and thats just good the way it is. Besides, no single market participant, no matter how big he is, is able to move the markets for longer than a very short time span if the markets feel different about price levels. Take the USD/JPY, no matter how many times the Japanese Central bank intervened it was all futile, price just kept moving where it was going to move in the first place. | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 140 Registered: 8-2003 |
Rob, I hope that you're right on the first one. The thing that scares me is if too many people assume that that is a fore gone conclusion, don't go and vote, and thus get Bush another 4 years to finalize his revolution... Jim, I'm a staunch liberal, but as I've said a couple of times I could accept, say, Bush senior as a legitimate, democratic president, even if I didn't agree with all he did, but then he wasn't trying to change the whole substance of the country, either. But as for Junior with his war based on lies, his total disregard for our most basic civil rights, freedoms, etc, that is a totally different situation. I really believe that everything the USA has ever stood for is at stake during the next elections. Another 4 years of Bush, and WW III plus martial law at home, a real nice Big Brother State, do not seem too far fetched anymore. Best, | ||
| Dave (Maranelloman)
Advanced Member Username: Maranelloman Post Number: 3115 Registered: 1-2002 |
Sorry, Telso, but you do not have enough lipstick for that pig. All trails led back to Soros, and he barely escaped multinational indictments (likely because he gave out lots of "gifts"). Go back & read your history. And Telson? I am VERY aware of how int'l finance works. How else would I know the depth of Soros' depravity? And your "everyone else does it, too" defense got old & trite in 6th grade. Try again. | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 139 Registered: 8-2003 |
No no, Soros isn't doing anything anybody else in the bizz isn't doing, if not always with as much success as him, if you attack him because of what he did - which of course is just the usual attempt to slander the critic anyway - then that only shows that you are not all too aware of the way the international financial markets work, and in which all market participants engage, be they Goldman Sachs etc etc on the sell side or any other fund or hedge fund on the buy side. Best, | ||
| Rob Lay (Rob328gts)
Board Administrator Username: Rob328gts Post Number: 6666 Registered: 12-2000 |
I'm not a Democrat or Republican, but my worthless Libertarian view is Bush will loose the election. To who is the part that scares me. | ||
| Dave (Maranelloman)
Advanced Member Username: Maranelloman Post Number: 3113 Registered: 1-2002 |
LOL !! George Soros?????????? The same George Soros whose wild, selfish currency speculations caused the Russian currency collapse & the Asian currency & economic collapses during the Clinton administration? The same collapses which almost took down the entire world economy? And you are putting faith in THAT piece_of_shit who made himself from a multimillionaire into a billionaire by almost destroying the world economy???? What does that really say about you and your motives, Telson? | ||
| Jim Schad (Jim_schad)
Intermediate Member Username: Jim_schad Post Number: 2037 Registered: 7-2002 |
Seriously, I consider myself to be relatively smart and I try to read and understand what is going on and why. However, I can't figure out the current political situation. If you look back with naive eyes it seems all administrations have spent more than we bring in, aided foreign countries, sent troops to other countries for whatever reason, created jobs, killed jobs etc. It's just politics ya know...... So is the current situation just red hot because it is happening today rather than looking back 10 or 20 years and it has had time to cool off? Someone I respect highly and that owns his own biz, has tons of money and has always been pro republican has now said to me that Bush is bad news. Didn't get a chance to elaborate. So if Bush is bad then what is the answer? What would the "other" party do? My young mind simply can't digest all the spins, angles, half truths, no truths, opinions and rhetoric. What the F is really going on??????!!!!! | ||
| Pat Pasqualini (Enzo)
Intermediate Member Username: Enzo Post Number: 1167 Registered: 2-2002 |
Telson, Don't you have anything to say of your own. A monkey can copy and paste can't you do anything more than that.  | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 137 Registered: 8-2003 |
Bruce, I thought we already cleared up that little difference yesterday, I don't believe Bush needs crack to induce his state, while the symptoms are highly similar Bush doesn't need any outside help to get there. | ||
| Bruce Wellington (Bws88tr)
Advanced Member Username: Bws88tr Post Number: 3413 Registered: 4-2002 |
GET OFF THE CRACK..... ENOUGH.............. | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 136 Registered: 8-2003 |
 Way to go, we need to launch a massive effort to restore dignity and honor to the White House by getting Bush out pronto, and get our nation back on track: "Billionaire launches get-out-the-vote effort against Bush By THOMAS HARGROVE Scripps Howard News Service August 08, 2003 - New York billionaire George Soros, an internationally prominent financier, has launched a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in a bid to defeat President Bush. Soros said Friday he has donated $10 million to start Americans Coming Together, or ACT, an organization intended to rally voters in 17 battleground states, against Bush's re-election. The group expects to raise at least $75 million and employ hundreds of election organizers by November 2004. "I believe deeply in the values of an open society. For the past 15 years I have focused my energies on fighting for these values abroad," said Soros, who donated $1 billion to pro-democracy efforts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. "Now I am doing it in the United States." "The fate of the world depends on the United States and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction," he said in a statement from his New York investment office. "The Bush doctrine is both false and dangerous. The rest of the world is having an allergic reaction to it, as we have seen in Iraq. We need to change direction." The group will focus on direct-voter-contact programs similar to efforts used by organized labor, according to Ellen Malcolm, ACT executive director. "In fact, we are not doing any media. This is all a ground operation," said Malcolm, who directed the Emily's List organization to support pro-choice Democratic women candidates. "This is a voter-contact program that is going to use personal contact, mail and the phones. But no electronic media." Malcolm said ACT will style itself on successful voter-turnout campaigns run by the AFL-CIO during the late 1990s. "Between 1996 and the 2000 election, they did a tremendous amount of work talking to union members, convincing them to vote Democratic. Union voter turnout increased by almost 5 million votes during that time, while nonunion votes declined by almost 15 million," Malcolm said. "We think that strategy will have the same kind of effect on a broader range of voters." She said the group will target key states next year: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. These are states where the 2000 presidential election was extremely close or where Democrats historically have had political strength, Malcolm said." http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?p k=ANTI-BUSH-08-08-03&cat=AN  Best, |