Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Do the opposite of what the sovereign wealth funds do! - Part II

I once suggested that one should shorten the stocks the sovereign wealth funds (SWF) invested in during the credit turmoil. OK, I agree that stock picking like this (albeit shorting) is somewhat of a casino-activity but still; had you shortened Citigroup last month (in the $4bn share issue) you would have made a profit of about 25%! On average the losses have been around -15. In some cases the losses have been close to -60-70%! Now, many SWFs have started to realize that the crisis isn't over and some of them seem to have stopped investing in share issues by US financial institutions. Perhaps the time of SWFs as "living" sell-signals is over? I wonder! The hidden-agenda-problem is still there for instance...