
Hedge Fund Private Investigators - champagnepapi
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1f6yg8n93jyfh/The-Ruthless-Secretive-and-Sometimes-Seedy-World-of-Hedge-Fund-Private-Investigators
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Animats
Sounds like a good idea.

I wonder how well a fund would work if you started with a broad index and
deleted the companies with scumbag executives.

I ran "downside.com" during the first dot-com boom, picking losers based on
cash flow. Picking winners is hard, but picking losers is not so hard. A broad
fund minus likely losers might outperform the market.

~~~
Wistar
Hmm. I wish I had seen your site. I do recall "fuckedcompany.com" a crowd-
sourced chronicle of dotcom excess and failures.

~~~
arthurcolle
The same guy who started that site wrote a great book that documents many of
the "losers" with detailed, and hilarious "case-studies." Highly recommended!

IIRC it is called F'ed Companies

~~~
CPLX
Indeed. And its author is a regular if somewhat infrequent HN poster under the
username “pud”, as one would expect.

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fergie
> "on its website, DDC says it once found that “the president of a large U.S.
> asset manager was arrested twice for major art theft”"

> "Another case involved a Bear Stearns executive whose murder conviction had
> previously gone undetected because, Barakett suspects, a casual background
> check either did not look at records in every state he had lived in or
> checked the wrong name or date of birth"

Its sobering to see the type of criminality that that they are uncovering at
the top level of established financial services companies. You do wonder if
people genuinely didn't know, or if their crimes were simply ignored.

~~~
bdavisx
More likely anyone official who found out was added to the bribes lists -
actual bribes, political contributions, etc.

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ryacko
>That the field is awash in unscrupulous characters who stretch the outer
bounds of legality and morality, individuals willing to secretly record
targets, pay off sources, hack, and steal, all covered by what one due
diligence researcher calls an attitude of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Outer bounds? Is there a single place where those aren't crimes? Where do they
find these people?

~~~
anbop
Secretly recording people is legal in many states and from public property in
most. Paying off sources is usually legal. “Hacking” is too broadly defined,
some of it is legal in some situations, most isn’t. Stealing by definition
isn’t legal.

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ohashi
That video of the guy pretending to be a reporter... hilarious and sad. My gut
tells me that should be illegal in some way, I don't know how or why, but it
is wrong.

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bhouston
Makes sense, I watch Billions.

~~~
jonplackett
Had the same thought exactly!

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walterbell
Elliott fund has influenced several tech companies, e.g CEO/board changes and
M&A. Samsung were not fans.

~~~
swarnie_
My last company was outright owned by EMF, a brutal reorganization and gutting
of company culture followed quickly.

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jgalt212
isn't this how Spitzer's enemies took him down?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_9:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_9:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Eliot_Spitzer)

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RickJWagner
Yet another reason to invest in Index Funds.

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sonnyblarney
If they actually do this:

"Nussbaum says Blue Heron employees will not misrepresent themselves or lie
for a client. “And we will not knowingly violate any rules, regulations, or
laws. We will keep our client's confidence very strictly. We will never
disclose the name of our client or provide any identifying information that
would allow somebody else to identify our clients. We will not say we are
working for X if we're working for Y. We would just decline to answer a
question or say we're not at liberty to say,” he explains."

Then I think it's actually a noble profession.

'Truth Hackers'.

There's a big podcast on FT about these guys - they are the one's the dig out
all of the corrupt dictators illegal holdings around the world (i.e. Argentina
wants to default on it's loans, when a ton of money was stolen by politicos
and hidden in offshore accounts, so the hedge fund managers holding the bonds
want to 'find the money') and arguably that's a 'social good'.

But do they stick to that moral impetus ? That's the question ...

~~~
TACIXAT
Link to the podcast?

~~~
sonnyblarney
It's in iTunes, sorry no link.

Search FT Alphachat podcast. It's recent about 'the most complicated debt
restructuring ever'. About a month old. They talk about PE companies who buy
up distressed debt and then go after it aggressively.

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mruts
Only activists would probably go to the trouble of hiring these kinds of
people. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Billions is in anyway
representive of the industry.

From personal experience, hedge funds are a lot more boring and a lot less
cloak-and-dagger than the general public thinks.

~~~
blantonl
I don't know about that. I've seen first hand, through close acquaintances,
where some hedge funds will expend enormous amounts of financial and human
capital resources when it comes to legal fights. Especially when it involves
current and former employees of said funds that get sideways with founders and
partners.

These guys running a lot of these funds didn't get to where they are without
really throwing some sharp elbows at times. With the amount of money at stake,
and the sheer megalomaniacal attitudes in play between parties, you can bet
the drive to get ahead in any dispute will be especially acute.

~~~
mruts
I mean certainly it happens but the vast vast majority of hedge funds just
deal in the trading of vanilla equities, options, bonds, and futures. And
there’s less/not much to sue about for those kind of things.

There are some who deal in bespoke debt, swaps, CDS, etc, where there are
often things to sue about. But it’s a less popular space compared to the
former.

