Hazard, a down-home country crooner  an “alter ego” of a Music City investment guru with an aptitude for price-earnings ratios, put options and financial leverage  is using the power of music and parody to tell a now-familiar modern tale of American tragedy: a risk-lovin’ hedge fund manager who watches his beloved fund go belly up.
The song H-E-D-G-E (based on the tune D-I-V-O-R-C-E by the late, great Tammy Wynette) is spreading like a virus on the social-networking site YouTube. Hazard, clad in his Sunday best cowboy threads, dedicates the tune of hedge-fund heartache to “the hardworking men and women on trading desks all across America.” (Watch it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtcnXLDnXvs)
Just as it went down on Wall Street, Hazard sings about how his once-wealthy hedge fund skidded into bankruptcy after bets on mortgage-backed CDOs (securities) with mostly borrowed money went bad. “I was leveraged 10-to-1,” the singer croons. “But it should have been 2 or 3. Oh, how I wished I had a working H-E-D-G-E.”
