Dr Boom, Doom and Gloom: I'm Bearish On Stocks, Gold And Everything Else

According to BI Marc Faber is still convinced that there's a 100 percent chance of a global recession and that stocks are due for a big sell-off.  While Faber favors gold, he thinks that it too is due for a correction after staging a huge rally. 

It has a huge rally from around – the low was at $1,522 last December and we are now over $1,700 and I think we need a correction here. In fact, I am now bearish about practically all assets near term I think we’re entering a correction time where there will be some disappointments, where stock markets, from the recent times can easily drop 20%.

However, Faber's bearish stance isn't so bearish that he has dumped everything.

I’m not 100% in cash, for the simple reason that I could be wrong, but in general I think that people that have a heavy exposure to assets being that equities, or gold, or other commodities. I think they will face some profit taking here.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-faber-bearish-on-practically-all-assets-2012-10

Fasten Your Seatbelts: : More Wall St. layoffs coming

Yes folks, now that the holidays are approaching, more layoffs are on the way for the big banks, according to prominent bank analyst Glenn Schorr. The Nomura analyst in a recent report warns that many banks, which are still overstaffed, need a more liberal wielding of the ax to squeeze out more profits in the coming years, amid a global market that continues to look sluggish.

“While overcapacity is weighing on returns under the current environment, most bank managements have been in the camp that the industry is currently experiencing a cyclical rather than secular downturn,” Schorr writes. “So they’ve been slow to do too much on the head-count front,” the bank analyst said regarding layoffs.  According to Schorr’s research, big banks like JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, UBS and Barclays have actually added jobs over the past three years. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have only slashed about 1 and 2 percent of their work forces, respectively……

Find out more at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/more_wall_st_layoffs_coming_report_iNZw1SIytwMue21e767cfK

1,175 Rich People Reveal How They See What's Happening In The Economy

Clusterstock writes that there's a collection of new surveys out revealing how wealthy people see the economy, so we've put it together here for you in a quick rundown.  The takeaway we came to was this — rich people are really worried about the overall economy, but most are confident they'll be okay through the storm, or "the new normal" depending on what you want to call it.

Now for the data. Let's start with Merrill Lynch's Affluent Insights Survey. They polled 1,000 Americans over the age of 18 with over $250,000 of investable assets. They especially targeted people in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, and South Florida. The most interesting thing about Merrill's findings was that:

44 percent of people think that our current economy malaise is a "new normal."  Of those 44 percent, a whopping 94 percent think they have what it takes to come out of it ahead.

Don't stop now.  Find out more at

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-wealthy-on-todays-the-economy-2012-9

New.News - College Students Launch Hedge Fund...

From HedgeCo.Net – North Carolina registered Lumina Investments, LLC, founded and managed by three North Carolina college students, has opened its first hedge fund that seeks to capitalize on the growing influence of “macro events” on the behavior of global financial markets.

“Globalization has increased correlation and volatility among international financial markets. We believe there is upside investment opportunity through a strategy founded on understanding international developments and their global impact,” said Elliot Carol, Chairman and Principal Managing Partner of Lumina Investments.

Lumina’s new fund will invest directly and indirectly into markets that are affected by international political and economic volatility using equities, commodities, fixed-income and currency trading, he said….

Read all about it at http://www.hedgeco.net/news/09/2012/college-students-launch-hedge-fund.html

The many (nine?) lives of Goldman's partners

From efinancialnews: In the world of banking, being made a partner at Goldman Sachs is the "golden ticket". But what happens when these gilded roosters decide to fly the coop and join the wider world?

The title harks back to the halcyon days of Wall Street, when partners were also owners of their firms. This meant making money in the good times, and putting up money when things were not going so well.  After Goldman's IPO in 1999, partners still had to worry about making money, but less about losing it (at least not personally), and being made a partner lost some of its lustre. The chief executive of one headhunting firm said: “It certainly isn’t what it was before the IPO, but it is still a golden ticket.”

Today, being made partner is more like a form of Masai initiation ritual, albeit it in a Brooks Brothers button down. Goldman staffers with roughly 10 years at the firm under their belt will, every two years, hope to become one of approximately 90 freshly-minted partners joining the 350 to 400 existing partners. Those lucky few can expect immediate increases in pay, bonus and career prospects.  But what happens after that?

http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2012-09-26/goldman-sachs-partners-careers?mod=mostread-hedge-funds

Hedge funds forced to play catch-up

According to FierceFinance it's getting to that time of the year when it's easy to panic if you're an underperforming hedge fund.

Credit Suisse, as noted by Reuters, says there are plenty of signs that hedge funds are ramping up risk in an effort to reverse their lagging returns. Through the end of August, hedge funds were up about 4.5 percent, compared with a 13.5 percent total return for the S&P 500 and 8.2 percent for the MSCI World Index. Hedge funds focused on credit strategies have been the best performers, with returns of more than 7 percent this year, thanks perhaps in part to a surge from European sovereign debt just recently.

Most hedge funds have benchmarks other than the stock market, you never want to admit being outperformed by broad market indexes. There's still time to recover. Credit Suisse's prime brokerage says hedge fund exposure to higher-risk stocks has reached levels not seen since the spring. Holdings in such stocks rose 40 percent in August and now represent about one third of hedge funds' net U.S. exposure….

Read more: http://www.fiercefinance.com/story/hedge-funds-forced-play-catch/2012-09-27?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz27m803MIa

Hedgie’s $$$$ goes poof!

Long Island hedge-fund manager Howard Brett Berger has agreed to fork over more than $6.8 million to settle regulatory charges he stuck investors with losing trades — while transferring the proceeds from winning trades into his wife’s account according to a NY Post report.

Berger performed the financial sleight-of-hand while running the Professional Offshore Opportunity Fund, or POOF, and a second fund, according to the charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The 41-year-old money man used an elaborate “cherry-picking” scheme while day trading to cheat investors, the SEC said.

Berger “utilized a direct-access trading platform to delay final allocation of the trades until the end of the day, frequently after the market close, so he could determine whether the trades were profitable,’’ the court papers say.  The trading platform Meeting Street allowed Berger to make market exchanges and place buy orders into a second fund’s “allocation’’ or “suspension’’ account.

The SEC concluded he put “most of the unprofitable trades into the POOF account and left many of the profitable trades in the second account…

Wait...wait...there's more at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/hedgie_goes_poof_uR5dxVMnKhaBmUqIppSAPM