I have written a response in the Weekend Financial Times to Andrew Lahde’s farewell letter:

Dear Andrew Lahde,

I have read your letter to investors in your hedge fund in which you say you are dropping out, praise marijuana as a drug that, unlike alcohol, “does not result in bar fights or wife-beating” and tell them not to “expect any type of reply to e-mails or voicemail within normal time frames, or at all”.

I did not put any money into your hedge fund although, in some ways, I wish I had, since you are said to have made an extremely large profit by shorting subprime mortgages in the housing downturn. As Kurt Vonnegut once said of the bombing of Dresden, the subject of his book Slaughterhouse-Five, it was a terrible event but he profited from it.

You admit that you were “in this game for the money” and have contempt for bankers “whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA” and who rose to the top of companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. They were the “people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades”.

Finally, you say you are going to “take a long rest to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered on to myself” and you have “no interest in any deals in which anyone would like me to participate”.

I do have a proposal for you, in fact, but it is just as well you are not reading your e-mail because it does not bear repeating in a newspaper. So I will confine myself to one point in response to your smug, self-satisfied stream of consciousness.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

October 25, 2008 10:27pm in Finance | Comment