“I have never been a gold bug. It is just an asset that, like everything else in life, has its time and place. And now is that time.”  the legendary hedge fund manager Mr. Paul Tudor Jones writes in a letter to his clients. A copy of the letter has been obtained by Bloomberg News. According to Paul Tudor [...]

German unemployment falls!  RBA disappoints the markets…  China to buy Canadian company…  ISM to print positive? And Now… Today’s Pfennig! Good day… And a Terrific Tuesday to you! And Welcome to September! Well… Here’s a thought to get our engines started this morning… Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning ( www.dailyreckoning.com )had this to add to my ranting about our National Debt going to over $20 Trillion in the next 10 years, due to deficit spending…

“The Obama administration, for example, expects to run $9 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years – and that number is based on a recovery! Imagine what will happen if the economy doesn’t recover?”

Now, that’s a nice comforting thought to start our day right? NOT! WAKE UP! Morning has broken, and the coffee is on… If you are still of the thought that this is all going to end up seashells and

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After being the largest hedge fund strategy in 1990 representing 71% of the overall hedge fund assets global macro has shrunk and now only represents about 15% of total assets.  While most people assume that this dropoff in assets was due to poor performance the numbers actually show a totally different story.  In fact according to the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Indexes, global macro has been the number one investment strategy with a total return of 502% from 1994 through June 2009.  Compare that with a total return of 335% from long short equity or 321% from event driven funds.

Of course most investors also have a misguided perception that every trade is like the trade that “broke the Bank of England.”  That trade in 1992 made Soros and his Quantum Fund over $1 Billion in a few days and garnered a lot of publicity.  The funny thing is

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a href="http://www.iimagazine.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=1964189"Interesting interview from iimagazine.com/a with hedge fund trader Paul Tudor Jones. He is one of the ones worth listening to. I love this quote from him in this interview:br /br /span id="ctl00_MainBody_ArticlePager"/spanblockquotespan id="ctl00_MainBody_ArticlePager"While I spend a significant amount of my time on analytics and collecting fundamental information, at the end of the day, I am a slave to the tape and proud of it./span/blockquotebr /br /One aspect of trend followers and technicians that I admire is their ability to say at sometimes things are out of their hands. For some reason there is a need to understand and quantify everything, and he touches on this. I think it is due to the immense amount of information on the internet. We just feel like there is nothing we can't find the answer to. Unfortunately, in the market, there is a lot that we can't ...

According to Bloomberg, some of the brightest, most successful hedge fund managers got into trouble too.br /br /-span style="font-style:italic;"In the close-knit hedge fund community, where confessions of a mistake are rare, billionaires Louis Bacon, Kenneth Griffin and Paul Tudor Jones are retreating from borrowed-money bets, private equity and emerging market debt and championing more transparent stocks, bonds and currencies./span br /br /Hedge funds got into the same cycle of "everyone's doing it, so we need to to stay competitive." But with massive losses and forced selling due to fund redemptions, Hedge funds now will get back to basics, and this should help to stabilize the market a bit. br /br /I wrote about a href="http://briskycapital.blogspot.com/2008/08/are-hedge-funds-ruining-market.html"hedge funds and their potential problems this earlier this year/a. These funds help create asset bubbles with excess leverage, and they increase market volatility by swapping in and out of stocks and sectors ...

h1 style="text-align: center;"bPaulson amp; Co Holdingsbr //b/h1h2 style="text-align: center;"bspan class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"Paulson amp; Co 13F Holdings Analysis | Q3 2008br //span/b/h2This post on Paulson and Co is being written as part of HedgeFundBlogger.com's a alt="Hedge Funds and Investment Securities" title="Investment Securities Holdings" description="Investment securities analysis 13F holdings" href="http://richard-wilson.blogspot.com/2008/09/investment-securities-and-holdings-of.html"Investment Securities Tool/a which analyzes the holdings of hedge fund managers.Please click on the pictures below each section to view the securities held along with their values and current share holdings as of Paulson and Co.'s Q3 2008 filing:br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Security Holdings Changes 1 of 3 (Click Image to View)/spanbr /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6sny29uYI/AAAAAAAACoY/pt3BxIP51Mk/s1600-h/Paulson+and+co-1+of+3.JPG"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 220px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6sny29uYI/AAAAAAAACoY/pt3BxIP51Mk/s400/Paulson+and+co-1+of+3.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277845612991986050" border="0" //aspan style="font-weight: bold;"Security Holdings Changes 2 of 3 (Click Image to View)/spanbr /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6stJWOltI/AAAAAAAACog/rpMlrrrMGPU/s1600-h/Paulson+and+co-2+of+3.JPG"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; ...

h1 style="text-align: center;"bViking Global Investors/b/h1h2 style="text-align: center;"bspan class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"Viking Global Investors LP Q3 2008 13F Holdingsbr //span/b/h2br /This post is being written as part of HedgeFundBlogger.com's a alt="Hedge Funds and Investment Securities" title="Investment Securities Holdings" description="Investment securities analysis 13F holdings" href="http://richard-wilson.blogspot.com/2008/09/investment-securities-and-holdings-of.html"Investment Securities Tool/a which analyzes the holdings of hedge fund managers.Please click on the pictures below each section to view the securities held along with their values and current share holdings as of Viking's Q3 2008 filing:br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Added More Since Last 13F Filing (click image to view)br //spana onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6mX8gQS2I/AAAAAAAACno/dFKOvogV1TQ/s1600-h/Viking-Global-Investors-Added+More.JPG"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 220px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6mX8gQS2I/AAAAAAAACno/dFKOvogV1TQ/s400/Viking-Global-Investors-Added+More.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277838743633415010" border="0" //aspan style="font-weight: bold;"New Holdings (1 of 3)/span span style="font-weight: bold;"(click image to view)/spanbr /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wM_OZdOMR_Y/ST6liHVebiI/AAAAAAAACnA/leNCGjSHd20/s1600-h/Viking-Global-Investors--New+Holding1.JPG"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 274px; height: 169px;" ...

Tudor Hedge FundTudor Hedge Fund 13F Holdings AnalysisThis post is being written as part of HedgeFundBlogger.com's Investment Securities Tool which analyzes the holdings of hedge fund managers.Next up in the macro hedge fund tracking series we have Tudor Investment Corp, the brainchild of Paul Tudor Jones. Taken from Wikipedia, the bio of PTJ is as follows: "In 1980 he founded Tudor Investment Corporation which is today a leading asset management firm headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Tudor Group, which consists of Tudor Investment Corporation and its affiliates, is involved in active trading, investing and research in the global equity, venture capital, debt, currency and commodity markets. One of Jones' earliest and major successes was predicting Black Monday in 1987, tripling his money during the event due to large short positions. Jones uses a global macro ...

Hedge Fund ReturnsHedge Fund Year to Date ReturnsWhile these "year to date returns" are now slightly out of date here's a nice guest post by Market Folly on the performance of some of the more well known funds in the hedge fund industry:

Well, we recently got an update as to just how poorly hedge funds are performing year to date. Don't get me wrong, there are of course some standout performers. But, for the most part, they are taking it on the chin. Even some of the best and brightest in the game are right there with you. Hell, you're probably even outperforming some of these funds. Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, we get a look at many notable hedge fund's performance year to date.

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