Louis Bacon

“Frankly, my dear, you should give a damn,” Louis Bacon said last night, paraphrasing from what he called his holy book, “Gone With the Wind.” The Raleigh, North Carolina-born hedge-fund manager, who looks a bit like Rhett Butler (especially the hair), exhorted guests to protect nature as he accepted the National Audubon Society’s Audubon Medal…Five women costumed as North American birds circulated during cocktail hour. They wore bras and undies, a feather here and there, and body paint (they’d spent six hours standing during their transformation). Each ably identified herself (which most guests — including Jonathan Rosen, author of a book about birding — failed at). There was a red-breasted robin, a Blackburnian warbler, a loon, a blue jay and a calliope hummingbird. “Mrs. Bacon and I thought of it,” said Ann Colley, the executive director of the Moore Charitable Foundation, which has carried out much of Bacon’s conservation work. “We didn’t want it to be boring.” [Bloomberg]

Time was, making hundreds of millions of dollars one minute and losing hundreds of millions the next got Greg Coffey’s blood pumping. Now? Eh. Who cares? What’s the point? Read more »

One thing you may or may not know about hedge fund manager Louis Bacon is that he likes to keep his human interactions to a minimum. It’s not a personal thing, just people in general thing. He doesn’t like ‘em and he doesn’t want to talk to or look at ‘em. For example, rather than taking five minutes to tell a subordinate he disagrees with a trade idea, Bacon has been known instead to “retreat to his office and place an opposing trade, a tactic known as ‘fading’ a colleague.” Clients are treated similarly (“During meetings with…investors, Bacon, who often draws the blinds in his private office, frequently turns to his lieutenants to answer questions, often sitting silently through presentations”) and if you thought that being, say, the fruit of his loins meant special treatment, you were sorely mistaken (“One longtime assistant negotiates annual spending allowances with the elder of his children individually…Once they’ve agreed on the number, the assistant invites the child for a sit-down meeting with his or her father, during which Bacon usually signs off on the terms”). So it probably did not come as much of a surprise when LB hired his brother, the improbably named Zack Hampton Bacon III, to speak with a dozen or so members of the staff re: security waiting to escort them out of the building. Read more »

At the end of each year, when the numbers are in re: which hedge funds had the best performance and, more importantly, which ones had the biggest profits, those nowhere close to the top would kill in cold blood to determine the secret to their vastly more successful colleagues’ (if you can even call them that) success. The fools will assume easily replicable tactics like in-depth research and a top-notch ability to (legally!) get information first are the edge employed by firms taking home billions upon billions. The wise ones know there is more than meets the eye.

At PIMCO, for instance, a daily shimmy down the trading floor keeps the Newport Beach-based operation in the money. At Bridgewater, it’s interrogating co-workers about every little trade with an intensity level not found at Guantanamo Bay. At Moore Capital it’s the prioritization of Louis Bacon’s time and breath. According a new profile out today by reporter Kate Kelly, the veteran hedge fund manager is loathe to waste either– not on children trying to squeeze him for an extra twenty bucks a month, not on know-nothing investors, and certainly not on worthless traders he’s already written off. Read more »

Almost exactly a year ago, if you happened to be walking down East 67th Street toward Fifth Avenue, you probably stopped to peer through the window of a certain $49 million townhouse. Specifically the one belonging to Phil Falcone. There, a piano playing pig name Wilbur was pulling out all the stops (“Memory” from Cats, his infamous Bette Midler), in celebration of his boss making AR Magazine‘s annual list of the 25 highest paid managers, having taken home $825 million in 2009. The good spirits and the gin were running high that night and the party didn’t stop ’til the early hours of the morning. This year, things will be different. The lights will be dimmed and Wilbur will be in his room, digging out the cocktail napkin with the number of the hedge fund manager he’d met last summer in Connecticut. He told himself he wasn’t going to do anything with it but…things have changed. Read more »

Give it up for Vikram! Read more »

If you were going to (ALLEGEDLY!) try to murder someone, how would you do it? For those who’ve been searching in vain for a way that might not immediately reveal itself to the authorities, a pioneering hedge fund manager’s got a tip for you.

Police have allegedly confiscated four pieces of dangerous sound equipment from the Lyford Cay home of billionaire Louis Bacon. The speakers are said to emit certain frequencies of irritating and annoying soundwaves that could possibly stretch over a wide range. Further investigations revealed that if used properly, the speakers have the potential to cause structural damage and even death.

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His name was Dan Tuckfield, and though the police say that their investigation “did not find that there was anything suspicious about the way the man died,” he did show “signs of decomposition” by the time they found him, which was almost immediately, so the neighbors are suspicious. Obviously this is very sad, but if there’s any consolation to be had, it’s the comfort we can take in the fact that Tuckfield was the happiest possible conditions when he passed: he was in a Jacuzzi and he was naked. It doesn’t get much better than that (the only way it could is if he was literally surrounded by bacon, not just in spirit, or if his tongue constantly regenerating strip of bacon). Read more »

BBC:

The London-based hedge fund, Moore Capital, was one of the firms raided by the City watchdog the FSA, the BBC has learned. One person at Moore Capital and five other City workers are being held. Those arrested are suspected of taking part in a long-running insider-dealing scheme. The arrests came after 16 addresses were searched in a joint probe by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca). Documents and computers were seized from premises in London, the South East and Oxfordshire. It is the FSA’s biggest operation against insider dealing.

Update: A suspect and statement from Moore, via the WSJ: Read more »