FX Island

Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews, who wrote “A Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” actually made the pilgrimage last weekend, along with 35,000 other Berkshire Hathaway investors.

In Matthews’ opinion, the most disconcerting news from the weekend was that the external managers Buffett has hired to manage Berkshire’s money are doing a lousy job. Specifically, Matthews says, they all lost more than 37% on the year — worse than the stock-market average.

The only reason to hire a money manager is to try to beat the market, because otherwise you should just buy an index fund. The fact that Berkshire’s external managers lost money isn’t surprising — everyone got hammered last year. The amount they lost, however, is. more…

Hidetoshi Honda, a currency strategist at Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd., talks with Bloomberg’s John Dawson and Naga Munchetty in London about the outlook for the U.S. dollar, Japan’s economy and his strategy for the rand and yen. The dollar has fallen 7.6 percent against the euro this year, heading for its sixth straight quarterly loss and the biggest since 2004 as the Fed slashed interest rates by 3 percentage points since September to 2.25 percent. (Source: Bloomberg)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkzGORndbFQ]