Lahde, Idiots, and Hedge Fund Trades

By: PAUL JACKSON
October 20, 2008

You simply can’t make stuff like this up — we’d covered the rousing success of fund manager Andrew Lahde in March, and that story recently popped up as the most-searched story on HousingWire. Which led us to wonder why.

Now we know, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Andrew Lahde, the hedge-fund manager who quit after posting an 870 percent gain last year, said farewell to clients in a letter that thanks stupid traders for making him rich and ends with a plea to legalize marijuana …

“I was in this game for money,” Lahde, 37, wrote in a two-page letter today in which he said he had come to hate the hedge-fund business. “The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.

“All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.”

He closed his letter saying that marijuana “gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover,” and that it should be legalized.