“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]
Louis Bacon
Louis Bacon’s Animal Conservation Work Involves Stripping Models Down To Their ‘Bras And Undies,’ Painting Them To Look Like Birds
By Bess LevinMoore Capital Co-CIO Retiring Because Trading Just Doesn’t Get Him Jacked Up Like It Used To
By Bess Levin
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 »
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Hedge Funds
Louis Bacon Recruits Brother To Have Tough Conversations With Employees Re: The Fact That They No Longer Work At The Firm
By Bess Levin
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 »
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 »
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 »

