It might seem so. In a recent spur of public statements, Andrew Lahde, a former hedge fund manager who won 870% on his blogs last year, thanked the “stupid traders” who made him a very rich man with their stocks trading techniques. And this in a farewell letter to his customers!
Lahde, who was heading the Santa Monica based hedge fund Lahde Capital Management LLC, told his customers that he has to exit the credit derivatives market because of its recent extremely high volatility. Of course, this is perfectly understandable when you are 37 years old and can afford to say that he “was in the game for the money” – and indeed it seems that he amassed a fortune by making huge returns from the $800 million shared for his investments fund.
In a more interesting twist, supported also indirectly by a Financial Times article, he blamed the sophisticated MBA graduates from the top Ivy schools for pushing the financial system into the abyss with their ignorance on how the things worked. Here’s a doitinvest.com letter extract:
“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.
All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.”
Somehow this reality was confirmed also by a vast majority of stock traders who now look for new jobs on Facebook.com. Our research on doitinvest shows that many of these unfortunate traders are now admitting that even they were not understanding the true consequences of their trading actions, and not even the structure of the derivatives they were selling.
So much with the proclaimed wiseness of the financial system..
An MBA is not a substitute for a brain, it is just like a doctoral degree – it throws the knowledge at you, but you must know how to use it. So yes, the ultimate MBA test is the business battlefield, were you can make it or break it. I am almost there to complete an MBA too and it is like in life – full of idiots and of smart people who think they know what they are doing. But no MBA can substitute a brain 🙂
The Author