Belated Post-Mortems on Amaranth

Not to beat a dead horse, but here are some interesting post-mortems on Amaranth (a hedge fund that recently 'blew up') that I ran across recently. (Note: I had little to say on the matter up to this point because: (a) I was too busy to post anything to the blog while all that was happening, and (b) as I've said before, I don't like to chase after some transient news event.)

There were a couple of stories by Heather Timmons -- one for the New York Times and the other for the International Herald Tribune -- that did a good job of disecting the whole affair. The Times article focused on the foibles of one of Amaranth's young traders who made a bad bet on natural gas prices that people ascribe as the proximate cause of the blow up.

On Nassim Nicholas Taleb's non-blog section of his website titled "Notebook," he makes some interesting comments about the Amaranth situation (including brief comments on the Zelig-like coincidence of having once been in the same office complex with them in Connecticut).