Friday, June 10, 2011

Tarpon Fishing 2011

Tarpon fishing is at best a combination of blind luck, good weather, favorable winds and very good technique.
So the question is, what do you do when the king of all game fishes eludes you because the wind is blowing like stink and the clouds obscure what you can see?
If you have a really great guide like I do, you do something different. I did something today i have only just heard of. I went fishing for sharks with a fly.
Right now you are saying to yourself "sharks only eat dead fish" or "sharks don't fight".
Bullshit.



This "little" guy ran off 200 yards of line real fast before getting beat. So the next time Your target fish isn't on the bite, think outside the box, or at least get a great guide like Captain Anthony Skinner of Key West Florida. He will think outside the box  for you.
I landed three of these beautiful killing machines and lost several others because the hook didn't set just right and all the other nonsense that can go on when dealing with fly lines in high wind. 
Bottom line? Tony and I had a blast. Maybe tomorrow we will fish for amberjacks.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Chasing Monsters under the Bed

Isn't politics wonderful?

Goldman Sachs looks like one of the biggest crook on Wall Street because of one of the basic rules required by brokerages to remain at arms length with customer accounts. The concept is called a "Chinese Wall".

Let's take the case of poor Fabrice Tourre, the middle manager that GS has thrown under the bus in this mess. The scope of his job was to sell mortgage derivative securities to customers. As a confident young man, he is brash and apparently uncaring, yet he did his job well.

Because Tourre was in the Sales department, he is not and should not be party to what is going on in the Financial Engineering or Corporate Finance departments. His only contact with the Trading department should be to simply place orders.

I fear, though, that because of Politics, the poor bastard is gonna spend a long time in jail ... just for doing his job.

Brokerages have whole departments in charge of Compliance (with the laws). It is their job to police the practices of a firm. Why aren't they on trial? Why did they allow an institutional customer to cherry pick mortgages for a short portfolio? I spent a lot of years at a brokerage firm, and the institutional guys would not even talk to me except through the Compliance department. And even then, my Office Manager had to be in the loop.

I am not even saying that there are not "iffy" practices at Goldman Sachs. Whenever big money is involved, there are going to be big crooks. Ask Bernie Madoff. But for the most part, we strive to be explicitly fair to the customers, the markets, and our firms just because we are really honest guys save those tiny few.

So Fabrice Tourre is the Monster that Wall Street is going to defeat and be the hero.