No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos (rainbow fish read aloud .txt) 📗

to his firm and the custodial bank. However, since Madoff owns a broker-dealer, he can generate whatever trade tickets he wants. And, I’ll bet very few FOF’s ask BM to fax them trade tickets. And if these trade tickets are faxed, have the FOF’s then matched them to the time and sales of the exchanges? For example, if BM says he bought 1 million shares of GM, sold $1 million worth of OTC OEX calls and bought $1 million worth of OTC OEX puts, we should see prints somewhere. The GM share prints would show on either the NYSE or some other exchange while the broker-dealers he traded OTC options thru would show prints of the hedges they traded to be able to provide BM with the OTC options at the prices listed on BM’s trade tickets.

13. Red Flag # 17:Madoff does not allow outside performance audits. One London based hedge fund, fund of funds, representing Arab money, asked to send in a team of Big 4 accountants to conduct a performance audit during their planned due diligence. They were told “No, only Madoff’s brother-in-law who owns his own accounting firm is allowed to audit performance for reasons of secrecy in order to keep Madoff’s proprietary trading strategy secret so that nobody can copy it. ” Amazingly, this fund of funds then agreed to invest $200 million of their client’s money anyway, because the low volatility of returns was so attractive!! Let’s see, how many hedge funds have faked an audited performance history?? Wood River is the latest that comes to mind as does the Manhattan Fund but the number of bogus hedge funds that have relied upon fake audits has got to number in the dozens.

14. Red Flag # 18:Madoff’s returns are not consistent with the one publicly traded option income fund with a history as long as Madoff’s. In 2000, I analyzed the returns of Madoff and measured them against the returns of the Gateway Option Income Fund (Ticker GATEX). During the 87 month span analyzed, Madoff was down only 3 months versus GATEX being down 26 months. GATEX earned an annualized return of 10.27% during the period studied vs. 15.62% for Bernie Madoff and 19.58% for the S&P 500. GATEX has a more flexible investment strategy than BM, so GATEX’s returns should be superior to BM’s but instead they are inferior. This makes no sense. How could BM be better using an inferior strategy?

15. Red Flag # 19:There have been several option income funds that went IPO since August 2004. None of them have the high returns that Bernie Madoff has. How can this be? They use similar strategies only they should be making more than BM in up months because most of these option income funds don’t buy expensive index put options to protect their portfolios. Thus the publicly traded option income funds should make more money in up markets and lose more than Madoff in down markets. Hmm . . . that Madoff’s returns are so high yet he buys expensive put options is just another reason to believe he is running the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme. A good study for the SEC would be to compare 2005 performance of the new option income funds to Bernie Madoff while accounting for the cost of Bernie’s index put option protection. There’s no way Bernie can have positive returns in 2005 given what the market’s done and where volatility is.

16. Red Flag # 20:Madoff is suspected of being a fraud by some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated financial services firms. Without naming names, here’s an abbreviated tally:

a. A managing director at Goldman, Sachs prime brokerage operation told me that his firm doubts Bernie Madoff is legitimate so they don’t deal with him.

b. From an Email I received this past June 2005 I now suspect that the end is near for BM. All Ponzi Schemes eventually topple of their own weight once they become too large and it now appears that BM is having trouble meeting redemptions and is attempting to borrow sizeable funds in Europe.

ABCDEFGH and I had dinner with a savvy European investor that studies the HFOF market. He stated that both RBC and Socgen have removed Madoff some time ago from approved lists of individual managers used by investors to build their own tailored HFOFs.

More importantly, Madoff was turned down, according to this source, for a borrowing line from a Euro bank, I believe he said Paribas. Now why would Madoff need to borrow more funds? This Euro Investor said that Madoff was in fact running “way over” our suggested $12-14 billion [Fairfield Sentry is running $5.3 BB by themselves!). Madoff’s 12 month returns is about 7% net of the feeder fund’s fees. Looks like he is stepping down the pay out.

C. An official from a Top 5 money center bank’s FOF told me that his firm wouldn’t touch Bernie Madoff with a ten foot pole and that there’s no way he’s for real.

17. Red Flag # 21:ECN’s didn’t exist prior to 1998. Madoff makes verbal claims to his third party hedge FOF’s that he has private access to ECN’s internal order flow, which Madoff pays for, and that this is a substantial part of the return generating process. If this is true, then where did the returns come from in the years 1991-1997, prior to the ascendance of the ECN’s? Presumably, prior to 1998, Madoff only had access to order flow on the NASDAQ for which he paid 1 cent per share for. He would have no such advantage pre-1998 on the large-cap, NYSE listed stocks the marketing literature says he buys (Exxon, McDonalds, American Express, IBM, Merck, etc...).

18. Red Flag # 22:The Fairfield Sentry Limited Performance Chart (Attachment 1) depicted for Bernie Madoff’s investment strategy is misleading. The S&P 500 return line is accurate because it is moving up and down, reflecting positive and negative returns. Fairfield Sentry’s performance chart is misleading, it is almost a straight line rising at a