Bloomberg – Companies with the most debt and lowest returns on assets are turning the biggest six-week rally in stocks since 1938 into a bloodbath for last year’s best- performing trading strategy.

Investors in so-called quantitative momentum funds — which speculate that the worst stocks in the past 12 months will continue to decline — have become this year’s biggest losers after banks and companies that rely on consumer spending surged. Quant momentum managers may have tumbled 27 percent this month in the U.S., the most since at least 1993, while those in Europe may have lost 20 percent in March and 24 percent in April, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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Tags: 12 months, amp, assets, banks, biggest losers, bloodbath, consumer spending, europe, investors, jpmorgan chase, momentum, rally, stocks, trading strategy

UnionLeader.com – For sheer toe-curling embarrassment, it may be a while before Wall Street does better than the Bernard Madoff scandal. Here was a rogue who practically telegraphed his unreliability by hiring a tiny, no-name audit firm, by reporting monthly investment results that never fluctuated and by claiming a trading strategy that could not possibly have been implemented given the billions of dollars he managed.

And yet, despite these warnings, the rich, the famous and the supposedly sophisticated entrusted their money to Madoff, who defrauded them with the most laughably crude of methods — an old-fashioned Ponzi scam.

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Tags: audit firm, bernard madoff, billions of dollars, embarrassment, investment results, money, ponzi scam, scandal, trading strategy, wall street