THE SOROS INVESTMENT YEAR - FT - Mto bom

Not only one of the best ever but also very humble...eitcha cara macho...acho que vou mandar meu CV pra ele...acho que perdeu grandes oportunidades em commodities por falta de trader, hihihi
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/b55/631





THE SOROS INVESTMENT YEAR:

Positions I took were too big for ever more volatile markets

Although I positioned myself reasonably well for what was coming last year,
one thing I got wrong cost me dearly: there was no decoupling between
markets of the developed and developing worlds.

Indian and Chinese stocks were hit even harder than those in the US and
Europe. Since we did not reduce our exposure, we lost more money in India
than we had made the year before. Our Chinese manager did better by his
stock selection; we were also helped by the appreciation of the renminbi.

I had to push very hard in my macro-account to offset both these losses and
those incurred by our external managers. This had its own drawback: I
overtraded. The positions I took were too large for the increasingly
volatile markets and, in order to manage my risk, I could not go against
the market in a big way. I had to try to catch minor moves.

That made it difficult to maintain short positions. Although I am an
experienced short-seller, I got caught several times and largely missed the
biggest down-draught, in October and November.

On the long side, where I stuck to my guns, I lost an enormous amount of
money. I was impressed by the potential in the new deep-water oilfield in
Brazil and bought a large strategic position in Petrobras, only to see it
decline by 75 per cent at one point in time. We also got caught in the
developing petrochemical industry in the Gulf.

We did get out of our strategic long position in CVRD, the Brazilian iron
ore producer, in time for the end of the commodity bubble and shorted the
other big iron ore groups. But we missed an opportunity in the commodities
themselves – partly because I knew from experience how difficult it is to
trade them.

I was also slow to recognise the reversal of fortune for the dollar and
gave back a large portion of our profits. Under the direction of my new
chief investment officer, we did make money in the UK, where we bet that
short-term interest rates would decline and shorted sterling against the
euro. We also made good money by going long on the credit markets after
their collapse.

Eventually I understood that the strength of the dollar was due not to
people choosing to hold dollars but to their inability to maintain or roll
over their dollar obligations. In a very real sense the strength of the
dollar, like the fever associated with sickness, was a measure of the
disruption of the financial system. This insight helped me to anticipate
the downturn of the dollar at the end of 2008. As a result, we ended the
year almost meeting my target of 10 per cent minimum return, after spending
most of the year in the red.