This Week - A Perspective From A Hedge Fund Manager.

Hey everyone,

This week has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. On Monday, the largest point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrials.

I was actually in the Detroit airport when the market closed and the scene was unbelievable. There were more people huddled around the TVs showing CNN than were looking at the TVs with the flight information. I've been flying since I was 2 months old, and I've never seen anything like it. Same scene played out when I was in the Salt Lake City airport later that day. People were just in complete disbelief and trying to make sense of the collapse.

We had an emergency call to find a few buys, but really even with 20 point drops in companies like Apple, we still weren't convinced of a strong abrupt rise for the rest of the week.

We wanted to buy Goldman Sachs, but it "only" dropped 10 points, which wasn't down far enough for us to make a trade.

The nearly 500 rally in the Dow Jones on Tuesday was nerve racking. The problem was the market was going up for no identifiable reason. We saw loan rates go up that day and there was no real reason for people to be buying.

Of course, the subsequent days validated that assessment - with the S&P dropping 5%

We did manage to use Wednesday to lower the basis in one of our investments.

Thursday hit me very personally. My employer's stock, Monsanto, dropped nearly 20%, in a matter of minutes following a downgrade by Merrill Lynch. I own less than $100 worth of Monsanto stock at any given time, and not by choice - only because of my 401(k) match which I need to manually diversify every two weeks. However, many of my fellow employees own major stakes in Monsanto in their retirement portfolios - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth.

As I was working that day, I thought to myself with much empathy, I told you so.

Normally, ICM does one long conference call every Sunday.

This week, we talked to each other every day and were constantly firing emails back and forth to explore advanced strategies that we could quickly execute.

Today, Friday was an unusually twisting day. We were trying to execute an options spread on some fairly illiquid options positions while the bailout was being voted on a second time.

My computer had an internet stream from CSpan.com, real-time quotes from Yahoo! Finance, and our brokerage website up at the same time making sure that I wouldn't execute the order under unfavorable conditions.

At the end of week, after what we hope (perhaps in vain) is the most tumultuous week we will see, we were still beating the market by 19.5%.

Tune out the noise. Not the market.

-Mansij Hans, E.I.T.
Member, Intigril Capital Management