Hurricane Refco

Things were fairly calm on Monday Oct 10, with the exception of a tropical depression via a press release from Refco about it’s CEO resigning. However, by Friday it was a full fledged Category 5 hurricane called Refco. I always wished people knew the name Refco, well my wish has come true and sadly it’s going down the same path as Enron, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, etc… I got several e-mails from people on Monday along the lines of “hey, aren’t you running a hedge fund with Refco, does this affect you?” Of course, I was sure this was a small hiccup and that Refco was a cleanly run company, Thomas H. Lee was the private equity group that took Refco public and they are viewed as solid players. How wrong I was, within 5 short days we went from the impending launch of India’s first ever commodity based fund to not knowing whether Refco will be around. Already, Refco USA has shut 3 of it’s operating units and there is definitely more fallout from hurricane Refco…stay tuned.