Maven: HSBC's Rancid Rhetoric

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On a separate but equally dangerous topic: When are basic business facts insufficient, as useless for getting at long-term financial truths as the Sunday comics? When does a tiny butter-pat pile of these assembled facts actually give you the illusion that something is way better than it is?

That's an easy one: When the business media are writing about an undeservedly hot IPO in just-the-facts-ma'am mode. But by adding a little thought and opinion to those same facts, the media can leave the investor with a much better sense of reality.

The topic here is Fortress(FIG Quote), the nation's first public offering of a hedge fund and one of the biggest trapdoors for investors that The Business Press Maven has seen since the likes of CMGI(FCMGI Quote), the Internet incubator and helper of young Internet companies, which came public in the 1990s to similar fanfare. The rest, as they say, is (margin call) history.

Anyhow, part of the similarity is the double exposure investors are faced with. With CMGI, as if there weren't enough exposure in the market to fly-by-night Internet concerns back then, you were effectively doubling up by gaining exposure within that larger exposure. In doing so, you ran the danger of the DTs: the double tanks.

To which The Business Press Maven says, tanks but no tanks.