{"id":194065,"date":"2008-10-28T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-28T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/10\/28\/hedge-fund-schadenfreude\/"},"modified":"2008-10-28T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-28T19:30:00","slug":"hedge-fund-schadenfreude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/10\/28\/hedge-fund-schadenfreude\/","title":{"rendered":"Hedge Fund Schadenfreude"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pic60.picturetrail.com\/VOL1689\/10590113\/18913141\/303055364.jpg\" style=\"margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer;\" width=\"400\" \/>Well, something interesting happened today; for a few hours today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\/id\/27414247\">Volkswagen had the largest market capitalization in the world<\/a>, exceeding that of Exxon-Mobil.<\/p>\n<p>It appears that what happened is that Porsche, which had previously held 42.6% of VW shares, cut a deal to increase this to 74%, and just announced it.<\/p>\n<p>Combined with the German state of Lower Saxony&#8217;s slightly more than 20% share in the auto maker, this meant that only 5% of the shares were available, and there were a bunch of short sellers who bid up the stock, because there was not enough out there to cover their short sales.<\/p>\n<p>My take is that the hedge funds can go Cheney themselves.  Their stock in trade is to make money from just such of a lack of transparency, they call it &#8220;market asymmetry,&#8221; and they just lost money on a lack of transparency.<\/p>\n<p>Hoist by their own petard&#8230;.Heh.<\/p>\n<p>There is going to be an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=aEKN.YqZye4k&amp;refer=home\">German regulators looking into this<\/a> though. <\/p>\n<p>My guess is that Porsche did this in this way because they wanted to punish the short sellers.<\/p>\n<p>They succeeded, but I&#8217;m not sure if all is in accord with German securities law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, something interesting happened today; for a few hours today, Volkswagen had the largest market capitalization in the world, exceeding that of Exxon-Mobil. It appears that what happened is that Porsche, which had previously held 42.6% of VW shares, cut a deal to increase this to 74%, and just announced it. Combined with the German &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1108,984,1004,985,1019],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auto-industry","category-europe","category-finance","category-regulation","category-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}