Blasting Holiday Stock Announcements

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Ever the working class hero, The Business Press Maven spent the July 4 market holiday hard at work, searching for bad news that had been purposefully released the day before the holiday in the hope that it would be lost in the lull of the holiday news cycle. No one but me reads by the light of fireworks.

I passed around a collection plate July 3, asking readers to donate (by email) any interesting press release that seemed timed to have been ignored.

As you might expect, a lot came in. But I want to focus on a donation from Dave Echternach of Dallas, one that proves once again that just when I am expecting the business media to be bad in one way, they surprise me by being bad in an entirely different way.

What Echternach sent had all the earmarks of the typical piece of bad news slipped under the wire before a holiday. United Capital Markets Holding, a Florida-based hedge fund, released a statement on July 3 that it was halting redemptions in some of its funds.

Telltale horrors, huh? We only wish.

I knew something was a little weird when Echternach attached a Bloomberg article and asked, with a puzzled tagline, "What do you make of this one?"

The Bloomberg piece, the first I could find that immediately ran on the news, way up high draws the link between the halting of withdrawals in this fund and the high-profile recent collapse of two hedge funds run by Bear Stearns(BSC). In fact, a good chunk of the article is then turned over to a recapping of the Bear Stearns collapse.