This line from an interview in this week’s Barron’s made me laugh out loud:

Back when he started, [Michael Steinhardt] says, hedge-fund chiefs were members of “a very limited, elite group that had mystery and excitement and élan. Now, it’s all about making money for the managers.”

I think there’s still plenty of élan and excitement around, but I’m not sure about the mystery. And it was always about the money. Anyway, later in the article he redeems himself by saying something I totally agree with:

“Mutual funds have been a disgrace, and if they were really measured in terms of their real performance, the disgrace would be much bigger.”

Good thing an unwitting public doesn’t know they’re being shaken and stirred. Maybe there’s our missing mystery.

The main interview in this week’s issue was with someone named Charles Hess whose firm is called Inferential Analysis. Here’s one of his inferences: In an insecure world people need to maintain their sanity… preferably through getting more sleep… so they will spend money on replacing their mattresses. No word on what he charges “an elite group of financial institutions and hedge funds and multinational corporations” for this kind of deep thinking.

And China did not knock “one of our satellites out of the air in October,” as Hess said, they knocked out one of their own. A petty detail for someone obviously focused on “mega-trends,” but it would have been a wee little bit more of a problem had it been one of ours.

I did learn one interesting thing from the interview and here it is:

“The Web-TV series and podcast, Diggnation, features two guys sitting with laptops and talking about technology. But they attract 250,000 viewers and have 15 sponsors paying $10,000 each per episode to place products like beer and tea on the show. Adagio Teas sold $100,000 of tea after the two hosts plugged the tea on the show.”