Bear Stearns

Lehman: Going Private?

July 17, 2008

In the coming months and years, you will hear more publicly traded companies than ever before discussing the idea of GOING PRIVATE.  Even with the mortgage mess, there is STILL access to capital. Management often gets fed up trying to build long term businesses and gain market share on a long term basis, while struggling [...]

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Bear Stearns executives arrested

June 21, 2008

Oh boy, these kinds of headlines are never good. Two former Bear Stearns portfolio managers were arrested this week, not because they did a poor job of managing money. They were arrested because they misled investors in a few ways: They told investors they personally had more money than they actually had in the fund [...]

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Recession Worse than Expected?

March 25, 2008

There was an article distributed nationwide, written by the Associated Press, and carried locally in the Asbury Park Press on March 22, 2008. I’ve re-printed the article here, but dropped in my own comments after each paragraph. The main point to take away from this exercise is that by the time news reaches Main Street, [...]

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Goldman Stearns and Lehman Sachs

March 22, 2008

All these firms hold the same investments. There is STILL considerable risk in the group. Why did this happen to just Bear Stearns? One of the first things I learned about investments was when it comes to bonds, think chocolate and vanilla, super simple: when interest rates rise, bond prices (values) go down. And when [...]

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Bear Stearns, part II

March 16, 2008

UPDATE: Sunday evening, 03/16/2008: Bear Stearns to be acquired by JPMorgan Chase for $2.00 in stock swap deal. That is NOT a typo! The stock closed at $30 on Friday. On Thursday, it was $57.00. And yes, it was $150 last summer. This, essentially became a giant margin call on Bear Stearns. Apparently, cash — [...]

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Bear Stearns, part I

March 15, 2008

The news surrounding Bear Stearns on Friday morning was not good! There are several important elements to this story. The first element is the most important one: Bear Stearns appears to be out of cash. If you’ve ever traded on margin (or know someone that does), running out of cash happens from time to time. [...]

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Wall Street Brokers

September 16, 2007

The big reason why the market fell apart this summer was because the financial stocks — the brokerage firms in particular — really struggled. We’re just learning these firms held a LOT of mortgage loans in their portfolio. And there’s really no accurate way to value these assets. There have been reports where these mortgage [...]

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