Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Roubini's Firm Losing Money, Up For Sale

From CNBC:
Roubini Global Economics, the economics research firm begun by noted economist Nouriel Roubini, is for sale, according to sources who have been approached by an investment bank conducting an auction for the firm.

According to people who have seen the offering book for the sale, the firm is projected to have revenues of $14 million this year and it will post a loss of roughly $2 million dollars, and projects eight percent revenue growth into next year followed by 40 percent revenue growth in 2013....MORE
HT: Clusterstock
Previously:
A Chart of Roubini’s Horrible Track record in 2009
In Tuesday's "The cost of a crowded volatility trade" (VXX; XIV; TVIX) I commented on Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb's iffy record running money at the Empirica Kurtosis fund.
Initially though I misremembered the advisor as Nouriel Roubini.

This morning one of our more popular pages was a November 2009 post on Roubini. He's not much better than Taleb:
From Wall Street Cheat Sheet:
As many of you know, Wall St. Cheat Sheet is on a mission to expose some of the biggest frauds on Wall Street. Most recently we did an extensive open-source research project on Nouriel Roubini and Jim Cramer. As a follow up, a new friend Nadeem Walayat posted a nice chart (including full citations) of Roubini’s major money-losing calls in 2009:
Nouriel-Roubini-stock-market-track-record-2009
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only people ignorant enough to defend Roubini are those who accidentally listened to him during the one brief moment he was right (for all the wrong reasons). If you followed his bearish advice in 2005, you would have either missed the entire rally through 2007, or you would have lost money shorting the market. If you would have followed his advice starting on March 9, 2009, you would have lost a ton of money. We should also note that Roubini said Oil would stay below $40 a barrel for all of 2009. Ouch.
Anyway, once again, science and facts prove that there are many “gurus” on TV telling the investing public how to invest, yet they cannot beat an ETF.