July 21 (Bloomberg) — Investors worldwide are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices. Managers from William Ackman to Jim Rogers made a total of at least $1.4 billion in July with wagers against U.S. mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, data compiled by Bloomberg as of last week show. Harbinger Capital Partners staked $665 million that U.K. mortgage lender HBOS Plc would drop and Sao Paulo-based hedge-fund manager Francisco Meirelles de Andrade’s short selling of Cia. Vale do Rio Doce is also paying off. More than $1.4 trillion of equities worldwide are now on loan, about a third higher than at the start of 2007, data compiled by Spitalfields Advisors, the London-based firm specializing in securities lending, show. Almost all of that is being used to speculate that shares will fall, according to James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University who studies short selling. The global economic slowdown, $453 billion in bank losses and an explosion of funds that can profit from stock declines spurred the increase in short selling, helping send 22 of 23 countries in the MSCI World Index into bear markets. More
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July 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
[…] Amateur Earthling wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptJuly 21 (Bloomberg) — Investors worldwide are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices. Managers from William Ackman to Jim Rogers made a total of at least $1.4 billion in… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] […]