Horrible News! Another Brian Hunter Failure

I just can't help weeping today. Seems that Brian Hunter, the much-investigated website-suer who was responsible for the biggest hedge fund collapse in history -- Amaranth Advisors -- is on the brink of having another failure on his hands.

His latest venture, Solengo, may go belly-up. And Hunter, being as big a blamer as he is a suer, blames them -- the regulators who are unfairly probing the little dear. Here's the bad news in Dealbreaker.

Oh no! Can someone please give this fine man a few million to get him on his feet again and give him another opportunity to lose money for his investors!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Brian Hunter Pulls a 'Richard Kimble'

Any fan of the great old sixties show The Fugitive will appreciate the latest news from the saga of Brian Hunter: hedge fund failure, website-suer, and all-around creep.

The Globe and Mail reported today that Hunter, on a lunch break from an interview with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, suddenly "pulled a Kimble" and lit out!

I'm serious. Here's what the Globe and Mail says:

Brian Hunter, the Calgarian who made more than $100-million trading natural gas for Amaranth Advisors LLC before the hedge fund collapsed, fled the U.S. as Washington regulators were trying to interview him earlier this year, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says.

"He was in the middle of an interview and there was a lunch break, and he never came back from lunch," FERC chairman Joseph Kelliher said in an interview yesterday after announcing preliminary findings that Amaranth, Mr. Hunter and another trader manipulated the market over three months early last year. FERC is seeking total penalties of $291-million (U.S.).

Why do you think he did that? I mean, what's going on here.... Were they, like, rude to him or somthing? Did he have indigestion.....? Or maybe he....

Oh, wait a second. I know!

He's looking for the one-armed man who actually manipulated the natural gas market!



Dealbreaker has more, but I think my theory makes the most sense.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Another Regulator Piles on Brian Hunter

Brian Hunter, former head trader of the world-class hedge fund disaster Amaranth Advisors, got another kick in the slats today. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants Amaranth and Hunter to pay $291 million in fines and penalties for manipulating natural gas futures.

Yesterday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed similar charges against the website-suing trader and Amaranth, which was the biggest hedge fund collapse in history.

Hey, I have a question: isn't market manipulation against the law? Don't people go to prison for that? Just wondering. After all, it seems to me that what these guys are talking about is a lot worse than insider trading.



Corporate cretin Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com, who blames all his company's failings on hedge funds, once said that he doesn't dislike all hedge funds, just the baddies -- in other words, all hedge funds except the one run by his brother, or the one through which he owns the bulk of the company's shares.

I think I have found a hedge fund honcho who would melt Patrick Byrne's heart.

P.S. I wonder how investors in Solengo Capital, Hunter's new plaything, feel about their fair-haired boy?

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Three Cheers for the CFTC! Hip hip hooray!

It's not every day that a guy can really gush about a regulatory agency -- heaven knows, the ones I generally write about tend to suck -- but I am really enthused today about the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Today comes word that the CFTC has sued one of the most truly odious characters in hedge fundland -- quite a distinction, that -- the sue-happy, free-speech-oppressing, failed former head of the collapsed Amaranth Advisors hedge fund, Brian Hunter.

As I've mentioned in the past, Hunter has given the expression "junk lawsuits" a new and odious meaning. His new hedge fund, Solengo Capital, has filed a ridiculous lawsuit suing Dealbreaker.com for publishing a marketing brochure.

There's nothing lovelier than seeing a sue-er like Hunter getting a taste of his own medicine, particularly for behavior that is really porcine.

According to Bloomberg, the CFTC's suit charged Amaranth with trying to manipulate U.S. natural gas prices, and sought an injunction against Amaranth and Hunter, who was its chief trader.

The Bloomberg story says

Hunter ``actually bragged about flexing his muscles upon America's natural gas markets,'' said Gregory Mocek, enforcement director for the commission, said on a conference call with reporters today.

So now he can actually brag about being both a sue-er and a sue-ee. In fact, the sound of the latter brings Hunter very much to mind.



© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

The Latest in the Case of Solengo vs. Sanity

A hedge fund genius caught in mid-whine

I'm surprised the press isn't having a field day with the bizarre, grotesque effort by Solengo Capital -- successor to the infamous Amaranth Advisors hedge fund -- to keep its "confidential" marketing brochure off the web by suing Dealbreaker.com.

What makes the media's neglect of this story especially curious is that the most interesting stuff is in court filings easily accessible via the web.

This story is newsworthy not just because of its First Amendment implications, but because Solengo's chief honcho is world-class money-loser Brian Hunter, who played the Captain Smith role in the Amaranth Titanic story. As FINAlternatives points out, Hunter "holds the distinction of being the only person in hedge fund history to single-handedly lose more than $6 billion dollars."

Hunter is also a first-class whiner, in addition to being a towering figure in red-ink-land.

In an affidavit filed with the court, Hunter says that "my colleagues and I are attempting to grow [Solengo] into a multibillion-dollar commodity investment vehicle." (I can already hear the murmurings of "God forbid".....)

Standing in the way of this worthy endeavor is the evil, nasty, awful Dealbreaker! "Given the sensitive nature of the information contained in the Document, as well as the fact that Solengo is still in the very early stages of development, I believe that the continued, unauthorized dissemination of the Document by DealBreaker will cause severe damages that would be difficult if not impossible to quantify."

If the above is true, publishing that marketing brochure is even more terrific than I had thought. What a service to the dumb institutional investors of the world! You really have to be a knucklehead, after all, to put your money in a fund run by a guy with that kind of track record

And I don't just mean the Amaranth disaster. This lawsuit is yet another example of sheer stupidity. By filing this suit, Solengo has drawn more attention to its super-secret marketing brochure.

