Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Jorge Posada Hopes You Fall Into Foreclosure

And so does Alfonso Soriano, El Duque, and Jose Contreras:

Now that their teams are out of the Major League Baseball playoffs, the New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada and the Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano may turn their attention to a new hedge fund investment.

The star athletes' financial advisers, the former Merrill Lynch employees Juan Collar and Anthony Fernandez, named them and [Hernandez and Contreras] as investors in a hedge fund in Miami that the advisers started in March, according to a July 12 private placement notice filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission . . . Fernandez and Collar primarily invest in fixed income securities like bonds, the attorney said. They generated profits for their clients this year by betting against the mortgage market.

"They were short subprime," Leeds said, referring to home loans for people with poor or no credit histories. Collar and Fernandez "made money in July and August hand-over-fist when everybody else was losing it."

I'm an idiot when it comes to investing, but I occasionally read a Wall Street Journal if someone leaves one in the john at work. As such, I know enough to understand that hedge funds tend to benefit from the misfortune of others, do not have the same constraints as others (no SEC filings is what I'm thinking here), and rather than spread the risk around, tend to go all-in on large, risky investments.

Knowing this, it makes perfect sense that the investors in this particular hedge fund are all current or former Yankees. Who else would be so used to an environment in which limit-free, high-risk, misery-inducing investments were the norm?

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