How To Build A Poor Man's Hedge Fund - CNBC

   To me, the market is a big game. It's the biggest MMORPG in the world where traders, investors, and scammers ply their trade in a daily battle of wits, wealth, and occasional treachery. Hedge funds used to be the gunslinging cowboys in the game but a lot of them were destroyed in the volatility of 2008-2009. Since many were destroyed, I found this opening paragraph from this morning's CNBC article odd:

"Ultimately unscathed and relatively unregulated in the post-crisis world of financial markets, the hedge fund space remains enormous in scope, risky in appetite and exclusive by design."

   Unscathed? Are memories really this short at CNBC? Need proof of hedge fund deaths in 2008? Here:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/18/news/economy/hedge_fund_liquidations/
   Hedge Fund Research, a Chicago-based information company, said the number of hedge funds liquidated in the third quarter rose to 344, which is more than three times the 105 liquidations in the third quarter of 2007. It's also 77 more than the previous record of 267 liquidations in the fourth quarter of 2006.
   The data also showed that 693 hedge funds were closed in the first nine months of the year versus 409 in the same period last year. That's an increase of 70% and represents nearly 7% of all hedge funds, according to HFR.

   And that's only 2008. The rest of today's CNBC article titled "How To Build A Poor Man's Hedge Fund" talks about using ETFs to implement long-short strategies, commodities trading, currency trading, and other nonsense that no average JOE is going to be able to manage. If an average JOE was going to trade the ETFs mentioned in the article, I can confidently predict that JOE would have lost his ass within a year of attempting to build his poor man's hedge fund.

   My advice? Keep it simple, stupid. We're still in the early throes of a bull market. When immersed in a bull market, there is only one thing to do - buy. You heard me? BUY and sit on those shares for years. It won't be time to sell for another few years but when that time comes, I'll be here to tell you when to sell.  

The Biggest Video Game Publisher You've Never Heard of

   ^^ That's a headline from CNBC late yesterday afternoon. When I read it, I thought to myself, "Damn, CNBC finally has an exclusive scoop on something?" I looked at the article and found out they were talking about Zenimax Media who owns Bethesda. CNBC fails again with dumb headlines. I've been playing Bethesda games since they were publishing on the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From the article:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39726707?__source=yahoo|headline|quote|text|&par=yahoo
"The company’s board of directors, meanwhile, is a who’s who of media and entertainment executives—including CBS [CBS  17.49    -0.05  (-0.29%)   ] president and CEO Les Moonves, director Jerry Bruckheimer and baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr."

   These are old dudes who don't have a clue about video games but they're on the board of directors? Well, that's pretty much par for the course on most corporate boards. The rest of the article reads like a paid pump-piece designed to pave the wave for an eventual ZeniMax IPO in the next couple of years. These articles prime the investing public to be on the lookout for a company and are designed to build interest. If the ZeniMax IPO is on course, expect to see a lot more articles like this one in the next few months.