However, I will say -- and tinhorn dictators the world over should give Hunter a high-five for this -- his efforts to squelch the brochure itself seem to have met with some success. The website to which I linked in this post, which had a link to the infamous brochure, has vanished, as has the link in this earlier post.

Dealbreaker itself has stopped talking about Solengo entirely, no doubt on advice of attorneys. It also agreed to a tempoary injunction stopping it from printing the brochure while the case is pending. The court is now weighing a Solengo request for a restraining order.

This cone of silence is temporary, of course, as is the absence of the brochure from the web. Money can't buy happiness, or a respite from the bad publicity Solengo richly deserves, but it can buy a nice chunk of Internet censorship for at least a short while.

UPDATE: The link with the brochure is back up.

Speaking of junk lawsuits, the mother of all frivolous, vexatious, nonsensical lawsuits that stomp on the First Amendment -- Overstock.com's "shut the f--- up" suit against Gradient Analytics -- was being heard by a California appellate court today.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

The Forbidden Solengo Brochure Arises

As a result of Solengo Capital's junk lawsuit and cease-and-desist campaign against Dealbreaker and bloggers -- still largely ignored by the media -- the infamous marketing brochure has disappeared from the web. Until now.

A civic-minded reader has posted a link to the brochure on a website.

Be sure to download it before these hedge fund bullies go on their next lawsuit rampage.

The people behind Solengo are the same ones who drove the Amaranth Advisors hedge fund into the ground. It is tempting to say, "They may not do a very good job at managing money, but they sure do an excellent job of pushing around bloggers."

Far preferable is this thought: "They may not do a very good job of managing money, and hopefully investors aren't so dumb as to give them another chance." Let's keep our fingers crossed. Meanwhile, be sure to download that brochure!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The Junk Lawsuit is Here!

Thanks to the Naked Shorts blog, a copy of the lawsuit against Dealbreaker.com, duly filed at the U.S. District Court in New York, is available for perusal by those with strong stomachs.

The suit speaks for itself, but my favorite line was this:

28. Defendants acted in bad faith by posting a Document that was clearly designated as confidential and which, therefore, they must have known they did not have authority to post.

Translation: "How dare they publish what we don't want them to publish!"

The legal geniuses behind this hyperarrogant drivel are at the firm of Kobre & Kim LLC.

Greg Newton's take on this idiocy can be found here.

Greg observes as follows:

So how does said notorious putative hedge fund go into court and allege, inter alia

31. Continued disclosure will cause irreparable harm to Solengo…by (1) placing it at a competitive disadvantage by allowing potential competitors blah blah blah; (2) revealing prospective trading strategy to other market players; and (3) discouraging prospective investors through raising confidentiality concerns.

apparently with a straight face? (1) and (2) don’t pass any kind of smell test – indeed, (2) is an especially challenging twist on the truth, given that the brochure contains no information about trading strategy, per se – while ‘confidentiality concerns’ should be well down the list of issues addressed by Solengo’s putative “investors.”

This masterpiece of junk litigation (fortunately not stamped "confidential") can be can be found here.

The brochure itself is here. (Hat tip: FT Alphaville blog.)

I'm still disappointed by the relative lack of media coverage being given to this hedge fund thuggery.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Silence on Solengo

I'm surprised, and disappointed, that the media has not picked up on the outrageous effort by Solengo Capital to bludgeon blogs to not post its marketing brochure. This includes a real or threatened (it's not clear which) lawsuit against Dealbreaker, which won't cave in.

Apart from Reuters and the New York Times Dealbook, both yesterday, there has been no pickup in the media.

What makes Solengo interesting, apart from its ham-handed and dumb saber-rattling, is that Solengo is quite fascinating in its own right, and for all the wrong reasons. It is run by former traders of the collapsed Amaranth Advisors hedge fund.

Dealbook noted:

Wall Street has been buzzing over the news that Brian Hunter, who was in charge of the ill-fated energy trades that brought down Amaranth last year, was already raising funds for a new hedge-fund firm called Solengo. The fund’s marketing materials, which were marked as confidential but leaked to blogs, describe it as “structured to become a multibillion-dollar commodity investment vehicle” that is “designed to minimize the risk associated with leverage, liquidity, credit and operations.”

Thus Solengo is a good example of the unbridled hubris that still infects the hedge fund industry -- and, to the extent it can raise money, the stupidity of people and institutions that invest in hedge funds. Apart from a small article in the Wall Street Journal a week ago, this swift rebirth of a proven failure has received little notice.

P.S. Here is the infamous brochure.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Annals of Legal Genius

I'd like to know the name of the genius who dreamed up what must surely be the dumbest lawsuit I've heard about in recent weeks... (no better make that recent days... no, recent minutes...)

Seems that the Dealbreaker blog is being slapped with a court order by the Solengo Capital hedge fund, to stop the blog from posting a marketing brochure.

Really a smart move for a "secretive" hedge fund group seeking to not draw attention to its marketing brochure. Naturally, the first thing I did when I heard about this was attempt to get the marketing brochure. It had been withdrawn. Drat. As soon as it is back up, I will of course link to it.

Meanwhile, here's a link to every story Dealbreaker has ever written about Solengo Capital.


There's an old movie line (from Detective Story, if you must know) in which the villain was told by Kirk Douglas he had a lawyer instead of a conscience. Solengo Capital has a lawyer instead of brains.

UPDATE: More on Solengo and a download link. To make the whole thing even more grotesque, Solengo hunted down Greg Newton's Naked Shorts blog and blackjacked him into removing a link to the brochure. Here's a Reuters story. Unbelievable -- as in unbelievably dumb.

P.S. Here is the infamous brochure.


© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

-----------

Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.