EXCERPT: Diary Of a Hedge Fund Manager

One of the things I most missed about being in the hedge fund game was my getting to engage in my process. I hated getting up so damn early, trust me. But I enjoyed cramming my notebook and my head (if I wrote something down, it became committed to memory) with informational points of reference, price points, levels, headlines, global macro observations, you name it, and then connecting the dots.

One of the reasons I started blogging was to go through the exercise of connecting the dots, making calls and proving myself, not just passing the time. I’d look at my son, small enough to fit in a golf club sock, and think to myself, one day he’ll be old enough to know what happened to me on Wall Street. I wanted to show him my side of it. To me it felt like I’d been booted from the team for giving away the puck in my own zone when in reality I felt I was playing the best game of my life.

So I got up, made my coffee, slurped down my oatmeal, and began my process, except there would be no veil, wall, or bunker secrecy. I was going to do my thing out in the open, my new normal. I called my website MCM Macro (for McCullough Capital Management) and cranked out content every morning, usually posting around 5:30 AM. I didn’t take to the internet trying to be the next big thing in financial blogging. I didn’t envision myself as a challenger to The Big Picture or Seeking Alpha, two of the most popular financial blogs; nor did I have an axe to grind (okay, maybe a hatchet); rather, I mainly wanted to let a little sunlight in, speaking out some against the levered long bulls on Wall Street who were perpetuating self-fulfilling agendas.

In one of my earliest postings, in mid-December of 2007, I took aim at the levered long crowd, the hedge fund bulls that gored me. This was a crowd not unlike the one that each July goes streaming through the narrow old streets of Pamplona dressed in white, convinced of safety in numbers when the undeniable facts on the ground were they were extremely close to mortal danger. I’d come to believe this crowd had not only created a bubble but were now living in one.