Hedge Funds and Stock Market Manipulation

I suspect that many of our readers will be interested in viewing a Sixty Minutes segment this Sunday on CBS.

There will be a segment investigating stock market manipulation and hedge funds, in particular, SAC Capital, a highly successful hedge fund run by Steven A Cohen. Accusations of market manipulation have been flying around hedge funds for years and such allegations have been thrown at financial journalists like Herb Greenberg and of course Jim Cramer.

Company bashing per se, so long as it is backed up with bona fide research and facts, can result in very positive changes in corporate governance, corporate behavior and occasionally management changes. However, when it is done to benefit a few, without disclosing one's self-interest, other motivations occur, and such actions reek of manipulation and fraud. Above all, any commentator must disclose his self-interest and conflicts and should be able to differentiate facts from opinion.

Bob O'Brien's Sanity Check Blog has brought this to my attention. I think you will find his post and some of the related comments quite interesting. Should be interesting viewing on Sunday.

Link Bob O'Brien's Sanity Check