<![CDATA[Deadspin: wally wall street]]> http://tags.deadspin.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/deadspin.com.png <![CDATA[Deadspin: wally wall street]]> http://deadspin.com/tag/wallywallstreet http://deadspin.com/tag/wallywallstreet <![CDATA[Tim McCarver Needs A New Broker]]> No matter what your opinion is about America's most prominent baseball explainer, you have to feel for Tim McCarver a little bit after hearing this story. He's suing the brokerage house Morgan Keegan & Co, because even though McCarver told them to invest his money in safe, low-risk ventures, they (like everyone else on Wall Street) spent it all on crappy debt investments and lost about one million of his dollars.

"He was told his investments - made with money he was setting aside for his children and retirement - were tantamount to buying CDs and [safe] bonds," [lawyer Dale] Ledbetter said.

"Tim was very conservative with his money because he grew up not having any," Ledbetter told The Post.

"His dad was a policeman in Memphis and I knew his dad. Tim didn't earn much in his early career playing baseball."

Because the stock market is no better than organized gambling, it's unlikely he'll see much of that money again, but at least he wasn't completely cleaned out. (Maybe he should give Lenny Dykstra a call?) The silver lining in all this is that McCarver is nowhere close to retirement now, so you can expect to see him sitting alongside the animatronic Joe Buck machine at the World Series for many, many, many, many, many years to come.

Tim McCarver: Add Him to the CDO Victim List [In Paulson We Trust]
MCCARVER: I LOST $1M BECAUSE OF MY BROKER'S ERROR [NY Post]

]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5097467&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Lenny Dykstra's Financial Acumen Called Into Question (Again)]]> Did that Lenny "Wally Wall Street" Dykstra story from yesterday seem a little fishy? (And familiar?) Well yes, his troubles with a few of his business partners have been well documented, but those were just friendly disagreements over strategy and don't really change the fact that the guy is filthy rich from playing the stock market. Surely, his perfect record of winning choices will hold up under greater scrutiny right? Well, Adam Warner of Daily Options Reports wrote to us to share some thoughts about that:

Here's the gist of his strategy. He buys options that don't expire for at least 6 month's. He books wins very quickly. He keeps doubling and redoubling losers. And never actually realizes a loss until an option expires. He started this round on Opening day of baseball, so he's only 7 month's into it. His losers are likely in the pipeline still as the market carnage was in the fall.

Now keep in mind also that because of the nature of the strategy, the losers utterly dwarf the winners by a magnitude of 40:1 and higher. So if he has as few as 3 losers in there, he's down on the year. And I suspect he has many more.

Keep in mind also, there's no capital allocation limits. He can buy and buy and buy, so unlike every other financial strategy, there's no return on capital that we can calculate.

I have no idea what that guy just said, but it sounds bad. Look, I got a 1.5 in "Concepts in Macroeconomics" in college. I blog for a living. Are you really going to turn to me for sound financial analysis? Or a guy with a .285 lifetime average?

Investing Legends: Where Are They Now? [Daily Options Report]

]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5086792&view=rss&microfeed=true