If at First You Don't Succeed ...

...Fail! Fail! again!

WSJ: Financial News -- Meriwether to Shut Hedge Fund After Losses

John Meriwether, the trader who founded Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that spectacularly crashed in 1998, is reportedly shutting the portfolio he established afterwards. The move comes after the fund suffered large losses after the collapse in Lehman Brothers, which left its annual return since launching at less than 2%.

Meriwether is shutting down the flagship hedge fund he founded in 1999 at his firm, JWM Partners, according to Bloomberg, after it lost 44% between September 2007 and February this year.

You remember Long Term Capital Management, right? You ought to. Does this ring a bell?

Meriwether's losses at JWM are less than half the fall by LTCM, the fund whose collapse in 1998 sent shockwaves through financial markets. The event is still often cited as emblematic of the damage hedge funds can do to financial markets.

This failure, whose effects were magnified by high levels of borrowings the fund made to invest in markets, led the U.S. Federal Reserve to organise a bailout by the portfolio's creditors, and to begin examining the role of hedge funds in financial markets - an examination which continues to this day, and which arguably has intensified since LTCM failed.

Don't you worry your pretty little heads, though. There will always be suckers investors around to fling their money at the Meriwethers of this world.