A few years back, a hedge fund in Greenwich went out of business. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Was called Amaranth Advisors. Was run by a guy named Nick Maounis. Had this lovable goof of a Canuck named Brian Hunter making natural-gas trades. Brian was always up for a good laugh and one day, on a lark, put on some trades that resulted in the firm losing, I don’t know, like $6.6 billion. It’s was hilarious! Maybe you had to be there, but I’m telling you, it was pant-pissingly funny. Definitely one of the best things to happen to the hedge fund community in a while.
Anyway, Maounis went on to start a new fund called Verition with most of the gang from the old shop, except for Hunter, who did some work for Peak Ridge Capital and also spent the last few years unsuccessfully fighting fighting what he believed was a bum rap re: market manipulation (on good, non-firm-destroying trades). Continue reading »
A few years back, a hedge fund in Greenwich went out of business. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Was called Amaranth Advisors. Was run by a guy named Nick Maounis. Had this lovable goof of a Canuck named Brian Hunter making natural-gas trades. Brian was always up for a good laugh and one day, on a lark, put on some trades that resulted in the firm losing, I don’t know, like $6.6 billion. It’s was hilarious! Maybe you had to be there, but I’m telling you, it was pant-pissingly funny. Definitely one of the best things to happen to the hedge fund community in a while.
Anyway, some people, namely Amaranth clients, who are humorless stiffs, didn’t find the blow up that funny. So even though Maounis who, FYI, has yet to get investors their money, was chomping at the bit to get things going again he had to lay low for a while. He and other members of Team A dispersed and went pretty much radio silent. Maounis told everyone not to contact him, and to instead wait for his signal. And now, the time has come. Continue reading »
From time to time, as it’s right next to the box I need to click to open a new post, I like to check out what terms non-regular readers have searched to end up on this here site. Ping Jiang is a frequent one, as is a rotating cast of CNBC anchorettes, in addition to some that are less expected but certainly welcome, like “dogs playing poker” and “Vladimir Siforov.” Here are today’s: Continue reading »
From the mailbag of awesomeness:
Very early unsubstantiated rumor going around that Brian Hunter– who is still at Peak Ridge– has completely blown up again, this time on bear spreads.
Continue reading »
How many Houston-based billionaires did Brian Hunter try to screw in an attempt to not blow $6 billion out of his ass, have himself escorted from the Amaranth building and be placed on Nick Maounis’s permanent shit list? At least one that we know of but maybe more will come out of the woodwork. For now it’s John Arnold. The Centaurus founder could probably point to trades that made him a ton of money but you really can’t put a price on avoiding the humiliation that would’ve come from being taken for a ride by fish boy.
Traders familiar with Arnold’s style also credit a calm and disciplined manner that helps him stay eerily focused on the fundamentals of the market when other trades are creating distractions.
That was on display most notably during the Amaranth debacle. Amaranth, a $9 billion commodities hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., was betting that natural-gas prices would rise in the winter, according to a Senate report that shed light on what happened in September 2006.
Continue reading »
What do you think the destroyer of all worlds/marine life/investor capital is feeling right now?
Brian Hunter has done a great job of vanishing from the public eye since the collapse of Amaranth. Despite ongoing litigation with regulators, Hunter has more or less managed to keep his name out of the headlines. But this week Fortune’s Bethany McLean tracks him down, and he agrees to talk to Fortune to explain that “he doesn’t think that what has happened to him is exactly fair.”
McLean knows this turf very well, having extensively reported on natural gas trading activities of a little company called Enron. It’s easy to understand why Hunter would have looked at her as someone who might understand his trading beyond the standard approach accusing him of losing $6 billion. (Also, she’s beautiful and charming, so that probably helped her get Hunter to talk too.) Unfortunately, the story McLean does get is pretty thin, unadorned by many details about what exactly Hunter thinks is unfair about his reputation. (Although she does a great job of describing the “Keystone Kops” at the FERC and the CFTC who are pursuing Hunter on different market manipulation charges.)
We’re told by a person familiar with the matter that Hunter despises Nick Maounis, the founder of Amaranth. Hunter privately argues that the collapse of Amaranth was more the fault of Maounis than his own energy trades. As evidence of this, he points to fact that Citadel was able to turn a profit on those trades. Judging from McLean’s article, however, Hunter isn’t quite ready to go public with these thoughts.
Entertainingly, Fortune didn’t manage to get a photograph of Hunter. As far as we can tell, no one in media has his picture. (Our picture is merely an artistic “representation” of Brian Hunter and some guy holding him in both hands.)
The man who lost $6 billion [Fortune]
