Kass: Hedgies Get Their Comeuppance

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Sept. 5 at 8:16 a.m. EDT.

Like the Dukes who tried to corner the market in frozen concentrated orange juice in the film Trading Places, the hedge fund community is getting its comeuppance now.

For now, as in that fictional 1983 when the Secretary of Agriculture gave the pronouncement in Trading Places that the cold winter apparently is not affecting the orange crop, our commodity and stock markets, too, are in disarray and in liquidation mode.

Today, as equities and commodities slide, the risk managers have taken over from the portfolio managers. And those risk managers are selling posthaste regardless of a sense of value, the relationship of stocks to interest rates, etc. -- just as the movie's orange traders did 25 years ago. ...