David Barse, recently fired as CEO of Third Avenue: Those who can’t do, pontificate. (Image: http://www.wsj.com)

Third Avenue Management, an investment manager that runs hedge funds, mutual funds, and other portfolios, is located at 622 Third Avenue in Manhattan, an address that makes sense given the firm’s name. But considering how outrageously stupid we now know these people are, it’s a surprise that Third Avenue isn’t on First, Second or even Lexington Avenue.

On December 9, Third Avenue’s CEO David Barse, who’s since been sacked, announced that, in a possibly illegal move, the firm was closing its Focused Credit Fund (“FCF”) and barring the fund’s investors from cashing out, the latter move a shocker because the ironically abbreviated FCF (a finance-speak acronym for what is clearly lacking here: ‘free cash flow’) is structured as a mutual fund, which by definition allows investors to liquidate their positions on a daily basis. FCF’s assets were transferred out of the mutual fund into a liquidating trust to manage the gradual sale of the remaining rubbish. To explain why they shuttered the fund, Barse ever so graciously issued a letter to the fund’s shareholders, part of which is below:

Investor requests for redemption, however, in addition to the general reduction of liquidity in the fixed income markets, have made it impracticable for FCF going forward to create sufficient cash to pay anticipated redemptions without resorting to sales at prices that would unfairly disadvantage the remaining shareholders…Third Avenue will manage the Liquidating Trust in order to obtain the best overall outcome for the beneficiaries. Third Avenue will not charge any fee for those services.

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In Bill Ackman’s spat with Warren Buffet… (Image: http://www.marketwatch.com)

…he brought a straw man along for backup.  (Image: http://www.veteranstoday.com)

From the “People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones” category comes the laughably Pecksniffian rich man’s row between hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, head of Pershing Square Capital, and Charlie Munger, who has been Warren Buffet’s fidus Achates/gal Friday for years.

It should be noted that Ackman is a self-inflated weirdo who started crying like a 5-year-old denied a toy while addressing Target shareholders back in 2009 during his high-profile and losing proxy battle against the company. In absurd fashion, he later attributed his breakdown to the poignancy of a JFK quotation (“We will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship“) that he used in his own remarks. Apparently, Ackman is so outrageously egotistical that he believed his quest for Target board seats was comparable to JFK’s intention to “assure the survival and success of liberty.”

The windbaggery started earlier this month when Munger hopped on his exceptionally wobbly high horse and called Ackman’s investment in Valeant Pharmaceuticals (ticker VRX), down about 50% this year and recently under fire for jacking up prices on its drugs way beyond industry standards, “deeply immoral.” Continue reading →

The CD section at the new Amazon bookstore is a bit cramped but has it all. (Image: http://www.casualoptimist.com)

Finally recognizing that the internet is just a fad and will soon go the way of the eight-track tape, Amazon (ticker AMZN) opened a “brick & mortar” bookstore in Seattle last Tuesday. Although the company’s official line implies that the store is designed to peddle Amazon products like Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet by giving customers a place to try them out, Jezebel Pantzaroff, Professor of Marketing at Northern Indiana Normal School and author of the soon-to-be-published Don’t Name Your Product “Crunky Nude Balls,” had this to say about the surprising move by Jeff Bezos’s loss-producing monstrosity (net loss of $241 million in 2014):

The Fire Phone, cloud computing, delivery by drone, you name it- this company is just a dog’s breakfast of half-baked ideas. It’s like they put a bunch of Philip Dick novels in a blender and just guzzled it down. Amazon Fresh? What the hell are they thinking? Food delivery? I mean, Webvan and HomeGrocer were two of the most spectacular failures of the dot-com bust. And the pilot for Amazon Studio’s new show “Patriot” is about a spy who sings folk songs. C’mon, does he live on the Island of Misfit Toys? Is he friends with the cowboy who rides an ostrich? The jig is up. The company’s operating margin was 1.1% in 2012, 1.0% in 2013, and 0.2% in 2014. So it appears they are going back to the basics. I’ve been told that they will open 1,000 bookstores a year for the next five years and shut down internet operations after the Christmas holidays.

Bodhi Yoho, a tattooed semi-professional gamer who devours comic books, rarely goes outside, and hasn’t read a novel since failing to finish Hunger Games back in 2009, nonetheless works at the new bookstore. He told Bud Fox News that he’s excited to be part of the “new” Amazon: Continue reading →